Multinationals’ political agenda is free trade of everything, especially financial assets, recently including even such things as mortgage backed securities.
What are some implications of globalization and free market forces for real property rights, justice, urban revitalization, home rule, hometown democracy?
Market state ownership interests are mostly in intangibles.
Although multinationals cater to nation, cities, states, and civilizations for particular purposes, they owe no deeper allegiance to any of them, or rather, a little to each. They don’t care much about concepts of justice. fn Bobbitt, Shield
Thus, urban, regional, and national economic competition is a symptom of a “problem of sovereignty,” of fragmentary polities, pawns in a world of more powerful, widely dispersed, private and quasi-private producer entities and regimes.
The term “new robber barons”, in property rights redevelopment literature, alludes to the historical growth phase of American industrialization, and to historical abuses of monopoly power in major domestic industries, at a time when America still had major domestic industries.
But that is not the world in which cash strapped local governments grovel and compete for business sites, ‘the crumbs’ of the world economy, in a declining ‘consumer economy’ ‘zero sum game’.
The local redevelopment agency in the 99 Cent Stores case had called itself, quite rightly, a mere pawn of Costco.
How important are real property rights in market states? Without domestic production, property rights, similarly to urban landscapes, are destined to be “hollowed out.”
Home ownership requires a certain level of wealth, separate and apart from the zeal with which a home ownership ideal happens to be embraced by the common man. With competition for income now global, American home ownership is fast becoming a
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