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Currently viewing articles in the Globalization category.
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The Global Crisis of Capitalism
Crisis theorists confuse what is clearly the degrading of labour, the savaging of living and working conditions and even the stagnation of the economy, with a ‘crisis’ of capital: when the capitalist class increases its profit margins, hoards trillions, it is not in crisis. The key point is that the ‘crisis of labour’ is a major stimulus for the recovery of capitalist profits.
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Mud, Hubris and Malevolent Urban Change
India seems more preoccupied than ever with showing off its resources and firepower, of which it certainly has plenty, than worrying about their mal-distribution and misuse. This attitude, as my article suggests, is at the heart of all that is wrong with the Commonwealth Games.
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G20 Fiddles While Planet Burns and Economy Fizzles
With the G20 political leaders preparing to gather in Toronto this June, the outcome of the palaver can already be predicted with certainty: failure to resolve either the global economic or environmental crisis.
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Sewing the Seeds of a New World Agriculture
Tony Weis is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario, and he’s really stepped back to look at the big picture. His book, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming is a lively, detailed, very readable survey of the global food economy. Ranging from the rich world to the majority world, his book is a scathing indictment of the “problems and iniquities of the world food system.”
Kuyek’s short history (just 125 pages) covers one hundred years of Canadian agriculture centred on seeds. Seeds are profoundly social, he writes: “they reflect and reproduce the cultural values and social interests of those who develop them.”
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Better and Better Reasons for War
In his timely and keenly argued polemic, Humanitarian Imperialism, Jean Bricmont subjects left-liberal humanitarian rationale for war to the same kind of unsparing scrutiny as he and his co-author Alan Sokal did to the intellectual pretenses of postmodernists in Intellectual Impostures. But while the influence of the postmodernists rarely reaches beyond the confines of academia, the conceits of humanitarian imperialists have global implications and, with the saber-rattling against Iran, may yet lead to catastrophe.
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The Gold Bug
Guided by resource discovery and the heavy-handed rule of the free market, the mining of gold today is “rush-mining,” much as it was a century ago. From the Indigenous lands of Brazil to those in Canada, from Tanzania to the Philippines, whenever gold is discovered, local communities are forced to migrate or attempt to adjust to the new industry. In fact, only eleven per cent of the gold mined worldwide has a practical use in technologies like biomedicine or electronics. Meanwhile, seventy per cent is used for jewellery, with the rest going to investment.
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Manufacturing Jobs
“Globalization” has become the easy explanation for any disaster that befalls. In itself, however, this generally obscures as much as it explains. The crisis in Canadian manufacturing is a case in point.
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Sharing the Plunder of the South
Dubbed “NAFTA Plus” by pundits in the popular press, the SPP is the continuing expansion of free-trade policies that were consolidated under NAFTA ten years earlier. The winners and losers of this ongoing trilateral power alliance remain the same — big capital in the North continues to expand its power at the expense of workers, their communities, and the environment in both the North and the South.
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Canada and World Order After the Wreckage
magining an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing. Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change and recurring military interventions by Western powers has been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order. This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in alliance with key European, Japanese and Canadian al
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Barrick’s Gold
The website of Canadian mining multinational Barrick says its vision is “to be the world’s best gold mining company by finding, acquiring, developing and producing quality reserves in a safe, profitable and socially responsible manner.”
Although no one would deny the profitability of the company’s operations, Barrick’s major new project in South America has activists, ecologists and residents questioning its claims of safety and social responsibility.
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