punkbass2000
Des An artiste
Bozo Erectus said:
But the topic is "What's so bad about globalisation?". Whether or not people have always been exploiting each other is highly irrelevant to whether or not there is something wrong with globalisation.
What is so bad about Globalisation?
- Thread starter classical_hero
- Start date
But the topic is "What's so bad about globalisation?". Whether or not people have always been exploiting each other is highly irrelevant to whether or not there is something wrong with globalisation.
Bozo Erectus
Master Baker
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2003
- Messages
- 22,389
Its not irrelevant when youre of the opinion that all the ills associated by many with globalization (modern captialism) have been with us for a loooooooong time. If tommorow morning we woke up, turned on the radio, and heard that captialism had been abolished by the UN, and communism was now the official religion of the planet Earth, the masses would still be exploited by the few. The only difference would be that those few would be even fewer than they had been under capitalism.punkbass2000 said:
Cant touch this (does the Hammer dance)
punkbass2000
Des An artiste
Bozo Erectus said:Its not irrelevant when youre of the opinion that all the ills associated by many with globalization (modern captialism) have been with us for a loooooooong time. If tommorow morning we woke up, turned on the radio, and heard that captialism had been abolished by the UN, and communism was now the official religion of the planet Earth, the masses would still be exploited by the few. The only difference would be that those few would be even fewer than they had been under capitalism.
Cant touch this (does the Hammer dance)
Well, I suppose I may be asking too much to stay on-topic. I imagine it won't be long before someone justifies globalisation with the bible and a religious debate breaks out.
"And god saw that there would be no thread where the sheep would follow the shepherd. And it was good?"
Bozo Erectus
Master Baker
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2003
- Messages
- 22,389
What I refer to is very much on topic PB. You happen to disagree:shrug:punkbass2000 said:
Sometimes even the shepherd doesnt know where the most fertile grass is, and must defer to the sheep
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
We agree, I'm against agricultural subsidies too. If farming isn't profitable, don't farm. I'm assuming that is what you are getting at.Rambuchan said:
Import liberalization is up to the country that will be impacted by the importing of those goods. Up until the late 1980s, the Korean government slapped extremely high tariffs and trade restrictions on foreign goods that were already being made in Korea. Basically, if you lived in Seoul in the 80s, your choice of cars was Hyundai and Daewoo.
What? I'm don't quite understand what you're trying to say here.
Rambuchan
The Funky President
Yes indeedy. See much of the starvation in African countries was, and still is, caused by a heady mix of both free trade and subsidies for rich countries' farmers. Take the multi-national trade talks which failed to agree on regulated coffee prices in 1989. Well it was left to the market to decide the best price and the market is a merciless beast. So, while the prices of coffee plummeted, poor African farmers could not compete. (And we started seeing Starbucks and the like opening shop). Meanwhile, richer counterparts protected by subsidies continued quite happily and still do today. The situation has not changed yet.rmsharpe said:
That is an example of globalisation being thrust upon a commodity market that was not ready. You could convincingly argue that the genocide in Rwanda was an off-shoot of this trade imbalance. Markets and economies need to be made ready for a properly integrated global system. If we take it too simplistically, as with the coffee case, there could be disastrous consequences. Careful steps are being taken with debt write offs and increased aid to push us closer to the goal.
I was highlighting that although wealthy companies bring many benefits to the developing world, they are also the cause of much of the problem. I chose to highlight drug companies as a random target. They tread the tricky line between running a profitable enterprise and actually going out and saving millions of lives, which their products are designed to do afterall. It just doesn't make sense for their bottom line but the patents of powerful drug companies are inadvertantly causing death on a massive scale. Just one example of the flip side of the coin.rmsharpe said:
In fact the above example makes me consider that the actual ultimate goal of globalisation, in unifying the world under a common political and economic system, will actually thrust the world's nations further into a late-capitalist era, in which much of our understanding of profit may well be quite different indeed if not completely different altogether. We may even find ourselves in a post-capitalist era.
Globilization = exploitive capitalism. Not modern capitalism.Bozo Erectus said:
There is nothing wrong with the ideology of Capitalism, except that it has the seeds of expoiting and selfishness build into it. And on their own, exploiting and selfishness can still lead to good things, but combined with greed and power; they can't. Globalisation is the extreme form of exploitive capitalism (many suffer for the glory of a handful) so you can't blame the "many" for protesting against the "handful".
BasketCase
Username sez it all
Anti-globalization is simply the latest in a series of fickle and ever-changing fads.
When I was in grade school a few decades ago, Globalization was the In Thing. All human beings should be one big happy family. The arguments we've been seeing in this thread simply did not exist.
This is clearly no longer the case.
The argument against destroying other cultures is simply the latest salvo in an ongoing Cold War that, frankly, is very similar to the cultural boundaries in a Civ 3 game. Each culture in the real world is trying to dent everybody else's culture and expand their own. When I was in college, the prevailing wisdom was that we Americans should embrace other cultures and learn about them. However, at that time (as now) other cultures were not all giving us the same courtesy.
Corporations haven't really changed. It's not corporations that are greedy; it's the people in them who are. And greed is a basic human instinct which is not going to change. Money, at its most basic level, is simply a medium for obtaining food. All animals are always competing for food (and trying to take it away from others in order to improve their own chances of survival), so humans are always going to compete for money.
A thousand years ago, medieval kings ruled with absolute power, and could simply take whatever they wanted. A single person spent most of his waking hours laboring to maintain a reliable food supply. Today, the Internet makes it very easy for a single person to access oodles of information, and technology in general makes it much easier for a person to produce more with less work. It's much easier for a few people to group together into a company to produce stuff. Those who don't have that technology naturally won't; improving standards of living simply make more visible those people whose standards are not improving.
There will always be a zero somewhere--somebody who has zero food or zero paycheck. No matter how few those people are, they will always be present somewhere, allowing people so say we're not doing enough to help the less fortunate. So, at some point, I stop listening to those people and enjoy my pizza and Dr. Pepper and car with the six-cylinder 200HP engine and my computer which consumes 400 watts of CO2-producing electricity.
When I was in grade school a few decades ago, Globalization was the In Thing. All human beings should be one big happy family. The arguments we've been seeing in this thread simply did not exist.
This is clearly no longer the case.
The argument against destroying other cultures is simply the latest salvo in an ongoing Cold War that, frankly, is very similar to the cultural boundaries in a Civ 3 game. Each culture in the real world is trying to dent everybody else's culture and expand their own. When I was in college, the prevailing wisdom was that we Americans should embrace other cultures and learn about them. However, at that time (as now) other cultures were not all giving us the same courtesy.
Corporations haven't really changed. It's not corporations that are greedy; it's the people in them who are. And greed is a basic human instinct which is not going to change. Money, at its most basic level, is simply a medium for obtaining food. All animals are always competing for food (and trying to take it away from others in order to improve their own chances of survival), so humans are always going to compete for money.
A thousand years ago, medieval kings ruled with absolute power, and could simply take whatever they wanted. A single person spent most of his waking hours laboring to maintain a reliable food supply. Today, the Internet makes it very easy for a single person to access oodles of information, and technology in general makes it much easier for a person to produce more with less work. It's much easier for a few people to group together into a company to produce stuff. Those who don't have that technology naturally won't; improving standards of living simply make more visible those people whose standards are not improving.
There will always be a zero somewhere--somebody who has zero food or zero paycheck. No matter how few those people are, they will always be present somewhere, allowing people so say we're not doing enough to help the less fortunate. So, at some point, I stop listening to those people and enjoy my pizza and Dr. Pepper and car with the six-cylinder 200HP engine and my computer which consumes 400 watts of CO2-producing electricity.
RedWolf
Deity
punkbass2000 said:
"No Logo" is a fascinating read. If you can plow through the dry parts you can really learn a lot - and as you say it is full of concrete examples.
Specifically the ways in which the World Bank and IMF force third world nations into adopting more "free market" principles (as a caveat for foreign aid) and in the process further devastate their economies making life harsher for the absolute poorest. (but opening them up to foreign investment thereby earning money for trans-nationals).
I've never liked the idea of dismissing anti-globalization protesters as "ignorant" because it serves as a poor debating tool - Dismiss them, making them irrelevant instead of actually debating their opinions. And in the reality few of them are actually ignorant. Most are university educated academics who care deeply about their causes. I know many of these people and I can confirm that they're generally more intelligent then your average person on the street. A liberal arts degree if nothing else educates about the world around you and teaches critical thought. If these people didn't gnuinely understand and care then why bother? Protesting is a lot of work when you could instead be partying and drinking... I understand and care yet I don't DO anything... I figure these people are better then I.
These protests will always draw the anarchist hoodlums in small numbers and they're always rowdy enough to "steal the show"... I believe they're in the minority though.
