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Tuesday, 30 January 2007 14:25 |
 | | Mark West |
Globalization is the enemy of the people.
No doubt, there are ways to express that idea that arenët so straightforward, or so at odds with the current orthodoxy.
At its heart, however, globalization is the idea that money ÇƒÓ capital ÇƒÓ should be able to go where it wants and do as it pleases. Money is visualized as some sort of force of nature, like the wind, which blows where it will. Of course, money is no such thing; capital is unnatural, a creation, the tool of the wealthy, and it goes not wherever it wants but where it is commanded to go by its wealthy masters. And the suffering that globalization causes isnët a natural phenomenon, either; it is the result of the greed of the very wealthy.
Globalization
is the force that brings Wal-Mart to communities, with a long-term loss
of jobs. Itës the force that leads American firms to move jobs to
places where the pay is low, without regard for the economic outcomes
for the United States, the environmental outcomes for the
less-developed nations, or the social outcomes for anyone.
Some liberal
commentators, people who have spent their whole lives trying to better
the state of the poor, have suggested that despite its increasingly
disastrous effects upon the American population, globalization might be
a good thing, because it would lead to a net transfer of wealth from
America to other countries.
If globalization
worked to benefit those in the Third World, it might be that it would
be a burden worth the bearing for those of us in the wealthier nations.
But a recent interview with Vandana Shiva in The Sun magazine suggested
that globalization is no better for the people of less-developed
countries than it is for the rest of us.
Under the
protective covering of the world ideological shift toward the
celebration of the brutality of the free market, businesses have moved
into the less-developed world, persuading the World Trade Organization
and other trans-governmental agencies to remove the protectionist
legislation that defended the poor and the weak.
As a result,
there are still food surpluses in India, as there have been at many
times in the past; but now the government no longer provides subsidies
to make that food affordable, and, according to Shiva, the grain is
being sold to American concerns at substantially less than the price
which the peasants would have paid for it.
Genetically
engineered cotton crops have had substantially lower yields in India
than the crops that were previously used; but American firms have
patented seeds and the genetic material, going so far in some cases as
to make it illegal to save or to sell seed. And pressures from
international purchases have meant that onion prices in India have gone
from three rupees to a hundred rupees per kilogram in the last five
years.
The gleaming
Microsoft factories that corporate shills like Thomas Friedman
celebrate are few and far between; but the daily transfer of wealth
from rich to poor, from the peasantry to the elite, continues apace in
India and throughout the world. But, as usual, it is only those who
benefit from the ǃÚnew world orderë who get a voice in the world press.
Global trade and
agreements reducing "barriers to trade" have fundamentally harmed the
poor by dismantling the framework of legal barriers that protected them
from the rapacities of laissez-faire. We can only hope that with the
change of power in Washington will come some insight into the
devastation free trade brings to communities, both here and in
developing nations ÇƒÓ and some compassion for the suffering of those who
are not wealthy and powerful.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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