Globalization: It's what's for dinner...

Globalization is a ticking time bomb. We will eventually pay the price for its "invisible" ill effects, i.e. the aspects most Americans can choose not to see like horrible labor and environmental abuse on the supply end, supply line pollution, etc. But consequences are currently revealing themselves in a big way as the FDA finally emerges from its slumber and alerts the public that the melamine stuff that killed all those pets has entered the human food chain.

The rest is here.

I personally do not advocate blind protectivism, but greed and incompetence are killing people and animals at an alarming rate when it comes to the rush to globalize. There has got to be a more balanced place available to us.

Since those who suffer most from globalization live below the poverty line, I don't expect it to really resonate with the middle and upper classes. However, other than globalization, my other main beef is with the FDA. I have to struggle with my own kids' Pavlov-dogian desires for certain kinds of food, the ingredients of which I know the FDA couldn't give two $#!&s about. Therefore, globalization + lazy/corrupt/incompetent federal regulatory agencies = the potential for a major crisis.

Americans (and I say this as one of them) take for granted the idea that we are entitled to have what we want when we want it in overabundant quantities. This is not how the rest of the world lives. However, to keep the corporations in ridiculous profit margins, they will do whatever they have to do not only to instill in us that sense of entitlement, but to then GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT. Most of the time, fulfilling our desires comes at the expense of other parts of the world. And since we waste a huge portion of what we consume, that crosses the line from tragic to downright evil.

I don't want to live that way. It's unnatural. Globalization is part of a much larger problem, but to understand the complex whole, we have to look at each aspect of it.

Edited to add:

You also have to weigh in the amount of fuel it takes to get goods from all over the world delivered here. The pollution from that fuel alone, coupled with the fact that the US subsidizes these fuel costs with foreign debt, makes you wonder why we have to do it this way. (or at least it makes me wonder that).

It's not impossible to find a scrupulous, sensible and logical path to semi-free trade, but as you say corporations don't have a conscience. And the government is not acting on the best interest of the public. Sure, certain populations have benefited, but other populations have suffered extreme harship and tragedy as a result of our systems. And the world as a whole is suffering -- if you look at the clearcutting and oil development in south and central america alone -- corporations are stealing huge chunks of the world's lungs. That's not good for anybody. It's definitely not good for the indigenous people.

What I meant by semi-free trade is selective free trade. And I disagree with your above point. That's like saying that we shouldn't hold it against [name a country] because it has underage sex junkets. The US is supposed to be a leader in the world, not a panderer. And ps. I don't blame the countries - I blame the corporations. It's the corporation's responsibility to see that its business is done lawfully and scrupulously.

Please cite your sources here. Besides: who said "growth" is so great? When the earth's population exceeds the capacity of resources to meet demand, that's a crisis.

The polluters in the Amazon are American corporations, not homegrown operators. If we soil and pollute a country, all of the computer programmer degrees and customer service rep jobs in the world can't put that ecosystem back. And again, the US is supposed to be a leader. If American corporations are rewarding the factories in, say, China that pay the least to their employees rather than the one that meets labor and environmental standards, how can you justify that? It's such bullshit. Profit margins for these corporations are insane, and they don't help the US economy. The profits go into Caymans accounts of the 5% richest Americans. And it certainly doesn't help the quality of life in the host country.

Who will sniff out and neutralize the parasites though? Who will do that? And again, I'm not against all globalization, but you pair a globalized economy with a greed-driven contingent of CEOs, a corporation-friendly/anti-environment/anti-labor/incompetent goverment that appoints former industry lobbyists to regulatory agency chairs, and you're looking at a disaster that helps no one but those named above.

I'm not saying I have all the answers, but turning a blind eye to horrible practices only contributes to the problem. And if child labor and slave labor conditions are facilitated by increasing profit margins for corporations like the Waltons, who sell 3.99 tops at Walmart, then if we shop at Walmart, we, as consumers, are directly responsible for misery elsewhere in the world. That is a fact. If we, as consumers, stop going to Walmart (I personally have not ever shopped there, nor will I), and pressure the company to enforce safe and legal labor and environmental practices, everyone wins (except the Waltons, who may be hedged slightly downward from the top 5 richest in the nations list).

I'm trying to understand why the choices are solely between unresticted free trade or unilateral sanctions. What I'm writing about in these posts is not the idea that the US should cut itself off from the world but to take a sensible approach to globalization that weighs the benefits against the drawbacks, and also to hold corporations responsible for their actions overseas, regardless of local laws.

That's horrible, but a number of other questions have to go along with that. Like, what other interests does the US have in Nepal? What are the nationalities of the people these 5-7000 children are prostituting themselves to? I don't know the answers but it's worth looking into.

Economic growth facilitates and spurs population growth. Economic growth, plus technology plus globalization accelerates population growth. Since the industrial revolution the world's population has more or less tripled.

Again, you're talking about absolutes. Encouraging and facilitating abusive practices are not constructive in the long term. There have to be other solutions.

But the system now doesn't just allow people to take advantage of it, it encourages and rewards abuse. And our elected representatives are mostly asleep at the wheel or actively taking part in the plundering.
Is your thinking that globalization is good inasmuch as it "helps" indigenous populations? Are there other reasons that you are so in favor of it?

Here's one example:


Jungle Law
In 1972, crude oil began to flow from Texaco's wells in the area around Lago Agrio ("sour lake"), in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Born that same year, Pablo Fajardo is now the lead attorney in an epic lawsuit—among the largest environmental suits in history—against Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001. Reporting on an emotional battle in a makeshift jungle courtroom, the author investigates how many hundreds of square miles of surrounding rain forest became a toxic-waste dump.
by William Langewiesche May 2007

In a forsaken little town in the Ecuadorean Amazon, an overgrown oil camp called Lago Agrio, the giant Chevron Corporation has been maneuvered into a makeshift courtroom and is being sued to answer for conditions in 1,700 square miles of rain forest said by environmentalists to be one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites. The pollution consists of huge quantities of crude oil and associated wastes, mixed in with the toxic compounds used for drilling operations—a noxious soup that for decades was dumped into leaky pits, or directly into the Amazonian watershed. The company that did much of this work was Texaco—an outfit with a swashbuckling reputation worldwide. It signed a contract with Ecuador in 1964, began full-scale production in 1972, and pulled out 20 years later. In 2001, Texaco was swallowed whole by Chevron, which by integrating its operations nearly doubled in size. The lawsuit against it in Lago Agrio was filed in 2003, though the legal antecedents go back much further. Having dragged on for four years, the suit may continue for half again as long. Chevron is represented by high-priced firms of experienced lawyers in Quito and Washington, D.C., whose collective fees run to millions of dollars annually. Its antagonists are 30,000 Amazonian settlers and indigenous people, who call themselves Los Afectados—the Affected Ones. These plaintiffs are represented by a low-budget but serious team of North American and Ecuadorean attorneys, who are backed by a Philadelphia law firm that is known for class-action securities litigation and has gambled that this case, though risky, can actually be won.

Chevron objects vociferously, and presents itself as the victim here. Its attorneys have repeatedly claimed that the company is being extorted for "two juicy checks," one to be divided among the plaintiffs and the other to enrich their North American lawyers. The North American lawyers are indeed working on a contingency basis, but unapologetically so, and for a percentage significantly lower than the norm in high-risk cases; they would like to be well compensated for their efforts, but as much, they say, to encourage other lawyers to bring similar suits elsewhere in the world as to pad their personal bank accounts. The most active among them is a New York–based Harvard Law School graduate named Steven Donziger, who has invested 14 years in the case and would certainly be more secure had he pursued a conventional career involving the preservation of wealth. He counterclaims that Chevron's lawyers are the real mercenaries here. It is a philosophical quarrel that will never be resolved.

As for the plaintiffs themselves, under Ecuadorean law they are not suing individually, and personally may never see a dime. They have sued to seek compensation for past damages and to force Chevron to clean up the residual mess that continues, they believe, to taint the soil and water today. It is unclear how a cleanup would proceed and to what extent it could succeed, but over decades the cost might run to $6 billion or more—making this potentially the largest environmental lawsuit ever to be fought. And fight is the word. The case has become emotional for both sides, with few signs of willingness to compromise. Worldwide the oil industry is watching. Lago Agrio is a forsaken little town where something rather large is going down.


This is not, however, a U.S.-style legal drama. The Lago Agrio court follows Ecuadorean procedures, which minimize oral arguments and rely heavily on submitted documents to get at the truth. So far the proceedings have generated close to 200,000 pages. There is no jury to sway. There is a single presiding judge, drawn from a pool of three on a rotating basis for a two-year term of unusual pressure. Currently the judge is a rotund middle-aged man, a reader of Dostoyevsky and a convert to Islam. He must be the only Muslim in town. He told me it is not easy to be a judge there. Five years ago he was ambushed and machine-gunned while driving his car. His companion was killed, but he himself escaped. The attackers were hired killers, of whom Lago Agrio has an ample supply. Colombia's largest cocaine-production area lies just over the border a few miles to the north, and is peopled not only by narco-traffickers but also by leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups. The police in Lago Agrio make a show sometimes of directing traffic. They did not investigate the attack, the judge believes, because they feared retribution. The judge accepted this without complaint, as if he had learned to believe in fate. Lago Agrio means "sour lake." He told me that the only safe choice there is to run away. Chevron would probably agree. It denies that the judge is fair, denies that the plaintiffs have legitimate complaints, denies that their soil and water samples are meaningful, denies that the methods the company used to extract oil in the past were substandard, denies that it contaminated the forest, denies that the forest is contaminated, denies that there is a link between the drinking water and high rates of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, and skin disease, denies that unusual health problems have been demonstrated—and, for added measure, denies that it bears responsibility for any environmental damage that might after all be found to exist. If Chevron can convince the court of the validity of even a few of those points, it will win the case and leave town.

Given the resources that Chevron has brought to bear, it seemed for a while that this indeed would happen—and for various reasons it may yet. But over the past two years there has been a change that, metaphorically, looks something like an inversion of Tiananmen Square, in which a lone man stands resolutely in front of a maneuvering tank, not to hold it off but to keep it from escaping. In Lago Agrio that lone man is a mestizo named Pablo Fajardo, aged 34, who was born into extreme poverty and toiled for years as a manual laborer in the forest and oil fields, yet managed by force of intellect to complete his secondary education in night school, and through a correspondence course to earn a degree in law. He became a lawyer only three years ago, in 2004, yet has assumed the lead in the suit against Chevron in this, his very first trial. Chevron is represented by lawyers from Ecuador's ruling class, an oligarchy whose women fondly sing "Y Viva España" at Quito garden parties. They may have assumed that they could run Fajardo over. No one makes that assumption now.

In Lago Agrio the men wear hats against the equatorial sky. The women carry umbrellas for the shade they provide. Even the Indians complain about the heat. On a sweltering morning, I went to Fajardo's threadbare quarters in a small house that serves primarily as a file room and office, but that has a space for sleeping, and a crude kitchen and bathroom, usually without running water. Fajardo was sitting at his desk studying a document in preparation for a scheduled argument before the judge. He wore an open-necked short-sleeved shirt, slacks, and street shoes. He was the only person in Lago Agrio who was not sweating. In this story, where so much is disputed, it is an observable fact that Fajardo never sweats, and furthermore that when he moves through the jungle in his tidy-lawyer clothes he does not get dirty or wet. I sat across the desk from him and asked if at first he had been intimidated by the case.

the rest is here at VanityFair.com

This is a handy sound bite for your argument but as I looked into it the truth is more complex than that. Child prostitution and abduction is massive in Nepal and India because poverty is so crushing there. Here's one account of the child labor situation, which is as bad as prostitution, if you ask me:

The carpet industry is very complex, but is generally controlled by the export companies. These exporters arrange, either directly or through contractors, for a carpet to be produced on a particular loom. The looms are normally owned by small entrepreneurs and range from single looms in private houses to small factories with 30 or more looms. The exporter supplies the wool and design and after a price and quality is agreed, the loom owner is responsible for producing the carpet to specification. Agents for the loom masters and owners find their workforce from a variety of sources.

The children may be their own children and other children from within the village. These remain in their own family.

The child labor may also be obtained from other areas (normally poorer regions) by purchasing or coercing children from Bihar in north-east India to Uttar Pradesh; or from small villages in Nepal to Kathmandu; or from outlying villages to small towns in Pakistan; and even children trafficked from other countries, such as children imported from west Nepal to Uttar Pradesh. Removed from their families, these are, without doubt, the worst sufferers.

All the children work long hours for very little pay. Indeed, in many cases, particularly when they live at the looms, their wages are reduced to pay for food and lodging, or they may receive no pay whatsoever, for example, where the loom owner applies their wages to cover the advances given to their parents and the agents who brought them in the first place. This is a form of debt bondage (which is defined as a slavery-like institution by Article 1(a) of Article 7(a) of the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery 1956) and is quite common in the industry throughout South Asia.

A great many of them are children who have been kidnapped by slavers from their parents and sold to the loom master.

They are locked behind bars and beaten. They are poorly fed and receive no wages.

In the past ten years, there has been a gathering movement in India, Pakistan and Nepal to end the exploitation of so many children in the industry. This activity has been supported by the Anti-Slavery Society. As a result, the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery and the International Labor Organization have called on the Union Government (ie, the federal government) in India and the federal government in Pakistan to enforce their own laws and to stop the use of child labor.

The material in this report is based on a Mission to South Asia by the Society's Secretary-General.

from here

Also, Rugmark is a nonprofit that is attempting to work with carpet suppliers to end unfair child labor in the carpet industry. This is the kind of organization that the corporations in the US should be forced to bankroll.

So, in your eyes, globalization is both inevitable and natural? And that's why you're in favor of it? I still don't understand your point of view.

You also have to consider the shipping costs in terms of fuel (in the hundreds of millions) and the pollution generated by that. Also, while businesses (whether state-owned or privately owned) benefit the most from industrialization, the land on which everyone else lives is often destroyed. Minsky, i/r/t your Petroecuador reference above, yeah there is an indigenous oil company in Ecuador, but Exxon built the pipeline and ran it in its initial years, with a small percentage take of profits going to Ecuador. It was then handed over to Ecuadorian companies after the pollution lawsuit was filed. Where industrialization goes, corruption follows and while business and government leaders take the bait (not unlike smallpox-infected blankets), it's the people who live there that pay the price.

The toothpaste is out of the tube now, but without a sense of awareness of the issues at stake, and a serious look at ways to fix them rather than throwing up our hands, is the only thing that is going to help us fix the horrors we have engendered in the world.

The usual suspects:
Consumers
Advertisers
CEOs
Lobbyists
Government
Foreign governments

Frugality is a virtue, but while regular consumers of every stripe are willing to pay huge markups for goods the advertisers have convinced them are must-haves, they flock to places like Walmart because of the "low prices" without any emotional recognition or even awareness of the conditions through which those goods come to market.

Also, we in the USA don't pay full price for almost anything, because our oil consumption is subsidized by foreign debt. Therefore, the cost not only to produce something but to ship it from China or wherever would price it out of the market, but consumers in the US don't pay those costs. Our children and grandchildren will end up paying it so today's consumers can get what they want when they want it.

And even if you're willing to pay more for sweatshop/child labor-free goods, they're increasingly hard to find. Labels also don't always tell the story either -- something can be "made in the USA," but that translates into a sweatshop on the Marianas. It's not in the interest of the corporations for you to know where what you buy comes from. Therefore it's up to the consumer to find out where, and most people are conditioned to think about building a wall around Mexico or who will get voted off American idol rather than anything more complex.

Then you have the corporate system, which rewards CEOs with ridiculous bonuses for cutting American workers and shifting production overseas at the lowest costs possible, regardless of labor or environmental standards, but the longterm effects of that are a cheapening not only of products but of the value of life, the duration of goods, the quality and security of community.

The lobbyists work for the corporations and industries to control the politicians, who are all too happy to comply as long as they don't get caught. And that is the open secret of Washington -- pull out all the stops for corporations at the expense of the people that elected you to serve them.

The media is owned by six mega corporations, so don't expect any scrutiny or real analysis to emanate from there.

And finally you have the politicians, who work in a system that will reward them later with riches beyond anything they could ever earn in service with consultancies and executive positions with the corporations that controlled them while in office, and George W. Bush is their crown prince.

And as the CIA has proven many times over, every country has a politician, warlord or business magnate that will sell out his own land and people to make a buck.

Everyone bears some responsibility, but the cycle has to break somewhere, and awareness and debate - even among people who have memorized the talking points from Hannity -- has to be a step in the right direction.