As democracy spread through the world in the 1990s, it was accompanied by a dramatic increase in slavery, according to the author of a new book. “The correlation between democracy and slavery is one of the consequences of rogue economics, a recurrent phenomenon in history, often linked to rapid and unexpected great transformations,” Loretta Napoleoni writes in Rogue Economics: Capitalism’s New Reality (Seven Stories Press, $27.50). “In the midst of profound changes, politics can lose control of economics, which becomes a rogue force in the hands of new entrepreneurs.”
In an April 8 interview in Vancouver, Napoleoni told the Georgia Straight that she thinks other analysts of world economic trends, such as the irredeemably optimistic Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Columbia University’s more cautionary professor Joseph Stiglitz, wrote books about globalization before it was clear what was taking place. “You can’t analyze such an amazing change at the beginning,” Napoleoni said. “You have to sit there and watch how things are changing. We are living in perhaps the most exciting time in history because everything is changing.”
Her book explains how the transition from communism to globalization in the 1990s unleashed a brutal and corrupt form of capitalism that cannot be tamed by national governments. Rogue Economics shows how Russian oligarchs stripped the country of its resources, depositing their profits in safe banking havens. Entrepreneurs in China and other countries unleashed counterfeit medicines on the world, causing untold harm to human health. The Bulgarian Mafia recruited former athletes to act as enforcers, and sex
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