Count me among those who filled the gas tank (and emptied it) Wednesday. The old-style pump couldn’t even register the price. It read .09. Stephen Harper said we should get used to it, just as he said we should get used to delays and harassment at the border following his mature and grown-up meeting with George W. Bush. It felt like another day in the era of globalization: The economy keeps expanding heartily and people’s lives keep getting harder.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way, but the advocates of globalization no longer have the zeitgeist at their backs. In fact, I’d say no one has the . . . um . . . wind of history, with them today, which makes for interesting times.

Take those huge protests by illegal, mainly Mexican, workers in the United States. Under globalization, the owners of capital get to take their operations anywhere. So they threaten Canadian workers with moving to the southern U.S., if they don’t get concessions. Then they threaten workers in the southern U.S. with going to Mexico (and then to China etc.).

But workers get no such mobility. So when Mexican workers try to come North for a better deal in the U.S. (or further north, why not, to Canada, for the health care and education), the backlash sets in. Sorry, that’s not included in globalization. But if capital can travel, why not labour? It’s hypocrisy and double standards, that often drive people to action.

What about France, where street protests forced withdrawal of a bill that would have made it easier to fire new workers? Globalization’s defenders went berserk over that one. Robert Fulford in the National Post said French youth had demonstrated in favour of the past: “By refusing to consider change, they are fighting a hopeless battle against the future.”

But is all change the same? What about change that takes you back to the past? French workers feel they fought for centuries to win certain rights for everyone, not just the rich (égalité, eh?). They don’t want to revert to the ancien regime in job security. What’s the point of going from medieval to modern and back to medieval? What’s the point of being European workers if you have to accept the conditions of workers in the most backward countries? What’s the point of having a history at all if you just swing back and forth?

Governments in Europe are in trouble over this. They’ve all been converted to globalization and want to implement it. But, as The New York Times reported, none of them knows how to do it and “win an election afterward.” Stop reading for a moment and think about that.

It’s interesting that these recent episodes focus on workers, since most discussion of globalization has stressed the new info technologies, revamped financial markets etc. When it’s been critical, it has centred on the maldistribution of wealth and the creation of social chasms everywhere — China, Japan, the U.K. But when workers come into the frame as key players, a new set of questions arises. Why, for instance, do the press report often on the “rigidities” of labour markets and the reluctance of workers to “change,” but far less about the ruthlessness and greed of employers?

On Wednesday night, I watched the television documentary on “Holy Joe” Atkinson and the origins of the Toronto Star, a crusading newspaper of its time. It made me think the media a century ago often handled the comparable questions better than they are handled now.

“Great wealth is not earned,” wrote editor Atkinson. “There are many words to describe the process but earned is not one of them.”

That poses the basic issue of who actually creates wealth. It casts the poor and needy not just as objects of charity but as victims of theft — a potentially more dignified way to see them. The battleground for the debate over wealth and its distribution back then was the demand for taxes on wealth. We could use more of that.

Nor was Joe Atkinson alone. E.W. Scripps, founder of a mighty U.S. newspaper chain, wrote: “I have only one principle . . . to make it harder for the rich to grow richer and easier for the poor to keep from growing poorer.”

They had their faults, but find me a media baron today who’s ready to make waves like that inside his own club.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.