Perils of globalization
Dec. 23rd, 2007 by AlI come across an interesting interview with Jerry Mander conducted by Scott London about the topic of globalization and decide to give the readers a sneak view about the conversation.
You can read the whole interview here
Jerry Mander is regarded as one of today’s most articulate and outspoken critics of technology and economic globalization. His books include Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, In the Absence of the Sacred, and The Case Against the Global Economy (co-edited with Edward Goldsmith). In this interview, Mander makes a forceful case against economic globalization, arguing that we need to examine the hidden costs of free trade and deregulation and search for more enlighened economic models to guide us into the twenty-first century.
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Scott London: The case, as it’s usually presented, is that the globalized economy is a good thing that will secure jobs, allow us to remain competitive, and promote democracy abroad. Isn’t there some truth to that?
Jerry Mander: The people who are making that case are the people who are promoting globalization — corporations and banks and governments. They are saying that globalization can solve the world’s problems, that it’s going to give people something to eat and so on. They are redesigning an economy that they say works. But it doesn’t work.
We’ve had globalization for quite a while, it’s just being accelerated right now. Wherever the rules of free trade and economic globalization are followed, you have economic and ecological disasters immediately thereafter. You’ve got the complete destruction of small, traditional farming in Africa and elsewhere; you’ve got the complete devastation of nature all around the world; you’ve got people shoved off their lands to make way for giant dams and agri-business and so on, who then become part of the millions & millions of people roaming the land and going into cities looking for impossible-to-find jobs, all in competition with each other, and violent and angry. And then people are angry with them, because who needs more people around? So you’ve set in to motion a global disarray and nonfunctionalism that would not have been achieved — certainly not at the same level and with the same speed — without this emphasis on global development.
However poorly people lived in terms of material wealth in traditional societies, there was much that they retained. They retained a fair amount of local control. They retained some degree of traditional culture. Even in societies that had already been impacted, like India, you had a lot of cultural identity and a history of relationships to scale that were really different. It was an economy of small-scale institutions. That has been wiped out by economic globalization with the invasion of franchises and giant institutions that have taken over the land.
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