Skip to content

Globalization

Globalization And Our Precarious Medical Supply Chains

The grave risks and dangers in the process of worldwide out-sourcing and so-called globalization of the past 30 years or so are becoming starkly clear as the ongoing health emergency across China threatens vital world supply chains from China to the rest of the world. While much attention is focused on the risks to smartphone components or auto manufacture via supplies of key parts from China or to the breakdown of oil deliveries in the last weeks...

How Working-Class Movements Are Moving Beyond The Confines Of Capitalism

Between the fall of 1999 and April of 2000, hundreds of thousands of factory workers, peasants, retirees, students, professionals, and everyday people took to the streets in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to fight the privatization of their water. A foreign-led consortium of private corporations had taken control of the city’s water supply, increasing water prices by as much as 300 percent. With the skills and experience of organized movements such as the Federation of Factory Workers, working people were able to defeat a multibillion-dollar corporation around a shared interest: the right to water. In the face of a well-organized global elite that has gutted the power of workplace organizing, Cochabamba shows us that organizing the working class around a common interest and moving beyond the confines of the workplace provides an opening to push for—and win—a future that centers people over profit.

2019: New Year, New Crisis

As we step into a new year, the world is facing a decisive turning point. The crisis of capitalism is reaching a new level – one that threatens to overthrow the entire existing world order that was painfully put together after the Second World War. Ten years after the financial collapse of 2008, the bourgeoisie is nowhere near solving the economic crisis.  All the sacrifices and pain of the last ten years have not solved the crisis, but only increased the suffering, impoverishment and desperation of the masses, while a tiny minority of parasites have acquired obscene levels of wealth. 

US Orders World Trade Organization To Shape Up Or Else

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

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”

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?

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.