Broken_Erika
Play with me.
Globalism is the worship of the great globular deity Rolly-Polly.
Is globalism undemocratic?
- Thread starter Hamilton321
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stinkubus
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I'm expecting a lengthy YouTube video blaming George Soros and the juice to be posted any moment.
IME most of those who decry "globalism" live in areas of 1st word nations which have lost jobs to foreign competition due to the fact that capital is now highly mobile.
It's not "globalism", per se, that is undemocratic. It's capitalism.
Lexicus
Deity
True enough, but capital certainly has crafted or coopted international institutions in an effort to evade the checks placed on it by national governments.
stinkubus
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Indeed, and I'm certainly not referring to you as we seem to be of like mind on many of these issues, but I'm tired of hearing legitimate criticisms of the current global economic order become twisted in xenophobic dogwhistles. The answer isn't to bring all the wealth back to America and leave billions around the world to starve. The answer is to afford them the same workplace and environmental protections that we all take for granted.
Seems pretty clear to me. Open borders and free trade, but also balanced out with a certain level of economic protectionism so local industries and businesses don't get completely steamrolled by large multinationals.
In short, globalism is, like any other ideology, good in moderation and bad if it's the only ideology we choose to live by.
Perfection
The Great Head.
globalism is the new reality - fighting it is a losing battle
People said the same about Hillary getting elected...
Perfection
The Great Head.
Hillary wasn't elected then - but I'm surrounded by goods not produced in the US.
And I'm surrounded by goods that are. What's your point?
Trade does not equal globalism.
Agreed.
However, certain transitory measures to ease the shock of change could still be useful.
GoodSarmatian
Jokerfied Western Male
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Transitory isn't enough. The fight against tax evasion and for labor, safety and environmental standards has to be a constant battle.
Corporations certainly will not stop fighting and take mile for every inch conceded.
Lexicus
Deity
The US government needs to get serious about enforcing its own laws against financial crimes. First step would be to make it totally illegal, like mandatory jailtime illegal, to create a business entity without public disclosure of the principals/beneficial owners.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
I think there are many, many different solutions to deal with globalisation, the problem is just that atm we are encouraging and strengthening the processes that are already going on. neo-liberalistic capitalism transforms a chariot into a jet fighter built by practical slave labor in a few years.
I would even go as far and say that globalization is not a problem at all, it's a process that has been going on for literal milennia and longer, just think about the silk road, colonization, the printing press, all these are cornerstones of this same process that is now demonized and has become a scapegoat for many people.
And why is that? I see plenty of alternatives, even with the technologies like internet still in place
This relies entirely on (unregulated) capitalism being the dominant economic force in the entire world, if that is not the case your premise just fails
If we, for example, taxed multinational conglomerates heavily for outsorcing into countries with significantly lower wages, that would in an instant make it not profitable anymore.
Not that this is an easy solution, or one that would revert globalisation, but your stance seems unnecessarily defeatist
I would even go as far and say that globalization is not a problem at all, it's a process that has been going on for literal milennia and longer, just think about the silk road, colonization, the printing press, all these are cornerstones of this same process that is now demonized and has become a scapegoat for many people.
And why is that? I see plenty of alternatives, even with the technologies like internet still in place
This relies entirely on (unregulated) capitalism being the dominant economic force in the entire world, if that is not the case your premise just fails
If we, for example, taxed multinational conglomerates heavily for outsorcing into countries with significantly lower wages, that would in an instant make it not profitable anymore.
Not that this is an easy solution, or one that would revert globalisation, but your stance seems unnecessarily defeatist
stinkubus
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Requiring that nations with lower cost of labor adhere to some minimal environmental and labor standards would also alter the balance. Unfortunately, the current neo-liberal paradigm on trade is to coerce these countries into signing "free trade" agreements which preclude them from doing exactly that.
Lexicus
Deity
Friedrich List recognized all the way back in the early 1800s that a nation which took seriously Adam Smith's principle of free trade (ie, that nations should, like customers in a market, always seek the cheapest source of goods) could easily prevent a nation from investing in its own development, thus crippling it in the longer term. The example he had in mind was countries which became dependent on imports of manufactured goods from England - while this was cheaper (in the short-term anyway) than investing in their own manufacturing capability, the long-term consequence was to leave those countries without any economic "base" of their own, which would rapidly lead to military and political decline. Even the English realized that total free trade was a fantasy, because a nation relying entirely on the principle could allow the industries which supported its own military forces to wither away, relying on cheaper imports of, for example, timber to build ships. The free market economists' ideal of global specialization, free trade allowing countries to focus on the things they were good at, was a formula for a highly developed metropolitan center savagely exploiting a periphery that would remain chronically undeveloped due to its state of economic dependence on the center.
This is more or less what we're seeing today. Despite the admirable reductions in poverty, the pattern of development in many nations has been calculated not to make them competitors to the "advanced" countries but simply to turn them into cheap sources of labor - somewhat similar to the way that hinterlands have been treated by the metropolitan centers of civilization throughout history (source of slaves, raw materials, and not much else). And of course the even more pernicious problem is that capitalists in the developing world tend not to invest in developing their own economies, but put significant amounts of their money in rent-seeking investments in the advanced countries.
The US revolutionary war was so important in large part because it prevented this pattern of development from holding in the US, allowing us to eventually become a serious competitor to England (after we had elected the Republicans who dispensed with the previously-dominant idea of free trade and promoted the development of US industry behind protective barriers).
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