Corporate Globalization has been made possible by information technology and is kept viable by cheap oil and repressive regimes that maintain a desperate population whose working conditions are little better than outright slavery. As critics predicted a decade ago, the disparity between rich and poor is increasing in every nation. Multinational corporations are positioning themselves to deal with this reality by merging, in order focus on serving the smaller pool of affluent customers. Some economists say that only one sixth of the planet's population as a customer base is needed to maintain corporate profitability, thus the others provide the labor and resources but benefit little or not at all.
Enter
Peak Oil - the situation where global oil resources have reached their halfway point of depletion, and thus have become harder and more costly to extract, unable to either keep up with a rising demand, thus resulting in sharply higher prices that makes the shuttling of goods and services thousands of miles no longer so cost effective. This results in higher prices for energy and thus for goods while wages remain stagnant, and the currency weakens, causing the costs of imports to rise. Most locales no longer produce the basic commodities they need, leaving them at the mercy of multinational corporations and global economic forces.
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