Decades before the Internet and cable television transformed our lives, Marshall McLuhan articulated his insightful concept of the global village: “Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”
In essence, McLuhan saw technology as a vital force capable of contracting the globe into a village where social, political and economic functions combine to heighten public awareness of responsibility.
Today, the global village has become a metaphor to describe the inter-connectedness of the world, regardless of distance and size.
So when US Congressman Gregory Meeks, a Democrat of Queens, whose constituency is home for thousands of Bajans, Jamaicans and other West Indians, told the WeekEnd Nation that the impact of the failure of the Republicans in Washington to agree with President Obama to raise the US debt ceiling and avoid a calamitous default would hurt the Caribbean and other regions of the world, he was quick to cite “the global village” as a reality that was often ignored by the Republicans.
“The United States is the largest economy in the world and if we are default on our debt, it would be catastrophic, not only to the United States but to the Caribbean and other places around the world,” said Meeks.
Winston Cox, a former Barbados Central Bank Governor, who until a year ago was the Caribbean’s executive director at the Inter-American Development Bank, representing the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, also cited McLuhan’s “global village” concept to emphasize that Barbados couldn’t escape the negative economic fallout from the gathering international economic storm.
Cox thinks the impasse in Washington can be traced to a narrow and somewhat outdated view of the United States and its place in the world.
“The Tea Party type of movement going back to the Founding Fathers of the United States has catapulted an ideology that tries to ignore the evolution of global finance since the founding of the United States,” said Cox.
Clearly, then, there is need for an extensive financial education programme designed for conservative lawmakers in Washington and around the country so they would understand that in enacting narrow laws and conceiving myopic economic policy they must consider that their decisions have far-reaching consequences on the everyday lives of people in New York, Brazil, India, China, Russia, Jamaica, Nigeria, Egypt, Ecuador, Poland, Trinidad and Tobago, Singapore, Oman, Guyana and more than 200 other places scattered across the globe.
