What's currently going on is called “corporate globalization,” where powerful transnational corporations, backed by supposed “free trade” treaties penned by corporate lobbyists in Washington, go to the ends of the earth to exploit slave-like labor. No one of us wants continuing poverty in China, India, or elsewhere. But is making $2.00 a day (the oft quoted dollar amount to be “out of poverty”) the goal, the only goal?
Life in rural communities in China, India and elsewhere is tough. Are we to displace a non-money economy with formerly self-sufficient peoples moving to the mega-cities to live in slums? In the recent PBS documentary, China From the Inside, rural people dislocated due to the damming of rivers were given new high density housing. But as one of them exclaimed, we have no jobs and cannot raise our food anymore. Relocation from dam areas, like the Three Gorges, is causing huge social upheaval (75,000 riots in China in 2005).Thousands of families are divided throughout China as parents spend most of the year in large cities making a living, while their children remain in rural villages with grandma tending to all the chores and to the fields. In other cases, women are left in the villages to raise children while husbands go off alone to the cities to work. Expectant mothers still abort female fetuses or abandon newborn girls because of the long-held view that women are not as valuable to the culture as men. China is the only nation in the world where the suicide rate for women is higher than that for men. Of course, relocated peasants cannot afford the laces on the brand-named shoes they manufacture in sweatshops. But then, again, they do get to see their children fiour days out of the year! So yes, they are “out of poverty” according to the $2.00 a day rule, but at what cost? Is there hope for a Global Middle Class? Why, when the Chinese Communist Party’s latest five-year plan called for increased focus on unions, did multinationals threaten to relocate jobs to Viet Nam or other dirt-cheap–labor countries?
China is run by the Communist Party, which bases its legitimacy on delivering both stability and the conditions for prosperity. But stability is under threat as the economic boom strands millions at the margins. Meanwhile, rampant corruption is sapping people's trust in the Party. Officials are seen, increasingly, not as public servants but as profiteers. Is China corporate globalization’s 21st-century poster child where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer in social as well as monetary terms? We don’t have the answers in our book, but we identify the essential questions, such as, Is earning $2.00 a day the end of poverty? You’ll see little discussion of these matters in Friedman.
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1 - Jake
The following is writing response assignment I have done for my English class on the world is flat?. Is my analysis misguided or is it nearer to the truth than Friedman was?
In this critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the reader receives an occasional glimpse into Friedman’s book itself. Some of these glimpses are more disturbing than others and some are even given appropriate recognition by the authors of the critique, Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo. However, there is one excerpt from Freidman’s book which I found to be far and above the most disturbing and culturally degrading. In this section Friedman asserts that there are certain jobs in our new flat world that have become “untouchable”. These “jobs” are demarcated by Freidman as the Great Collaborators and Orchestrators, the Great Synthesizers, the Great Explainers, the Great Leveragers, the Great Adapters, the Passionate Personalizers, and the Great Localizers. As Aronica and Ramdoo have paraphrased this proposal from Friedman’s book, “we should all become masters of social, organizational, and motivational skills”, or as they go on to say, managers. The most disturbing aspect of this idea is Freidman’s apparent perception of the American people as only being interested in getting a job so we can have money to buy stuff. In his defense, this is a very popular ideal of the American identity, but it is not the kind of goal we should hold above all else and certainly not what we should be teaching our children.
It is also important to note that Freidman is pushing for the American people to do something which not everyone was made for, to lead. Being a manager or president is a
heavy responsibility that requires lots of work with very little recognition aside from a pay check. To lead is essentially to carry the concerns of all those who are under you and this is a task that very few are suited for. Should we start telling our kids, “you can do whatever you want when you grow up…on the weekends.” Friedman’s idea not only contradicts the ideological foundations of this country but also a later chapter in his book. In this later chapter Friedman encourages for a push in math and science. Are these jobs also untouchable? Or is that only if we become smarter than China and India? As a college student graduating with a degree in English, it is a very bleak, flat world that Thomas Friedman has painted for me.