Archive for the 'Globalization' Category

Global Capital Looking to ‘Global Green New Deal’ for Climate and Other Bailouts

Editors Note: The key phrase below is ‘potential backers of low-carbon projects.’ From the left, there is no reason these can’t be public ownership projects or worker-owned coops—but it will take a fight.

Davos Call for $14 Trillion 'Greening' of Global Economy

Political and business leaders warned of need to ensure sustainable growth

By Tom Bawden
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Independent - UK

Jan 22 2013 - An unprecedented $14trn (£8.8trn) greening of the global economy is the only way to ensure long-term sustainable growth, according to a stark warning delivered to political and business leaders as they descended on the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday.

Only a sustained and dramatic shift to infrastructure and industrial practices using low-carbon technology can save the world and its economy from devastating global warming, according to a Davos-commissioned alliance led by the former Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, in the most dramatic call so far to fight climate change on business grounds.

This includes everything from power generation, transport, and buildings to industry, forestry, water and agriculture, according to the Green Growth Action Alliance, created at last year's Davos meeting in Mexico.

The extra spending amounts to roughly $700bn a year until 2030 and would provide a much-needed economic stimulus as well as reduce the costs associated with global warming further down the line, said Mr Calderon, who leads the alliance.

It is better to try to pre-empt events like Hurricane Sandy, which cost $50bn, by keeping a lid on global warming, concluded the report, researched by the Accenture consultancy.

Mr Calderon, whose six-year term as Mexican President ended in November, said: "It is clear that we are facing a climate crisis with potentially devastating impacts on the global economy.

"Greening global economic growth is the only way to satisfy the needs of today's population and up to 9 billion people by 2050, driving development and wellbeing while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing natural resource productivity."

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Krugman, Marx and the ‘Rise of the Robots’

by @ Sunday, December 9th, 2012. Filed under Globalization, Marxism, Technology, Unemployment

'Marxist Echoes' Indeed...It's Called the Crisis from the Growing Organic Composition of Capital over Labor--and the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall  -Ed

 

By Paul Krugman
SolidarityEconomy.net via NYTimes

Dec. 8, 2012 - Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield write about the growing evidence for "reshoring" of manufacturing to the United States. They cite several reasons: rising wages in Asia; lower energy costs here; higher transportation costs. In a followup piece, however, Rampell cites another factor: robots.

    The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.

    As more robots are built, largely by other robots, "assembly can be done here as well as anywhere else," said Rob Enderle, an analyst based in San Jose, Calif., who has been following the computer electronics industry for a quarter-century. "That will replace most of the workers, though you will need a few people to manage the robots."

Robots mean that labor costs don't matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that's another issue). On the other hand, it's not good news for workers!

This is an old concern in economics; it's "capital-biased technological change", which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing about globalization and inequality, capital bias didn't look like a big issue; the major changes in income distribution had been among workers (when you include hedge fund managers and CEOs among the workers), rather than between labor and capital. So the academic literature focused almost exclusively on "skill bias", supposedly explaining the rising college premium.

But the college premium hasn't risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from labor:

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won't do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an "opportunity society", or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won't do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn't seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism -- which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.

But I think we'd better start paying attention to those implications.



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Note to Obama: Apple Products—and Any Others for that Matter–Will Be Built in the U.S. when U.S. Workers Own and Run the Factories that Build Them

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER
SolidarityEconomy.net via New York Times

Jan. 21, 2012 - When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

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China’s Rise & The New Multipolar World

by @ Friday, January 7th, 2011. Filed under China, Economy, Globalization

Think Again: American Decline

This time it's for real.

BY GIDEON RACHMAN

ForeignPolicy.com

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011

"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."

This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.

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Taunton, Mass: Worker and Local Government Alliance vs Low-Road Capital

by @ Thursday, December 16th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Globalization, Organizing

UE and Taunton, Mass. Set Own Course

in Fight Against Job Outsourcing

By Roger Bybee
SolidarityEconomy.net via ZNet

Dec. 14, 2010 - The American economy increasingly functions like a high-tech machine that efficiently plunders money from the vast majority of citizens and shoots a jetstream of the cash upward into the bank accounts of the richest 1%. At the same instant, it sends family-supporting jobs zooming off to Mexico, China, India and other low-wage sites.

The Republican landslide, enabled by a weak job-creation strategy coming from the White House, might lead you to think that a majority buys into the notion of letting the economic machine run on, continuing to chew up lives and communities.

However, a growing number of restless and desperate Americans in places like Taunton, Mass., a factory town of 50,000 hard-hit by unemployment, are showing that they understand how disastrously the machine works for them.

They increasingly realize that they must fight to save every endangered job and do battle to preserve decent pay, benefits and union representation.

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China’s Peaceful Rise: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

by @ Sunday, September 5th, 2010. Filed under China, Globalization, Socialism

Poster: 1989, Only Socialism Can Save and Develop China

 

Information and Analysis:

Towards a world for people not profit

How China Rises

by Noah Tucker

Nov 4th 2007

SolidarityEconomy.net via 21st Century Socialism

What lessons can be drawn from China's spectacular and sustained economic growth?

As Hu Jintau remarked at the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the period since the previous Congress five years ago has been extraordinary. China's economic achievements have been arousing not only astonishment and admiration but also some anxiety.
In the past twelve months alone, The People's Republic of China (PRC) has overtaken Canada as the biggest source of imports to the USA, and overtaken the USA as the biggest source of imports to the European Union. Concern about the low level of investment in Africa has been displaced by concern about the effects of the high level of Chinese investment in Africa; there is now even anxiety about the effects of investment by Chinese state-owned firms into the Western economies.

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A Specter Haunting Globalized Austerity: Marxism on the Rise

by @ Friday, July 2nd, 2010. Filed under Globalization, Marxism

Marxism 2010: Fixing a Broken System

  • alex

By Alex Callinicos

The Guardian, UK, July 1, 2010

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek: one of the speakers at the Marxism 2010 festival. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

 

The death of Ken Coates last weekend silenced yet another strong and distinguished voice on the radical left. The past year or so has taken from us some of the most outstanding Marxist intellectuals of the 1968 generation – Giovanni Arrighi, Jerry Cohen, Peter Gowan, and, particularly painful for me, Chris Harman and Daniel Bensaïd. In the supposedly ideology-free world of the Con-Lib coalition, it would be tempting to conclude that these individual disappearances are representative of a much broader decline of Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the constitutionally myopic financial markets are beginning to wake up to the fact that capitalism is very badly broken. The Keynesian economist Paul Krugman wrote a few days ago: "We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression," following those of the late 19th century and of the 1930s. Marx described his own intellectual project as the critique of political economy: Marxism therefore lives or dies by its ability to make sense of the dynamics of capitalism and to offer a way out of it.

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Shadow Elite: How Global Power Brokers Undermine Democracy

by @ Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010. Filed under Economy, Globalization

Review: Shadow Elite

by Janine Wedel

The New 'Flexian'

Transnational Elites

 

By Ariana Huffington

Huffington Post

My first HuffPost Book Club selection of 2010 is Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. It's a gripping, disquieting book that exposes and explains why it's been so hard to bring about any real change in our country -- why Washington no longer seems capable of addressing the problems our nation faces. Fingers have been pointed at everything from gerrymandering to partisan polarization to the misuse of the filibuster. But, according to Wedel, the real problem is much deeper -- and more disturbing -- than any of these.

As she writes in Shadow Elite, a new "transnational" class of elites has taken over our country: "The mover and shaker who serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services. It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible."

Wedel dubs this new class of influencers "flexians," and the closed system they've created for themselves the "flex net." She attributes their power, among other factors, to the "embrace of 'truthiness,' which allows people to play with how they present themselves to the world, regardless of fact or track record."

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A Carbon Rush at the World Bank

by @ Friday, May 4th, 2007. Filed under Environment, Globalization
_41572158_carbon_funds_203x199.gifby Daphne Wysham As the Kyoto Protocol comes into force this month, a carbon rush is gaining steam in the financial industry. Investors predict that carbon could become one of the largest markets in the world, with a trading volume of $60 billion to $250 billion by 2008. Supporters assert emissions trading allows the invisible hand of the market to do what the “command and control” approach to regulation of greenhouse gas emissions can not; that is, meet and even exceed expectations of emissions reductions. Critics charge that carbon trading is a smokescreen: At best, it will represent a (more...)

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Global Notes #26

by @ Tuesday, May 1st, 2007. Filed under Economy, Globalization, The Right
An embattled Paul Wolfowitz, symbol of slipping neo-con hegemony?by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net .US hegemony rapidly disappearing US economic and political hegemony has degraded further in the rapidly globalizing world. At the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz has lost control through his own corrupt crony capitalism. But his problems stem as much from Iraq as his current missteps. Globalists who fill the bureaucracy at the World Bank never were comfortable with the US unilateralist coming to their home and Wolfowitz opened the door for their attacks. That the US can no longer control the internal politics at the World Bank is a good indicator of how far its political influence has fallen. (more...)

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Global Notes #25

by @ Monday, April 23rd, 2007. Filed under Globalization
Socialist Segolene Royal and conservative Nicolas Sarkozy go head-to-head in French electionsby Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net . Income up for Venezuelan poor A marketing research group, Datos, reports that the real income of the poorest Venezuelans, 58 percent of the country, have risen 130 percent under President Hugo Chavez. Although inflation is running at 19.3 percent that is lower than the 52 percent average in the early 1990s before Chavez took office. . What they say Neoliberal economist Adam Posen recently attacked Germany’s Mittelstand economic sector. These are the middle and small size business’ that employ 70 percent of the German people. Writing for the Peterson Institute for International (more...)

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Why is the US in Iraq?

by @ Tuesday, April 17th, 2007. Filed under Global Justice, Globalization
lcc_global_2048.jpgby Cliff DuRand, Center for Global Justice It is now generally recognized that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is an unmitigated disaster –some say the biggest foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, meaning it even surpasses the U.S. war on Vietnam. At the same time it has helped to lay bare the reality of U.S. imperialism. But lest we think of that as an aberration peculiar to the Neo-cons running the Bush presidency, I want to argue that there are basic continuities between the Non-con view of the role of the U.S. in the world and the Liberal view that has characterized the foreign policy establishment since at least WWII and certainly for the last quarter century. Let me begin by characterizing the Neo-con and Liberal views in the (more...)

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Global Notes #24

by @ Monday, April 16th, 2007. Filed under Globalization
Part of the Euro-Brazilian merger InBev's brand portfolioby Jerry Harris .Viet-Nam’s stock markets grows Viet-Nam’s six year old stock market is undergoing massive growth. Daily trading has gone from half-a-million in 2005 to $50 million a day in December 2006. Listed companies have risen from 30 to 107 and larger state enterprises, including commercial banks, are expected to be listed this year. Market capitalization has reached $14B. However Viet-Nam restricts daily share price movement for any stock to just five percent to protect the market from wild fluctuations and manipulation. .India’s Muslims lack economic and social equality India’s Muslim population faces similar social conditions as minorities in the US. They are unable to rent or buy property in many areas and their children are rejected from the better public schools. Literacy rates average 59 percent for Muslims compared to the national average of 65 percent. Average years in school for Muslim boys run only three years compared to the national average of four, and for Muslim girls the average is (more...)

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Global Notes #23

by @ Monday, April 9th, 2007. Filed under Globalization
China's National People's Congressby Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net . IMF admits workers income is shrinking The IMF has stated globalization is driving down the share of national income going to workers. The world labor force increased 400% over the past 20 years with China, India and eastern Europe integrating into the global economy. This has rapidly increased the number of educated workers which the IMF says has the biggest impact in the industrial countries, negatively effecting skilled workers. The IMF contends technology has a bigger impact on the unskilled and is responsible for the growing lack of income among workers in this sector. The IMF’s blame on technology sidesteps the question of who controls technology. Blaming “technology,” rather than how the capitalist class organizes its use, makes lower wages and more unemployment seem like a force of nature or the market. The IMF still defends globalization as increasing the overall pie, stating workers are doing better, they just have less of more. (more...)

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The Democratic Dialectic: The State, Markets and Civil Society

p200.jpgby Jerry Harris

SolidarityEconomy.net


Globalization opens the door on many possible futures. The fundamental changes taking place creates a host of contradictions played out at every level of society, all interlinked and simultaneously affecting one another. The integrative force of global production, finance and technology has qualitatively changed social relations along with culture, politics and the way we see the world and ourselves. Globalization, as a mode of accumulation and wealth has achieved a hegemonic position but its social structure and nationally defined characteristics continue to be formed. This is particularly true of its political expressions and the role of civil society.

Therefore far from a determined and certain future multiple alternatives exist, all dependent on human agency and struggle. On one extreme is the possible collapse of globalization into a world defined by reactionary nationalism, fundamentalist theologies and environmental collapse. Another future may be a long period of relative stability and capitalist transnational hegemony, punctuated by periodic crisis’ that are resolved by the institutional structures that come to characterize the globalist era. The habits, ideas and relations formed during the rise of nation states and (more...)

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