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Currently viewing articles tagged with Globalization.
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Avarice and Arivis
Do you have the right to live if you are not helping to produce profits for those already awash in profit? Who do you allow to determine what your life is worth? As we organize our fair trade enterprise, surrounded by an ever-expanding and increasingly ruthless empire of capital, we continually confront fundamental questions about the nature of human existence.
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Keynes and ‘National Self-Sufficiency’
today’s world it may seem that I am trying to link Keynes with the autarky of, say, North Korea, but of course I am quoting the title of an article he wrote in 1933, in that prior period of great economic crisis of the 1930s, in which he argued the case for national self-sufficiency or, more precisely, for less international finance and less international trade. “I would sympathize… with those who would minimize rather than those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations [a marvelous phrase]. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily local.”
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Web Exclusive: EL SALVADOR: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA
On Monday, June 1, 2009 El Salvador will turn a new page in its history with the inauguration of the country´s first left government, joining the ranks of the majority of Latin America. Representing the FMLN (Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional), Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, president and vice-president elect, will face a national assembly where the FMLN is outnumbered by more than 2:1. Out of a total of 84 seats, the FMLN only have 35. This will make broad sweeping changes difficult, but not impossible, and may force Funes to use the power of the presidential veto as a bargaining chip. It is important that those of us observing from a distance understand the complicated environment within which the new government will be operating.
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Web exclusive: US-Latin American Relations
One of the most striking aspect of contemporary US-Latin American relations is the profound divergence between the hopes, expectations and positive image of the Obama regime and the policies, strategies and practices which are being pursued. Many so-called progressive North American commentators and not a few Latin American writers have ignored the most elementary features of US foreign policy, and focused exclusively on the highly deceptive rhetoric of “change” and “new beginnings.” A serious understanding of US foreign policy toward Latin America requires a discussion of the main objectives of the Obama regime, the global priorities of imperial policy in times of multiple wars and world depression.
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Wall Street’s Killing Fields
The pundits are very busy these days looking for scapegoats among the swindlers, liars and manipulators who by their greed and excesses have caused the meltdown that led to this mother of all stock market crashes. Now it’s true that in the midst of every economic boom some masters of the universe exercise no scruples in grabbing their share, and then some, of the profit bonanza; and when conditions sour, find novel ways of hiding their true bottom lines to keep investor capital coming their way.
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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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The Global Gang Thang
With A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture, author John Hagedorn heeds Antonio Gramsci’s call for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” “Gangs aren’t going away soon … no matter what we do,” Hagedorn says gloomily, but with Gramscian optimism he continues, “this means we better figure out how to reduce the violence and encourage gangs and others in ghettoes, barrios, favelas, and townships to join movements for social change.”
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The Structural Roots of Hunger, Food Crises and Riots
In recent months major international banks, financial newspapers and mass media have been forced to recognize that there is a major food crisis and that hundreds of millions of people face hunger, malnutrition and outright starvation. World conferences have been convoked and national emergencies have been declared, as millions riot in nearly fifty countries, threatening to overthrow regimes.
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The (Not-So) Sudden Crisis of the Global Food Ecomony
Rapidly rising food prices are casting millions of the world’s poor into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Various food-centred scenes of suffering and associated social tensions have become regular fixtures in the news in 2008: people staving off hunger pangs by eating mud in Haiti; guarded warehouses and grain shipments in the Philippines; export prohibitions in India; food rationing in Pakistan; and food-price riots in more than thirty countries across the Global South.
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Tales from the Below-par Economy
We Don’t Play Golf Here!, directed by Saul Landau, is a series of vignettes exposing the impact of globalization on working-class people on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border. The opening story documents the struggle between the people of Tepoztlán and the golf-crazy elites and their developers, who planned to construct an eighteen-hole course, chalets and country club.
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