No amount of money can bring back species pushed to extinction. Globalization is inherently destructive to the natural world because it requires that products travel thousands of miles around the planet, resulting in staggering environmental costs such as unprecedented levels of ocean and air pollution from transport, increased energy consumption and use of fossil fuels furthering climate change , and increased use of packaging materials.
WTO agreements have already rolled back years of hard-won environmental gains made through national legislation and multilateral environmental agreements MEAs , including measures agreed upon at the Rio Summit. To date, in every dispute case challenging a domestic environmental regulation, the WTO has ruled against the environment. Its very first ruling, in fact, seriously weakened a part of the U. Clean Air Act.
In , the U. Environmental Protection Agency changed some of its clean air rules to allow dirtier gasoline as a result of this ruling. In addition, the WTO has ruled against provisions of the U. Endangered Species Act and the U. In the interests of advancing trade liberalization, commercial interests advising governments say trade rules must be consistent from country to country. However, instead of setting minimum standards for environmental protection, WTO agreements and dispute rulings effectively place a ceiling on environmental standards.
This ensures that environmental regulations sink to the lowest common denominator, resulting in a downward harmonization of global standards. Proponents of globalization point to the rising number of MEAs as evidence that environmental concerns are being addressed. However, most MEAs are largely voluntary and do not have effective enforcement mechanisms.
Advocates of economic globalization have succeeded in making the term "protectionism" a dirty word. They use it to offhandedly dismiss everyone from environmentalists to consumers to small businesspeople to organized labor.
Peasant farmers are lampooned as protectionists for resisting trade liberalization and for trying to preserve a so-called "inefficient" way of life that has served them and their communities well for centuries. If protectionism refers to protecting local jobs, public health, cultural diversity, and natural resources, then protectionism is a good thing.
The structure of economic globalization is itself corporate protectionism, because it is set up to protect corporations from the regulations of democratic societies. Developing countries are, in fact, becoming poorer, not richer. They are already paying the highest price for globalization. This is because the rules of the global bureaucracies invariably favor Northern corporate interests. While it is widely accepted that the biosphere is incapable of sustaining six billion people at the consumption levels of the North, one cannot argue that poor countries should stay poor while rich countries continue to consume more than their share.
There are many alternatives. But for the reasons outlined above, our current course is the one that is not realistic. By punishing countries and communities that fail to follow its rules, economic globalization actually precludes the development of other alternatives and growth models.
At the same time, it devastates the natural world, homogenizes cultures, and destroys communities. The better path is to do exactly the opposite of what economic globalization advocates suggest.
The more they say to remove restrictions on currency flows, the clearer it is there should be strict restrictions on currency. The more they say free trade, the more we must fight for the powers of local communities and regions to act in the interests of their own resources, people and land. Myth 3: Globalization Will Alleviate Poverty This has been the theme strongly trumpeted since Bretton Woods; free trade and globalization will "lift all boats," and end poverty. So much for the rising tide that lifts all boats.
Actually, it lifts only yachts. For the number one thing that has been "globalized" in the past two decades is a very specific set of economic and social policies, the formulae of economic liberalism in Australia, because these policies were initiated by a Labor, and not a Liberal, government, they are dubbed "economic rationalism".
These policies are everywhere the same, they come from the exact same recipe book: hand over state assets to corporations, turn a blind eye to the operations of financial institutions, prorogue controls on capital flows across borders, allow currencies' exchange rates to be determined by speculators, weaken laws which specify labor rights or environmental standards, cut government spending on social programs, cut taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy, force workers to pay for their own retirement and education and health care, rob from the poor, give to the rich.
By March 1, , the starting date for the WTO's new Financial Services Agreement, which drastically reduces restrictions on cross-border finance flows, member-nations out of had signed onto it. Those governments which haven't read willingly from the recipe book have had it forced on them. Since the s, there have been 90 Third World countries forced to sign "structural adjustment programs" with the IMF, as a condition for refinancing their massive debt burdens.
These programs are a long list of pro-business, pro-Western measures: the IMF's grotesquely named "Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper" for Tanzania, signed in April , for example, included specific changes to the country's laws and regulations.
Can it be reversed? Privatized assets can be re-statised, freedoms can be taken away from corporations and given back to communities, tax burdens can be shifted from poor to rich, the rentiers can be euthanised and the expropriators expropriated. There's one further proof that "globalization" isn't inevitable: its architects don't think it is.
If it is inevitable, why are World Trade Organization director-general Mike Moore and the trade representatives of the United States and Europe desperately criss-crossing the world twisting the arms of governments to make sure that the coming WTO conference in Qatar doesn't end up the debacle that the last one in Seattle in November was?
If it is inevitable, why have the drafters of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the "corporations' bill of rights", buried their document since massive public outcry erupted when it was leaked in ? And why are they now forced to plot its reintroduction, through as yet little-noticed clauses of proposed WTO agreements, by stealth and not in the open?
If it is inevitable, why are the meetings of the corporate globalizers taking place behind high barbed-wire fences and lines of riot police? And why are the numbers, and the confidence, of protesters around the world increasing? Three days before thousands from across Europe gathered in the Czech capital, Prague, to demonstrate at the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF, the British Economist magazine, which boasts that it is the standard-bearer of economic liberalism, editorialized on September "The protesters are right that the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of our time is third-world poverty.
China is the biggest beneficiary, a strong promoter, and an important contributor of this round of globalization. Since the reform and opening-up, China has persisted in opening its doors to the outside world, actively integrated into the process of economic globalization, and achieved a great historical transition from self-closure to all-round opening. It has not only changed its outlook and national destiny, but also profoundly affected the process of globalization. China proactively participates in expanding the scope of the global economy, promotes trade liberalization and facilitation, supports improvement of the global free trade system, bravely assumes the responsibility of global economic governance, seeks mutually beneficial development with global trading partners, and makes important contributions to the stability and healthy development of the global economy.
From the perspective of Marxism, socialism needs globalization. Only through combination with economic globalization can socialism develop and strengthen itself with the tide of the times, which should become an important principle of Marxism.
The year history of the Communist movement since the Russian Revolution shows that socialism, should it deviate from the tide of economic globalization, will reach a dead end and lose its vitality and attraction. The important experience of the success of the socialist road with Chinese characteristics is to unswervingly open up to the outside world and actively integrate into economic globalization.
At the same time, we should opt for the appropriate integration path and pace according to our national conditions so as to make China a beneficiary of economic globalization. China, as an emerging power adhering to the socialist road, shoulders the responsibilities to safeguard globalization and steadfastly promote globalization as the world is handicapped by anti-globalization currents and a few Western powers who are losing their motivation to push economic globalization.
China clearly opposes protectionism and unilateralism, further enhances the level of overall opening-up, promotes economic integration among countries, jointly builds an open world economy, effectively integrates its pluses like market potential, industrial cluster competitive edge, and integrated innovation capability into the development pattern of the world economy, and promotes the optimal allocation and free flow of high-end production factors in the global context.
The global governance concept championed by China as embodied by the Belt and Road Initiative and the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits as well as the initiatives of a community of a shared future for mankind contributes to addressing the drawbacks of globalization, and plays a leading role in building a new globalization characterized by openness, inclusiveness, universal benefit, and win-win cooperation, and will create new opportunities for the world economy to become strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive.
Roots and Sustainability of Globalization The history of human development is the history of human beings expanding their scope of activities based on the requirements of the development of productive forces and the level of scientific and technological progress. China Firmly Promotes Globalization China is the biggest beneficiary, a strong promoter, and an important contributor of this round of globalization. Share to:.
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