If tsunami had snatched the Cowell Theater off the San Francisco Marina Monday night, we would have lost some of the country's greatest optimists. Leaders in the global civil society movement-- David Korten, Randall Hayes, Jerry Mander, Fritjof Capra, Bill Twist, to name a few--convened at the theater for the release party of Alternatives to Economic Globalization,a second and beefier edition published in October 2004.
160 pages of new material have been added to this version--a blueprint for sustainability that lays out principles of economic practice for a day beyond globalization. Decades from now, historians will say the book foreshadows the end of the global corporation, and the rise of the civil society movement. This movement dug in roots at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and brought the WTO to its knees at the 1999 Battle in Seattle.
It's no Fulbright scholar who sees that a global economy based on long distance trade is having seriously deleterious effects. Environmental catastrophe is inherent to the economic framework of globalization. The desperate hunt to find infinitely expanding resources has destroyed landscapes with developments in the Amazon Basin. Lands occupied by ancient societies have been decimated. The tremendous increase in long distance transport has led to climate change.
In view of this dismal panaroma, the President of the International Forum on Globalization, Jerry Mander (also the author of In the Absence of the Sacred and Four Arguments in Favor of the Elimination of Television), launched the discussion on a surprisingly high note, calling this "the perfect political moment to be putting forth new and tangible ideas to move them into concrete expression."
"Believe it or not, I believe these are very optimistic times," said Mander from the podium. "We think of this as a turning point. We are no longer willing to measure our success by how many people we can lay out in front of the WTO. The movement is more proactive and visionary. We can already see this in the turn of events, such as the World's Social Forum which will take place in a few weeks."
Article comments
1 - Aaman
...It's no Fulbright scholar who sees that a global economy based on long distance trade is having seriously deliterious effects
Low costs for consumer products, a global supply chain increasing productivity and providing education, employment and money to hitherto agrarian societies, rising stars of the global economy like India and China - these do not seem too deleterious effects. If you would rather that the new global forces be bottled up and Indians return to their villages, Chinese to their fields, well then fuck anti-globalization efforts.
Globalization is here to stay, not for the first time in history. A shift of global dynamics, power and production is underway - fortunately not led by Comintern.
2 - Dave Nalle
>>You may have noticed that our dollar doesn't mean very much internationally. A fundamental tenet of trade theory is that trade amongst nations should be balanced evenly between imports and exports. We are flouting this economic truism, and waving around our 620 billion dollars of foreign date like so much dirty laundry. In this country we are living so high on foreign borrowing to pay for our excess of imports, that our foreign debt is skyrockting.<<
This widely accepted trade imbalance 'problem' is actually not the problem people think it is. Our foreign debt is high because our level of imports is high. This has been characteristic of the US since colonial times. While we are great producers, we are even greater consumers, and despite common assumptions, a huge consumer marketplace weilds enormous economic power - really much more than a producing economy does. Consumers drive the market and Americans consume like no one else. What the world produces, how they produce it and what they can sell it for is determined almost entirely by what US consumers want. Without our giant level of consumption and massive imports the rest of the industrial world would basically implode economically. And we buy these products with US dollars. That's why the current relatively modest decline in the dollar is so significant. Not because it hurts the US, but because of the pressure it puts on foreign manufacturers by cutting their profit margins. They can't afford to raise prices on their products in the US, but the amount they are making on those products has been slightly reduced. This has the effect of basically transfering economic weakness out of the US economy and into the economies of our trading partners. As the dollar has gone down the US GDP has actually gone up, while the GDPs of our major trading partners has correspondingly gone down.
Dave
3 - Eric Olsen
Thanks Jennie and glad to see you back!
Opposition to globalization seems to be largely based upon philosophy rather than economics, since the overall economic success of the system is hard to dispute. Of course there are relative winners and losers as there are with any system, but the opportunity is there for most anyone in the world to take advantage of economies of scale and efficiency and I fail to see how this can be bad.
I agree that improving the environment is a critical goal, but I see a global approach as the only way to achieve that goal on a "sustainable" basis.
4 - Dave Nalle
>>I agree that improving the environment is a critical goal, but I see a global approach as the only way to achieve that goal on a "sustainable" basis.<<
To date the problem with the global approach to environmental reform is that the issue has been used by certain special interests and certain nations as a club to use against the United States not because we are great polluters, but because we are economically powerful. Environmental mandates which let China and Mexico and Nigeria spew forth enormous amounts of pollution while heavily penalizing the United States for the relatively tiny amount of pollution we produce is blatantly unfair. Countries which have taken steps to limit emissions should not be penalized while those which are making virtually no efforts to limit pollution are given free reign merely because they are farther behind on the track of industrialization.
Dave
5 - Eric Olsen
exactly Dave, that's why I say a true "global" approach is necessary
6 - jennie rose
This has the effect of basically transfering economic weakness out of the US economy and into the economies of our trading partners. As the dollar has gone down the US GDP has actually gone up, while the GDPs of our major trading partners has correspondingly gone down.
dave,
thanks for your thoughts. please enlighten for me how this effect of 'transferring economic weakness into the economies of our trading partners' is a good thing. also, to which trading partners do you refer specifically? jennie
7 - jennie rose
Opposition to globalization seems to be largely based upon philosophy rather than economics, since the overall economic success of the system is hard to dispute.
i think this depends on your metric of economic success, eric. as to the opposition being largely in the world of the immaterial (ie: philosopical), i suspect the book aims to mitigate that pitfall with real world case studies of working 'alternatives.'
8 - Dave Nalle
>>thanks for your thoughts. please enlighten for me how this effect of 'transferring economic weakness into the economies of our trading partners' is a good thing. <<
I didn't actually say it was a good thing. But it's not necessarily a bad thing either. As long as it's not done excessively it helps bolster our GDP by making it cheaper for big corporations to do business in the US than it would be otherwise and making it more expensive for them to do business in competing nations. It also essentially steals wealth from manufacturers in other countries who are operating and paying expenses in Euros but have to sell their products in the US for devcalued dollars, but cannot raise prices so long as there is competition in the marketplace becaus the US us the only consumer marketplace large enough and affluent enough to buy their products in sufficient quantity.
>>also, to which trading partners do you refer specifically? jennie<<
Germany and France more than anyone else, but also oil producing nations and to a lesser degree Japan because their economy and monetary system are more intimately intermeshed with ours.
Dave
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