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Globalization

US Orders World Trade Organization To Shape Up Or Else

September 2, 2018 Arkady Savitsky, Strategic Culture. , , ,
The US mulls leaving the World Trade Organization. "If they don't shape up, I would withdraw from the WTO," said President Donald Trump in an interview with Bloomberg News on Aug.30. The president wants the organization to adopt rules more favorable to America. He believes the US is not treated fairly though it’s Washington who is pressing challenges against other states, including close trade partners, not vice versa. According to Mr. Trump, the 1994 agreement to establish the WTO "was the single worst trade deal ever made". Two years ago, then presidential candidate Trump told NBC's "Meet the Press," that the "World Trade Organization is a disaster."

Sanctions Backfire: US Is Being Left Behind

August 26, 2018 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance , , ,
The United States has a long history of dominating international economic institutions and has been able to use that power in the past to control other governments and enrich its industries. At present, the United States is waging an economic World War targeting much of the world economy, including allies who refuse to comply with US mandates. This is a time for the US to try new tactics, but the power elites and Pentagon don't seem to know any other way. It is up to us, the people, to organize and mobilize for a modern foreign policy and economy that takes the new global dynamics into account.

Meet The 1%: “Giants: The Global Power Elite”

August 26, 2018 Marc Eliot Stein, World Beyond War. , , ,
Peter Phillips, professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University and media researcher for Project Censored and Media Freedom Foundation, presented a summary of his groundbreaking new book “Giants: The Global Power Elite” last week at Fordham University’s campus in Manhattan. This was an information-packed session that explained the unique purpose of this new book: exposing to public view the private workings of the influential investment partnerships, global councils, think tanks, consortiums and other non-governmental organizations that...

Trump: The De-Globalizer?

July 28, 2018 Peter Koenig, Dissidentvoice.org , ,
Looks like Trump is running amok with his “trading policies”. Not only has he upset the European Union, which doesn’t deserve any better, frankly, for having been and still being submissive vassals against the will of by now 90% of Europeans; but he has also managed to get China into a fury. Well, for China it is really not that important, because China has plenty of other markets, including basically all of Asia and probably increasingly also Europe, as Europe increasingly feels the need for detaching from the US. What is striking, though, is that even at the outset of the G20 Summit now ongoing in Buenos Aires, Argentina,Trump’s Ministers have made it clear that unless Europe cancels all subsidies – referring primarily to agricultural subsidies – and eliminates the newly imposed retaliatory import duties, new trade deals are not going to be discussed.

NAFTA Should Work For Everyone – Not Just Investors

April 10, 2018 Stan Sorcher, Thestand.org , ,
(April 3, 2018) — In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all recognized that workers and communities have lost trust in the NAFTA approach to globalization. They all said we should manage globalization differently. Over the last few months, Canada, Mexico and the U.S. have had seven meetings to renegotiate NAFTA. To understand the renegotiations, we should know what was wrong with the original NAFTA, and what we want in a new one. I’m 100 percent in favor of trade. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone opposed to trade. We take pride when we export software, airplanes, apples, and wheat. That’s never been the issue. The central question is, “who gets the gains from globalization?” The purpose of an economy is to raise living standards. Trade, more than most public policies, creates winners and losers.

US Trade Deficits, Trump Trade Policies, And Capitalist Globalization

April 2, 2018 Marty Hart-Landsberg, Economic Front. , , ,
Understandably concerned about the consequences of the large and sustained US trade deficit, many workers have grown tired of waiting for so-called market forces to produce balance.  Thus, they cheer Trump administration promises to correct the imbalance through tariffs or reworked trade agreements that will supposedly end unfair foreign trade practices. Unfortunately, this view of trade encourages workers in the United States to see themselves standing with their employers and against workers in other countries who are said to be benefiting from the trade successes of their employers.

In The Ruins Of The Present

March 26, 2018 Vijay Prashad, Thetricontinental.org , ,
In the Ruins of the Present traces the challenges posed by globalization and what these challenges produce for our society. The first attempt to address the problems of globalization was neo-liberalism. It failed. Next came cruel populism, which expresses itself in narrow, hateful terms. It will also fail. The Left is weak – decomposed by globalization. The need of the hour is for the Left to recompose itself, to become a vital force for a fragile humanity.

Globalization’s Deadly Footprint

February 27, 2018 By Alex Jensen, Localfutures.org , ,
That pollution is bad for our health will come as a surprise to no one. That pollution kills at least 9 million people every year might. This is 16 percent of all deaths worldwide – 3 times more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than all wars and other forms of violence. Air pollution alone is responsible for 6.5 million of these 9 million deaths. Nearly 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. All this is according to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, a recent report by dozens of public health and medical experts from around the world. This important report is sounding the alarm about a too-often neglected and ignored ‘silent emergency’ – or as author Rob Nixon calls it, ‘slow violence.’

Corporate Globalization Is Threatening Indigenous Communities With Extinction

December 24, 2017 T. J. Coles, truthout.org , , ,
As we speak, some humans are already going extinct. Their extinction is often a consequence of the structural violence of corporate globalization. Communities are under threat, especially those which sit on land coveted by big business. Some live near rivers polluted by dumping. Others rely on biodiversity wiped out by intensive agriculture. Their misery stems from the so-called "soft power" of corporate globalization and is bolstered by the "hard power" of militarism, special forces and the rent-a-goon culture designed to enforce it.

Protesters Demand End To Corporate Courts, Transparency In NAFTA

October 12, 2017 Daniel Cooper Bermudez, www.tradeforpeopleandplanet.org , , ,
By Daniel Cooper Bermudez for Trade for People and Planet. Arlington, VA - Official negotiators were met by protesters demanding that the deal do away with the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a system of tribunals through which multi-national corporations have sued governments for millions of dollars for implementing stronger labor and environmental standards, and to implement transparent and participatory practices in the deal’s remaking. Activists stood in front of the Sheraton in Arlington, Virginia – where negotiations are taking place from October 11-15 – with a giant Trump puppet and signs that read “Democracy not Corporatocracy” and “Transparency: Release the Text!”

Xiamen Summit Doomed: Capitalist Deglobalisation Could Crack BRICS

September 3, 2017 Patrick Bond, www.borderless-hk.com , , ,
By Patrick Bond for Borderless HK. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa summit in Xiamen from September 3-5 is already inscribed with high tension thanks to Sino-Indian border conflicts. But regardless of a new peace deal, centrifugal forces within the fast-whirling world economy threaten to divide the BRICS. 1brics Beijing’s logo designers for this summit, perhaps unconsciously subversive, illustrated how the formerly overlapping, interlocking BRICS are now thin and flimsy, wedging themselves apart. Such a prospect was predictable earlier this year as a result of Donald Trump’s ascendance. Both Washington’s neo-conservative ‘Deep State‘ and the (fast-disappearing) paleo-conservatives were intent on ramping up conflict with China – though early on, BRICS splintering towards the US included not only proto-fascist India, for elites in Russia and Brazil also sought friendly relations.

Globalization’s Blowback

August 10, 2017 Alex Jensen, www.localfutures.org , ,
By Alex Jensen for Local Futures - A recent study of air pollution in the western United States made a startling finding: despite a 50 percent drop over the past 25 years in US emissions of smog-producing chemicals like nitrogen oxides (NOx), smog actually increased during that period in the rural US West – even in such ‘pristine’ environments as Yellowstone National Park. Most of this increase was traced to “the influx of pollution from Asian countries, including China, North and South Korea, Japan, India, and other South Asian countries.”[1] That’s because over the same period that NOx emissions declined in the US, they tripled in Asia as a whole.[2] In media reports of the study, China and India are described as the “worst offenders” of this fugitive “Asian pollution”.[3] Left only with these findings, a reasonable conclusion would be that the US has become more environmentally enlightened in recent decades, while Asia – particularly ‘developing’ Asia – is a veritable eco-reprobate, sacrificing not only its own but global airsheds to choking pollution. The new, anti-environmental EPA director, Scott Pruitt, recently expressed this view in explaining why the US should exit the Paris Climate Accord: “[China and India] are polluting far more than we are.”[4]

The End Of Globalisation

July 24, 2017 Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, www.dissidentvoice.org , , ,
By Stuart Jeanne Bramhall for Dissident Voice - In From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalisation, Finbarr Livesey challenges the common neoliberal claim that globalization is the be-all and end-all of global prosperity. Livesey’s premise, which he supports with an impressive array of data, is that globalization peaked shortly after 2008 and the world economy is in a period of deglobalization. World trade is slowly declining as a percentage of GDP, and many companies who moved factories to the third world are improving their bottom line by reshoring them to the US and Europe. Livesey contends that, to a large extent, last year’s vote for Britain to leave the EU and for a US president who promised to withdraw from the TPP and bring back American jobs, merely reflect an economic trend that began nearly a decade ago. The present deglobalization was triggered by the 2008 financial crash that sucked trillions of dollars out of the global economy. However, Livesey identifies a number of other factors that influence this trend – chief among them the volatility of oil prices and shipping costs (containers must be booked months in advance) and the growing cost of labor in China and neighboring countries.

It’s Not Only Necessary To Develop An Alternative To Globalization — It’s Entirely Possible

July 22, 2017 Walden Bello, www.fpif.org ,
By Walden Bello for Foreign Policy in Focus - Free trade and the freedom of capital to move across borders have been the cutting edge of globalization. They’ve also led to the succession of crises that have led to the widespread questioning of capitalism as a way of organizing economic life — and of its paramount ideological expression, neoliberalism. The protests against capitalism at the recent G20 meeting in Hamburg may seem superficially the same as those which marked similar meetings in the early 2000s. But there’s one big difference now: Global capitalism is in a period of long-term stagnation following the global financial crisis. The newer protests represent a far broader disenchantment with capitalism than the protests of the 2000s. Yet capitalism’s resilience amidst crisis must not be underestimated. For trade activists, in particular, who’ve been on the forefront of the struggle against neoliberalism and globalization over the last two decades, there are a number of key challenges posed by the conjuncture.

Newsletter: Power Dynamics Changing In World Order

July 9, 2017 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopulaResistance.org , , , , , , , ,
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. The G-20 summit highlighted a transition in geopolitical power that has been developing for years. The process has escalated in recent months since President Trump took office, but its roots go much deeper than Trump. The United States is losing power, a multi-polar world is taking shape and people power is on the rise. The G-20 bordered on being a G-19, with the US a loner on key issues of climate change, trade and migration. These are some of the biggest issues on the planet. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been saying lately "We as Europeans have to take our fate into our own hands." This is an indication they no longer see the US as the leader or even a reliable partner on some issues. In a summation of the G-20, Politico writes: "Hamburg will also go down as a further mile marker in Europe’s slow emancipation from the U.S."
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