globalization

[sanne]

ok, can anyone explain it to me (in easy words please!!!!!!!) cause i never know what it´s exactly. and perhaps the reasons why it´s not good.

[Citizen X]

Globalization is really an inaccurate term, but as used it's shorthand for "free trade."

We've lived in a "global" world for a very long time. Imports and exports are nothing new. However, with "globalization" we have a new set of rules. Free trade is simply trade without trade barriers, like tarrifs, which are all called "protectionist" by most Western economists today, and it's currently a term that is said with scorn, although no country, not one, ever grew itself out of poverty using the free trade model, though several have with protectionist trade policies (South Korea being the nation generally talked about in this regard since it happened after Western industrialization, but that's something we don't really need to get into here).

The Left doesn't like free trade for a couple of reasons. First of all, the say it creates a "race to the bottom." The theory (which is playing out now) is that if Western workers (Americans) have to compete with Third World workers, that won't raise the pay in the Third World but lower it in the US, leading to the "Third Worldization" of America.

Second, and this has more to do with "globalization" than just free trade, there's the matter of the WTO, which grew out of GATT. The WTO can say to a nation that its laws are "unfair" to a corporation in another country and either force a change in the law or make the country pay the corporation for "lost profits," that is, money the corporation claims it would have earned if the trade barrier hadn't been in place. Europe, which doesn't want to eat hormone-laden US meat or GMOs, is running afoul of the WTO. This creates a situation in which an anonymous, three judge panel at the WTO can tell a nation that the will of its citizens means nothing (it's bedtime for democracy) and it must accept the products made by a corporation whether it wants to or not, like GMOs.

That's it in a nutshell, I think. It's a big topic and there's a lot of information about it, and I left out anything about the World Bank and the IMF. Start reading stuff online and you'll soon have a very good idea of what it's all about.

Good luck.

[h&s]

'Free' Trade promotes the capitalist view that people are a resource for labour. The only reason why the companies want free trade is because they want to pay as little money for wages as they can, so they decide to go off to some third world country where they can get away with paying people a pittance, with no holiday time or other rights, and pay no import duties for their goods. This means that the third-world countries get exploited as just a labour pool, and it also leads to unemployment and exploitation in the west. Because most of the companies bugger off to where they can get cheap labour, the ones left in the west can get away with paying the western workers less and treating them worse, as due to unemployment, workers are easy to find.

[Pawn Power]

The globalization that most are opposed to is market globalization. It encompasses businesses that are open to the world market with both production and sales. They open sweat shops in third world countries and sell their products at high prices all over the world. It is the cause for big businesses that end up controlling society and government.