“But the leaders of our society will carry American forward and a rising tide will life all boats in the US of A as usual.”
Wow, are you a dreamer. You would have done well in Herbert Hoover’s Cabinet.
LOL. No, I would have done very poorly.
I would have gone against the grain in counselling Hoover to lower taxes on the upper classes.
From:
A REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON GLOBALIZATION
A Critique of Corporate Globalization
(pp.28 - 32, from the 2002 report)
Beneficiaries of Economic Globalization
One might give the benefit of the doubt to the architects of this global experiment. Perhaps they actually believed that the system would produce the kind of rapid growth that would truly benefit the poor and the environment. We have certainly heard them repeat the homily over and over: “A rising tide will lift all boats”. We continue to hear it from the heads of the WTO, the World Bank, and most countries’ leaders, including President George W. Bush. But is it true?
The problems begin with the assumption that hypergrowth can continue forever. How can exponential growth possibly be sustained, given the limits of a finite planet? Where will the resources–the minerals, the wood, the water, the land–come from to feed hyperexpansion without killing the planet and ourselves? The world’s limits are already in view. How many cars and refrigerators can be built and bought? How many roads can cover the land? How many fish can be vacuumed from the sea before species disappear and ecosystems fail? How much pollution can the world survive? What about global warming, toxic dumping, ozone depletion?
There’s another important question: Who actually benefits from this system? It’s not the farmers who are driven from their own lands and made into homeless, jobless refugees in both the South and the North. It’s not the urban dwellers who must deal with masses of displaced people jamming into cities looking for jobs. It’s not the workers caught in downward wage spirals in both the North and the South. It’s not the indigenous peoples facing hordes of corporate invaders seeking the last resources. And it’s surely not nature.
The actual beneficiaries are obvious. They are the exact opposite of those whom the advocates claim. In the United States, for example, during the period of most rapid globalization–the 1990s–the top executives of the largest global companies made salaries and gained options in the many millions of dollars (often hundreds of millions), while real wages of ordinary workers barely rose. Sara Anderson and John Cavanagh of the institute for Policy Studies report that the American CEOs were paid on average 458 times more than production workers in 2000, up from 104 times in 1991. The Economic Policy Institute’s 1991 report by Lawrence Mishel and others says that the median hourly wages are actually down by 10 percent in real terms over the previous twenty-five years. And in the industry that led our recent boom–the computer industry–where some people famously made fortunes, 80 percent of assembly and production workers are temporary workers, earning $8 an hour with no benefits and no unions.
As for lifting the global poor, the U.N. Development Program’s 1991 Human Development Report revealed that the gap between the wealthy and the poor within and among countries of the world is growing steadily larger. It blamed inherent inequities in the global trade system for this situation. Even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concurred. In its Global Trends, 2015 report, the CIA maintained that globalization will create “an even wider gap between regional winners and loser than exists today. [Globalization’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic volatility and a widening economic divide...deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. [It] will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.” Such is already the degree of wealth concentrated that the world’s 475 billionaires are now worth the combined income of the bottom half of humanity.
The economic clout of global firms is equally staggering. As Sara Anderson and John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies report, the combined sales of the top two hundred firms grew faster than overall global economic activity between 1983 and 1999, reaching the equivalent of close to 30 percent of world GDP. Yet these firms employ only three-quarters of 1 percent of the global workforce. As they continue to grow larger and more globalized, they continue to replace workers with machines or to buy up competitors and eliminate duplicate jobs. Such economies of scale are intrinsic to the free trade, globalized design, just as environmental pollution is intrinsic to export-oriented trade. Large-scale mergers and consolidations–bigness–produce fewer jobs, not more jobs. Indeed, the ideologies and rules of economic globalization have destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people while eliminating basic public services.
It is true that there are isolated instances where some improvement has been achieved in Third World countries. The Bretton Woods institutions often trumpet these examples. But it is also true that the benefits of this growth have usually been short-lived. Furthermore, nearly all of it goes to the elites in these countries and to the chief executives of the global corporations at the hub of the process.
Let’s look at the so-called poster children of free trade, the Asian Tigers: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia. In these countries, improvement has come not by assiduously following the dictates of the Bretton Woods institutions but often by doing the opposite of what they prescribe. Asian countries that have had some brief success in developing their own economies did not cut all their tariffs as demanded by globalizing institutions, permit foreign entry without controls, or eliminate existing support for domestic businesses, local economies, and local agriculture. Instead, those countries first developed the ability to take care of their basic needs internally, rather than totally converting to an export-based production system.
By at first resisting the economic model pushed by Bretton Woods, some countries managed to stay free of the volatility of export markets. But when they finally succumbed to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, they found their glory days quickly ending.
Indeed, most poor countries have never enjoyed much benefit from globalization. After three decades of strong doses of IMF and World Bank medicine and less than a decade of WTO policies, many have seen that globalization is a false promise. The policies are not designed to benefit them but to benefit rich industrial countries and their global corporations. For this reason, many of the poor nations of the world–notably from the Caribbean and Asia–held firmly together in opposition to the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and only reluctantly agreed to further trade talks in Doha, Qatar, in 2001.
So much for the rising tide that lifts all boats. Clearly it lifts only yachts.
Hundreds of thousands of people are now convinced that it doesn’t need to be this way; there is nothing inevitable about it. Globalization is driven by a set of rules and self-interested institutions that can be changed–if we have a democracy.
At its root, economic globalization is really an experiment, an economic model promoted by people who most benefit from it. As for the charge that we are utopian, obviously the globalizers have got it backwards. To keep arguing as they do–that a system that homogenizes global economic activity and culture to benefit corporations, removes power from communities and puts it into global bureaucracies, marginalizes and makes homeless millions of farmers and workers, and devastates nature can survive for very long–that is utopianism. It’s not going to work. It’s far better that we seek other solutions.