Ed Weick says below,
The declining
power of the public sector relative to the private sector might be fixed by
developing new instruments, international if necessary, to bring capital
under control.
Cordell
Which government has the courage to do this? Most officials say, 'we can't
do anything until the US moves'
Ed,
Where I really take issue with Ms. Bramham is her statement that
"globalization [has been] set in motion by intellectuals, unelected advisers
and political leaders who devised a new world trade order." If it was that
simple, we could simply rid ourselves of these people, and the world would
be OK again.
Cordell
How is this to be done? Wasn't the frustration seen in Seattle a function
of the seeming impossibility of bringing about reforms? The inability to
slow down or humanize what has been presented as an exogenous process that
must be rushed through, no matter what. Who is accountable?
Ed,
What Ms. Bramham doesn't seem to recognize is that we are all
guilty. We want Nike "cross-trainers" and GAP clothing even though we know
that the poor of the third world are exploited in producing them. Every
time we drive our suburban assault vehicles (SUVs) up to the gas pumps, we
aid and abet global warming and the depletion of finite resources. If the
world is going to hell in a handbasket, we have no one to blame but
ourselves.
Cordell
This is the Pogo argument, 'we have met the enemy and it is us'. I think
it is facile and leads to an easy cop-out. Choices are being made and not
always in the best interest. Item: suburban assault vehicles were
classified as light trucks rather than cars so that auto makers could turn
out these gas-guzzlers without affecting the fleeet averages agreed to for
cars. Governments in the US and Canada looked the other way and said sure
they are not cars at all. I am sure most on the list can supply their own
items, that is examples where choices are being made which lead to a
misallocation of resources and where consumer choice is often no choice at
all.
===================================================
In reading the piece by Daphne Bramham I was somewhat amazed at her ability
to link and associate a variety of things without conclusive evidence that
they are related. In one breath, she turns the decline of the powers of
nation states, the growing income and wealth disparity between rich
countries and poor, global warming, the spread of AIDS and malaria,
governance by an invisible elite, and the breaking-down of trade-barriers as
being part and parcel of a single growing malignant disorder. "All of this
is generically called globalization" she says.
Ms. Bramham may have an argument, but hardly a case. It would seem to me
that at least some of the things she lists may operate independently of each
other. Global warming would appear to be a result of heavy reliance, for
some three centuries now, on fossil fuels and the more recent use of
chemical substances which erode the ozone layer. The origin of AIDS is
uncertain (see the October "Atlantic Monthly"), but it's spread is caused,
as most epidemic diseases have always been, by people moving around and
mixing. I've argued in previous postings that the disparity between rich
and poor nations is based on the historic plunder, which has now gone on for
some five centuries, of the world by the West, enriching the latter while
leaving poor nations with virtually nothing to build on. As I've also
argued before, that corporate capitalism has seized the initiative and
become globally powerful reflects the ability of the private sector to move
quickly to take advantage of powerful new technologies such as the microchip
and high-speed/high-volume transportation. The public sector's
responsibility is to defend the now internationalized public interest. So
far, its attempts to do so have been rather awkward and clumsy, and have
drawn mass protests instead of kudos.
I don't want to trash Ms. Bramham's argument entirely; she is right in the
sense of everything being related to everything else. But can all of the
things she lists really be put into a single package labeled
"globilization"? Personally, I believe that the notion of a single package
focuses attention onto something too large to be fixed or even contemplated
and away from smaller components of the global mix which may well be
fixable. It leads to despair instead of action. While we may not be able to
fix "globilization", we can surely examine it's component parts to see what
can be done with each of them. AIDS might be fixed by concentrating more
resources on a cure for it. Global warming, to the extent that it is
man-made, might be fixed by pricing and incentive policies which force us to
cut back on fossil fuels and to develop alternative energy sources. It could
be slowed if not stopped if nation states observed the letter and spirit of
the undertakings they have signed, such as the Kyoto Accord. The declining
power of the public sector relative to the private sector might be fixed by
developing new instruments, international if necessary, to bring capital
under control. The rich/poor disparity can be moderated if not fixed by
larger and more effective transfers to the poor world - by giving back some
of the plunder we've taken.
Where I really take issue with Ms. Bramham is her statement that
"globalization [has been] set in motion by intellectuals, unelected advisers
and political leaders who devised a new world trade order." If it was that
simple, we could simply rid ourselves of these people, and the world would
be OK again. What Ms. Bramham doesn't seem to recognize is that we are all
guilty. We want Nike "cross-trainers" and GAP clothing even though we know
that the poor of the third world are exploited in producing them. Every
time we drive our suburban assault vehicles (SUVs) up to the gas pumps, we
aid and abet global warming and the depletion of finite resources. If the
world is going to hell in a handbasket, we have no one to blame but
ourselves.
Ed Weick
(613) 728-4630
Visit my website: http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636
>
> The Vancouver Sun Thursday 5 October
> 2000
>
> Why all is not well with globalization
>
> Its architects did not understand where the new world trade
> order would lead. Or how to fix it later.
>
> by Daphne Bramham
>
> National boundaries are blurring, yet nationalism is rising. Worldwide
> trade is exploding and so is worldwide crime. States and their politicians
> are letting
> power seep away not only to transnational corporations, but also to
> multinational institutions and non-governmental organizations.
>
> The per-capita incomes of more than 80 countries are lower now than a
> decade ago, yet they have increased in developed countries. The fifth of
the
> world's people who live in the richest countries now have 74 times the
> income of the fifth who live in the poorest countries. In 1960, that ratio
> was
> 30 to one. In 1990, it was 60 to one.
>
> AIDS and malaria have proven that infectious diseases are also
> transnationals. And global warming has reminded us that environmental
> concerns transcend boundaries.
>
> People say they feel increasingly powerless, alienated and overwhelmed.
> Yet protests at last week's Prague meeting of the World Bank and last
> year's riots at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle attest
that
> never before have we been so plugged in. Never before has there been so
> much information so readily available, or a tool as powerful as the
> Internet to disseminate it.
>
> All of this is generically called globalization -- set in motion by
> intellectuals, unelected advisers and political leaders who devised a new
> world trade
> order. And some of them now admit they didn't fully appreciated where it
> might lead.
>
> Sylvia Ostry, who was Canada's ambassador for multilateral trade from
> 1985 to 1988, is one of them.
>
> "We in the developed countries did not fully understand the implications
of
> the new trade system," she says "But if we didn't understand all of the
> implications, the developing countries did not understand the implications
> at
> all."
>
> Ostry says she thought of it as "the north-south grand bargain: The north
> opened its markets, the south improved its trade systems to fit with
that."
>
> But what happened was quite different. Rather than simply making it easier
> for goods and people to move across national borders, Ostry says what was
> created was "a system of enormous intrusiveness into our domestic system."
>
> This is not to say that removing trade barriers was the sole element. If
> anything, it was just one piece of a puzzle that has put us at "the hinge
of
> history" -- the evocative phrase Ivan Head, a former policy adviser to
> Pierre
> Trudeau and founding director of the Liu Centre on Global Issues, uses to
> describe our place in time.
>
> While trade barriers fell and countries were aligning their systems to
quick
> passage of goods through their borders, the Cold War ended. The European
> Union grew into a monetary, social and political unit. The Internet
> exploded.
> Asia rose and then fell back. Scientists began to notice that the polar
ice
> caps are melting.
>
> The architects of globalization can be forgiven for not having predicted
> all of that. But what is troubling is that few, if any, have clear ideas
of
> how to
> fix things now.
>
> "We are in the very difficult situation of deepening globalization and the
> fragmentation of nation states," Ostry said at the recent opening of the
Liu
> Centre. "There is a real erosion of the nation state and I'm not sure what
> the
> replacement is."
>
> It's put another way by Gordon Smith -- a former deputy minister of
foreign
> affairs, former Canadian ambassador to NATO, who is now chair of the
> International Development Research Centre and the Canadian Institute for
> Climate Change and head of the University of Victoria's Centre for Global
> Studies.
>
> "What the present globalization has introduced, along with its wealth of
> opportunity, is a . . . new intrusiveness -- and a new destructiveness --
> in the harm done."
>
> In fact, in the book Altered States: Globalization, Sovereignty and
> Governance that formed part of the discussion at last month's United
> Nations' Millennium Assembly of world leaders, Smith and co-author Moises
> Naim (Venezuela's former trade minister and a former senior adviser to the
> president of the World Bank) raise questions that sound surprisingly like
> those asked by protesters on the streets.
>
> "After surviving the long progress to democratic government, men and
> women have won a disturbingly ambiguous prize: responsible government,
> yes, but responsible for what? Capable of what? If there is a power shift
> that now disfavours the state, what is the remaining significance of
> democratic government? Can states any longer govern? Can globalization be
> democratized?"
>
> They list institutions with a "democracy deficit" and include not just the
> World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund
> and the UN Security Council, but also Greenpeace, Amnesty International,
> CNN, Microsoft and Reebok.
>
> This public soul-searching, the admission that not all is well with
> globalization and that not all may be quickly resolvable, has sent some
> staunch
> free-marketers into paroxysms.
>
> The Economist recently chided world leaders to "defend globalization
boldly
> on its merits as a truly moral cause against a mere rabble of exuberant
> irrationalists on the street and in the face of mild public skepticism
that
> is
> open to persuasion."
>
> Would that it could be so easy.
>
> Last week, World Bank president James Wolfensohn talked publicly about
> "sharing the emotions and the concerns" of the protesters on Prague's
> streets, then went behind closed doors and raged against the mob.
>
> We came to this pass because we trusted the globe-erati -- the unelected
> technocrats like Wolfensohn who flit about the world pretending to know
all
> the answers. But these elites prefer to deal behind the closed doors of
> five-star hotels, and until they realize that globalization also means
> democratization, there's no reason to trust them or their moral cause any
> more than the motley crew of protesters who turn up dressed either for war
> or outfitted as endangered turtles.
>
> ==============================
