Friday, June 6, 2003
From Free-Traders to Protectionists
OECD nations channel $362 billion a year in subsidies to their own farmers while (a) restricting agricultural imports from developing countries, and (b) insisting that debtor nations repay their foreign loans in foreign currency, which they can earn only by exporting. According to a World Bank...
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Monday, June 2, 2003
From Public Health to Private Wealth
The financial benefits of globalized production practices are harvested predominantly by a financially sophisticated few while costs are habitually imposed on the public. For instance, there’s 75,000-plus manmade chemicals in use worldwide; all are heading somewhere. Where? More than 500 measurable...
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Sunday, June 1, 2003
From Developing Nations to Developed Nations
The widening wealth and income gap between poor and rich nations is matched by a steady redistribution of the world’s natural capital from poor to rich nations. In all three ecosystems suffering the worst declines (forests, freshwater and marine), the most severe damage has occurred in the southern...
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Friday, May 16, 2003
From Democratic Effectiveness to Finance-Measured Efficiency
The neo-liberal emphasis on finance-calibrated efficiency makes the modern near-monopoly and the megastore appear an appealing phenomenon, despite their impact on the distribution of wealth and income, on communities and on democracy. Wal-Mart alone, with its 4,251 outlets worldwide and $219 billion...
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
From Consumers to Oligopolists and Monopolists
Prior to the dot-com collapse, Wired magazine projected Microsoft’s Bill Gates would become a trillionaire by March 2005 and, by March 2020, a quadrillionaire (a million billionaire). With the Bush II Administration reneging on the Justice Department’s pledge to bust-up this acknowledged monopoly,...
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Tuesday, May 13, 2003
From Families to Financial Markets
What’s the impact of neo-liberal globalization in OECD countries? The work-year for the typical American has expanded 184 hours since 1970. That’s an additional 4-1/2 weeks on the job for roughly the same pay. Household working hours in the US reached 3,149 in 1998, roughly 60 hours a week for the...
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Monday, May 12, 2003
From Poor Nations to Rich
Today’s version of globalization assumes that unrestricted economic flows will benefit the 80 percent of humanity living in developing countries as well as those 20 percent living in developed countries. Yet since 1985, economic decline or stagnation has affected 100 countries, reducing the incomes...
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Sunday, May 11, 2003
From the Future to the Present
Unsustainable production methods are now standard practice worldwide, due largely to globalization’s embrace of a financial model that insists on maximizing net present value (that’s largely what stock values represent). That stance routinely and richly rewards those who internalize gains and...
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Friday, May 9, 2003
Democracies to Plutocracies
Today’s capital markets-led “emerging markets” development model is poised to replicate US wealth patterns worldwide. For instance, 61.7 percent of Indonesia’s stock market value is held by that nation’s 15 richest families. The comparable figure for the Philippines is 55.1 percent and 53.3 percent...
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Uh-Oh
In a break from a pattern I've barely begun, here's a recent article suggesting that the USA is in danger of defaulting on it's national debt. And since that debt is a whopping $6.5 trillion, that's bad news for all of us.
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