Globalization

(Response to Kirk: Living in a Globalized World)

            “The Global Call to Action against Poverty, the world’s largest anti-poverty coalition, continues to pressure the governments of richer countries to address global imbalances of wealth and power.” (Kirk p. 389)

            Globally, the system of capitalization keeps third world or “devastated” countries in poverty.  Workers are given low wages, bad working conditions, unstable positions, and often unsafe working conditions.  If the workers try to unionize, the big American corporations move their factory somewhere else.

            Democracy was originally a government “of the people, for the people.”  Unfortunately, corporations which were originally only legal entities have now gained rights and personhood in law:

            “In an 1866 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared corporations legal persons.  Gradually they were given a long list of civil and political rights, such as free speech, property rights, and the right to define and control investment, production, and the organization of work.” (Kirk p. 390)

            The laws of our country and the execution of its practices around large corporations creates a global state of devastation.  Third world countries have been exploited by global capitalism, their natural resources subject to international trade agreements.  The WTO uses secret tribunals to determine damages in trade disagreements between less powerful and more powerful countries.  The IMF requires countries to change structurally and value exports, much like Planned Parenthood controls women’s lives in exchange for so called “help,” which is largely enslavement.

            National organizations are restructuring our planet’s economy worldwide.  Small countries are being forced to organize their economies in a certain way, and pander to global interests, as well as secular and private ones.  Many countries were forced to remove price caps on food for instance, which leads to destabilization in favor of corporations who can maximize the profit margin and minimize wages paid.

            Overall I am appalled.  In Mexico the unemployment rate has reached 50%.  It’s not because Mexicans don’t want to start businesses, it’s because their rights have been infringed to the point that the large corporations and international community hold the economic playing cards.  The multinational corporations can sell and manufacture products at the lowest cost to themselves, causing a low-wage competition in devastated (third world) countries.  Part of the problem is the fluidity of capital – when a US corporation can move it’s operations without any responsibility to keep the locals in a third world country employed, massive devaluation and devastation of the third world country results.

If our society is to survive, worker rights must be advocated and corporations must be liable to the individual they employ.  If Nike wants to pull it’s operations out of one country and put them in another, it should bear a responsibility to the people whose lives it is displacing with its “conspicuous consumption” of the cheapest available labor on Earth.

We are additionally facing a pandemic of evil where women and children are sold into the global sex trade.  India panders to the corrupt cops and statesmen who conceal and continue running whorehouses.  When the cheapest labor is slave labor, and legislators are participating in the system, what can be done?  Who will police the police? 

It is extremely important for international journalists to penetrate unjust situations and expose them to world scrutiny.  Even then, it is not governments who will object – it’s the people who object, who know that if one of their brothers or sisters is enslaved, so might they lose their rights and privileges also.

This reading makes me wonder – when will globalization hit my backyard?  Will my friends, family, and neighbors be struggling against faceless corporations? We will have to make the choice to support our friends and neighbors and small businesses when that times comes, and it already has.  We struggle against the forces of local dismantlement and disempowerment every day, with each economic choice we make.  I only hope that my neighbors keep their female children, and do not resort to selling them into slavery because the global system hasn’t properly divided Earth’s resources to those that deserve them: the workers.

We all have a dollar to spend, and collectively, as we spend it, we shape the globe.  We need a system that maximizes human wellbeing for the many, not human wealth for the few.  Each day we make a choice between globalization and localization.  It is as simple as the choice between slavery and freedom.