Unless you bury your head in the sand, it's hard to miss the fact that we are on the road to a global economy.

It isn't just NAFTA and "fast track" trade negotiations. It's not just the Asian financial crisis. It's the internationalization of industrial production, investment, currency speculation, and capital flows that continues every day whether the President has "fast track" authority or not.

The global economy is a two-edged sword. It can enrich us all -- Americans as well as citizens of developing countries -- through growing trade and rising living standards at home and abroad. Or it can impoverish us all through a race to the bottom in which our jobs move off-shore leaving behind empty factories, idle workers, and poorer communities, while workers in developing countries remain mired in starvation wages, rampant pollution, and deadly working conditions.

Which result we end up with depends significantly on which choices we make.

In a fascinating new book One World Ready or Not, William Greider, the author of Secrets of the Temple (about the Federal Reserve Bank) and The Education of David Stockman and other Americans, asks us to "confront capitalism's repetitive pathologies and organize a new system that genuinely merges the marketplace with democracy."

At the core of these pathologies, Greider argues, is the prevalence of poverty amidst plenty, now on a global scale.

Even in industrial democracies in Europe and North America, an increasing share of national income is allocated to capital, in part because of increased technological capacity, in part because of capital's growing mobility in search of cheap labor. The nation-state is increasingly irrelevant as a unit for economic policy. The consequence is that the rising tide of national and international prosperity lifts only some ships. As Greider quotes Syracuse University professor Robert Ashford, "We have a capital boom and a labor depression around the world."

Of the various remedies Greider discusses -- enforcing more balanced trade among nations, boosting consumer buying power from the bottom up, levying heavier taxes on capital to reduce taxes on labor, defending labor standards, regulating the players in the global market in our collective self interest, maintaining social protections -- none ring truer than "universalizing access to capital ownership."

If Indonesian workers owned their share in those Nike plants, we would all be better off. Their wages would be higher and they could buy our products. Maybe they could even buy the shoes they make themselves. Of course, Michael Jordan's endorsement income might be a bit lower....

But how do you "universalize capital ownership" in a world where most economic forces point toward capital concentration in the hands of those who already have capital?

For Greider, one key "is reform of the credit system -- enabling people without any wealth of their own to borrow the funds to buy shares of capital ownership, loans that will be paid back by future earnings from the very income-producing assets they have acquired."

We don't have to think in terms of complex economic strategies here, says Greider, for this is exactly "the same means by which families acquire equity in their homes: instead of paying rent to a landlord each month, they pay off the mortgage loan that enabled them to buy the house."

In the United States, Greider specifically seeks to put on the national political agenda Louis Kelso's proposal to channel the Federal Reserve Bank's money creation to broaden ownership in the United States.

This is hardly a non-controversial position, even in a country which espouses the virtues of universal capital ownership, like our own. "Economists who have grudgingly accepted Kelso's other ideas still choke on that proposition, though it is the core of his vision for achieving a synthesis of democracy and capitalism."

That is, after all, Thomas Jefferson's argument. In Jefferson’s view, what made the United States fertile ground for democracy when this country was founded was the fact that ownership of productive assets was broadly distributed. Farmers owned their own land; artisans, their tools; and shopkeepers, their shops. In American political thought, democracy has always required broadly shared ownership.

There is another side of employee ownership in the global economy that demands our attention: employee-owned firms anchor capital locally. They reinvest locally. They purchase more from local suppliers. They invest more in apprenticeship and training programs.

Why?

Their owners' jobs and their owners' children's jobs depend on it. Employee-owned firms are rooted in the community.

That doesn't keep them from being part of a global economy in terms of taking part in international trade.

It does, however, keep them from taking part in the "race to the bottom" in wages and benefits that characterizes so many global firms. It also keeps them from the speculation -- in the Thailand baht or in Hong Kong office buildings -- that exacerbated the Asian financial crisis.

That's a global economy based on ensuring that ordinary Americans' interests are served first.

This may not be very sexy on Wall Street, but it plays very well on Main Street in any town in Ohio.

"A democratic society makes choices," Greider writes, "and those choices will reflect what its people truly value. And every society, even a very rich one, has to live with the consequences, wise or foolish."

Greider is right -- and this is a book worth reading.