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Edited on Thu Nov-10-05 11:07 PM by davekriss
I don't know exactly where it stands as of 2005, but recent numbers show that the U.S. amounts to 6% of the world's population yet controls about 35% of it's wealth. Further, in the U.S., a thin sliver (the top 1%) own more than the bottom 80% combined. So, yes, I am -- and many here -- are in favor of leveling the benefits people everywhere gain from our social arrangements. Me, I say eat the rich!
(I add on edit that the preservation of this imbalance is what's behind American foriegn policy since WWII; preservation of advantage is what drives past and present policies in East Timor and Indonesia; Chile and Greece; El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua; Panama and Haiti; Iraq and Iraq and Iraq ... blood pours so the worldwide owning class retains advantage, advances still further, and feels secure.)
But the poll setup here gives a set of false choices. I mean, hypnotoad might as well have added a choice saying "what if George W Bush is all about finding a cure for cancer?" or "what if Saddam Hussein was really about advancing love for kittens, would we support him then?".
Globalization is NOT about creating more equitable outcomes over a growing prosperity pie.
What it is about is creating cover for a thin sliver of the planet to magnify and gain from their exploitative advantage over the rest of the planet.
Think about it. Globalism would state that free and unfettered flow of capital across national boundaries is a greater good. We should, it posits (to oversimplify), build factories in nations with the lowest production costs, period. But to who's benefit? If, for example, I can build a factory in country x where the right wing dictator ensures me there will be no onerous penalties for polluting the local waters and air, where labor will be content to work at 1% of wages required in my country, and said dictator tells me he will be sure to squash any pesky populist aspirations (by applying the skills he learned at SOA in Ft. Benning, Georgia, no doubt), then it is my fiduciary responsibility (ahem) to sharpen my pencils, calculate the additional costs of managing distant operations and shipping product over wide distances and, if the numbers work, then close my factories in Detroit and Knoxville and Cleveland and build them in the distant Peoples Republic of Sadistic Greed.
But wait a moment. Where is the policies that state labor can freely follow capital, go where the jobs are? No, labor is stuck in so many livestock pens ready for exploitation by the owners of capital. The latter can and indeed do pit one nation's labor pool against another, force them to compete on price, and by so competing it becomes a race to the bottom -- the least if any benefits, the lowest wages, the worst working conditions.
The thin global sliver (the owners of capital and the sliver of managers and magistrates that do their bidding) benefit by greatly reducing inputs into the cost of production (thereby increasing profit), but the many lose. It's taking standard of living from Joe Sixpack and giving it to capital and management, though leaving some crumbs (sometimes substantial) to the desperate in various exploited nations.
(Yes, the pie grows, economic production becomes more "efficient", but it is setting us up, all, for a horrendous crisis in effective demand -- aka, another Great Depression. It's just around the bend, there, up the road...)
So: I am all for advancing global change that does raise most boats even if the top tiers of our societies have to be a little less prosperous, but that is NOT what globalism is designed to do.
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