Globalization

[cleoeo]

What is at the root of the anti-globalization movement? I'm intrigued. Is there a central organization is it a loosely knit bunch of alarmed libertarians, nationalists, separatists, etc.?
I'm a personal privacy and freedom nut myself (Big Brother scares the dumps out of me) but always considered a global economy to be a good thing.


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Bomb Mars Now!

[ogb]

The main argument of the globalization opponents is that the poor countries are kept as poor as they are now and the "rich" nations (if you consider the nations that are highly in debt as the USA, Japan, UK, Germany... to be rich) establish or even improve their situation. According to my mind, globalisation doesn't change anything, neither positive nor negative. Concerning the ideology it is good - as well as communism could be considered at least interesting, but both are only good on the paper and can't be pulled into action in reality.

[Ada_Doom]

That's right ogb, they object to the exploitation of developing countries by the West, and quite right too. We in the West do have to wake up and realise that the 3rd World isn't just there to provide cheap labour for our industries and cheap food for our stomachs at the expense of the economies of those countries. Small farmers in the Africa, Asia and S. America are so busy growing cash crops for sale to the West (sometimes this means drugs - Columbia, Burma) that they can't grow food for themselves. Something that should serve as a warning from history for this is the Irish Potato Famine. In 1845, whilst the Irish people were starving to death, England imported record amounts of grain and wheat from Ireland to feed ourselves. Not our finest hour. I would hate to see this sort of thing happen again nearly 200 years later, but it isn't such a remote possibility as we would like to think.

*gets off soapbox http://www.dumblaws.com/ubb/wink.gif*



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Heaven is where the police are English, the cars are German, the chefs are French, the lovers are Italian and everything is organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are English, the police are German, the cars are Spanish, the lovers are Swiss and everything is organised by the Italians.
The man is a God (http://www.jpwsfc.org)

[cleoeo]

I highly doubt any culture in the World would like to return to subsistance farming or hunter/gathering. Two thousand year old cultures are now casually referred to as "developing countries". They're tired of living like **** and dying at age 30.
It seems that industrialized nations are simultaneously accused of promoting technology thus destroying ancient cultures AND of witholding technology and keeping poor countries poor. What would you have us in the West do differently?

[ogb]

I see the point Ada is making, but I have no clue how to solve that. If you pay the poor countries more money, the products will be more expensive. The people in the industrialized countries can't afford all of the products anymore and don't buy it. Then you have two solutions: the people here get higher wages, but this means further costs for the industry and again higher prices and this will lead to the consequence (besides inflation and economy problems) that would automatically be solution no. 2: the people in the poor countries will get less if you want to sell the products, or they get nothing at all if the products are too expensive to be sold. It always is the consumers behaviour that decides, the industry is only reacting to the market situation.
What I don't see is: what is the influence of globalization on that? Nothing changes, it is as it was before.

[Serendipity]

Ogb, that's not the point. There are entrepreneur companies in the West that, for example, employ people in developing contries to make training shoes. They pay these people next to nothing. Then they import the shoes into the West and sell them for in excess of US$150. Then they pay sports celebrities to endorse their shoes. Nike paid Micheal Jordan $20,000,000 to endorse their training shoes, which is more than they pay their entire manufacturing staff in Indonesia (I think). It is this kind of exploitation that anti-globalization protesters are angry about. It's the profit made at the expense of the developing world, whose workers are kept poor, and therefore have little chance at setting up an industrial base that benefits their own people. At the sme time, we in the UK have seen our own industrial base diminish so that the only significant economic growth is in the service sector. Ironic, considering the Industrial Revolution started here (as much as anywhere).

[cleoeo]

Thank you, I'm starting to grasp the issue. I'll have to ponder this one for a while.

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Bomb Mars Now!

[cleoeo]

How about the G8 agreeing to a "value added" tax to be kicked back to the producing country? They could use it to build their own infrastructure. Also, write off any unfair debt accrued by previous despots who spent the money building up the military and buying 2,000 pairs of Gucci shoes.

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Bomb Mars Now!

[ogb]

I think that I got the point, Dippy. Whether Nike pays 20 mio to Michael Jordan or not, it doesn't change anything for the 3rd world, but surely the company itself. And of course the firms are making the money with selling their products. They would make the same profit if they produced their stuff in their own country, just the price for the consumer would be higher. And you cannot blame the companies that they want to make money - that's the way the system works.
We could discuss it on and on and on. If you find a solution for that, you'll win any prize in the world. But only protesting against globalization doesn't change anything.

[Serendipity]

But only protesting against globalization doesn't change anything.

...But silence is often interpreted as consent. Protesters have been saying for years that what is happening is wrong, and have got nowhere, that's why I am no longer an active protester (I was in the 80's, but it started to feel like banging my head agiainst a wall).

A solution? Ha ha! Yep, if I had a solution I'd sell it and become really rich...

Of course companies want to make money, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But when companies place the profit motive above all other considerations - such as worker's rights and welfare (I mean basic human rights) - well, we see what we get.

Nike paying Jordan $20m leads to lots of young people who respect Jordan buying Nike products. I hate being told to Live My Dream or whatever stupid slogan they use, my dream is of a world that can live with itself.

These corporations could employ American (or western) workers, pay them decent wages, sell their products for a reasonable price, and have a lot less profit, but what money they do have would be more honestly earned, with no exploitation on the way. What is wrong with that as a solution?

[ogb]

I doubt that the poor countries will improve their situation if the companies produce in the western world. Then they have no work at all and their situation will even be worse. I don't want to cut them their human rights or their workers rights, but the standard of living is in many countries much less than in the modern world. If the western companies paid higher loans in these countries, the home based industries there would all go bankruptcy.

[CBranski]

One thing that has to be realised is the fact that many of the problems in poor countries are in fact caused by the countries themselves. Human rights in the Third World are a strange concept for the most part, and I believe that my kitchen appliances have more legal rights than women and children in the Third World. It should also be noted that the West is hardly encouraging some of the more brutal customs that occur there.

Of course Western companies often times get into bed with brutal dictators, but that is hardly the fault of western consumers. While we need to stand up against blatant exploitation of poor countries, the poor countries themselves need to take a good long hard look at how they treat their citizens.

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Jennifer Lopez for Mayor

[Serendipity]

Ogb: The employment issue is only one aspect of the whole problem. The West could, for example, try paying fair prices for crops. There is only one company that I know of, Fairtrade, that doesn't take a huge cut from the profits of the third world produce it imports into the West. I don't know if you heard about the banana wars a few years ago, this was an incident involving the World Trade Org, trying to insist that the UK buy American bananas. The UK already has a staedy supplier of bananas, mostly The Windward Isles, a former British colony. The WTO said that the US should impose sanctions on some goods that we export to the US. In short, the WTO exposed itself as an organisation that exists to allow North American corporations to dominate any market they choose. Recently the EU overruled the WTO decree that France must buy Canadia asbestos, since abestos importation into the EU is illegal.

CB: Yeah, but who backs the third world gov'ts? In Africa, the USSR used to back many countries, I'm not sure what goes on now. Remember Nicaragua and Reagan backing the Contra rebels over the democratically elected government there? As Lou Reed put it "Life is not worth more than infected yeast". (I think that's what he said... he was being ironic anyway.)

[Sjax]

Fighting globalization is like fighting gravity. You can fight all you want, but you will never succeed. Both things are here to stay.

[ogb]

In Germany there were lots of stores in the 80s in which only natural products and especially those of third world countries were sold for a fair price. Today you'll hardly find one of these shops because they were too expensive by far.

[Ada_Doom]

The point is, that while these people are spending their days growing bananas for the WTO, and cocoa beans for Cadbury's and sewing trainers for Nike, they can neither produce their own food, nor make a solid base for the improvement of their local economy. This means they will stay poor, and they will stay dependent on the West. And when Nike decides that Burmese workers are cheaper than Indonesians, and moves their operation to Burma, the Indonesians will be buggered. For example.

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Heaven is where the police are English, the cars are German, the chefs are French, the lovers are Italian and everything is organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are English, the police are German, the cars are Spanish, the lovers are Swiss and everything is organised by the Italians.
The man is a God (http://www.jpwsfc.org)

[ogb]

That's definitely true. But without help from the west, they'll have no possibility to improve their situation.

[Serendipity]

That's definitely true, unfortunately. The corporations are doing exactly nothing to help, though; they're too busy profiteering.

[cleoeo]

Also, unfortunately, many "developing nations" have very few resourses to develop except for human labor. No oil. No minerals. Lousy soil. Crummy climate. No seaport. Hostile, militaristic neighbors. Most areas of the globe worth exploiting were colonized or overrun long ago; the remaining "undeveloped nations" are that way for a reason.
We poured billions of dollars into developing the North Sea and Alaskan tundra because there's oil there. We poured billions of dollars into Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait because there's oil there. There ain't no oil in Burma or Indonesia.

[amr]

You've just put your finger on the heart of neo-colonializm (AKA globalization), cleoeo. Agressive countries reap the benefits(namely cheap labor) of an essentially conquered nation without all the expense of actually taking a country over.

If you invade a country, you spend money and resources on the actual takover and maintaining a presence. Then you need to spend money on keeping the natives happy lest they revolt. It's alot harder to revolt against a foriegn corporation than a foriegn dictator. Can you imagine Ghandi going up against Nike instead of the British? The image blows my fragile little mind!

The exploitation of 3rd world peoples isn't going to stop anytime soon because even though the average worker may only get paid $.50 a day, that's still probably twice the amount they would recieve otherwise.



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I like to con people and I like to insult people. If you combine "con" and "insult" you get "consult" ...

May I consult you?

[cleoeo]

At least with a truely global economy we'll have international corporations competing for the cheap labor. Sooner or later someone's going to offer the Nike workers 75 cents a day to make tiddlewinks instead, and the gates will be open. But this will only happen if the labor force is free to pursue the best deal for their efforts. If the county's run by a dictator they're screwed. Central planning sucks; ask the Soviets.

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Bomb Mars Now!

[Phreakmeister]

Well, central planning is not all that bad. As long as it meets the demand.
If 3000 shoes are needed, proper central planning can easily get that done properly. As long as they don't make 3000 right shoes size 6.
'Cause let's face it: central planning is what is the core of every organization. Without central planning it wouldn't be an organization. It would at best be just a think tank.

[ogb]

You're just missing one thing: central organisation of a company happens for economical reasons and makes sense. In a state organisation the economical pressure is missing - as cleoeo said, we had that, and not only in the Sovietunion, and it failed everywhere.

[TV_Guy]

Who owns all the countries debt? If all the countries are in debt who's doing the lending? Sweden maybe or Bill Gates?

BTW Cleo, like the sig. I just read war of the worlds for the first time and I think we should strike mars first!

[Phreakmeister]

OGB:
The New Deal, by president Roosevelt was a form of central planning as well. And you can say a lot about it, but it didn't fail. It did help the U.S. overcome the crisis of the 1930's.

[ogb]

Originally posted by Phreakmeister:
OGB:
The New Deal, by president Roosevelt was a form of central planning as well. And you can say a lot about it, but it didn't fail. It did help the U.S. overcome the crisis of the 1930's.

Yes, that's right, but only for a short period of time. The state has better possibilities to collect and provide material. Just take a look at the state companies - in Germany they all are in massive trouble (except the mail service) after being privatised.

[Phreakmeister]

Yeah, we got a lot of them as well. But that has nothing to do with having been state company or having been privatized.
These problems are start-up problems. These are problems any company faces in the first few years of its existence. That is why most companies go bankrupt within a year.

But as you will probably agree with me, there are several things the state can NOT privatize. Banks for instance are no business of the government. A central bank is required to guarantee stability of the economy, but the banking itself can be done by the banks.
But what about electricity??? We've seen the problems California has been facing the past few years. In cases like these, the government can guarantee a stability of life. Governments, by exploiting an electricity company, can make sure that the companies can put more effort in WHAT they are producing, and not how much it sells. Green electricity (environmental) (solar energy, water energy, wind energy, etc.) can be promoted.
Or what about prisons? What do you think of the idea of prisons being privatized? Prisons being on the stock markets. Prisons having to make profit. What will happen then, is that prisons cut the costs, by saving on for instance security, or food, or toilet paper. What do you think of that?

[ogb]

No, state companies have much better starting conditions when they are privatized. They already got a whole working structure, they have the basics and mostly even resources others don't have (like Deutsche Telekom the phone wires, like Deutsche Bahn the rails, like Deutsche Post if they finally get privatised the mailboxes and stamps...) - they mainly have problems because they are completely unorganised and have too many employees who don't know what the neighbour is doing.
Energy has to be cared for by the state if the other companies are not able to provide everyone securely with it. I disagree with most of the natural energy as they aren't working yet. In Germany with all the financial support of the state, one kWh of natural energy costs three times more than the consumer has to pay for it - this doesn't make sense.
With prisons you have to be careful. Private persons are much more corrupt than the state. I'd be afraid that private persons could let some prisoners go if they just see enough money. Besides, I don't know how they can make money with it.

[Phreakmeister]

Well, as far as I know prisons in the US (which are privatized) get a certain amount of money from the state for every detainee. This is not enough, however, so the prisons have to cut on expenses like food, and the prisoners have to buy their own toiletpaper.

Well, whether natural energy is affordable yet or not, you will probably agree with me that it is necessary for th e environment. And you probably also agree with me, that the state has a prime potential in supplying environmentally safe energy.