Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources
The following is a select listing of additional resources that complement readings and lectures in this course, which students may find interesting. For the most part, these are not articles in academic journals; see the course bibliography instead for such sources. Links often expire, in which case you can copy and paste a link from below into the search box on the Wayback Machine, or enter the title of the item as a search term in an Internet search engine, as it may have been reproduced on another site.
Globalization & Neoliberalism: What They Mean
Watch Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explain globalization in three minutes
“Globalization. It’s a term we hear thrown around all the time – even more so since Britain voted to leave the EU in a decision that was widely seen as a rejection of globalization. But what does it actually mean? That’s a tough one to answer, simply because it signifies different things to different people, as Manfred Steger explains in his widely read introduction to the topic. ‘Globalization has been variously used in both popular and academic literature to describe a process, a condition, a system, a force, and an age’.”
Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
“Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly? So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.”
Global Elites / Transnational Capitalist Class
The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class
“Abstract: This study asks Who are the the world’s 1 percent power elite? And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? We examine a sample of the 1 percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth. These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations, whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of removal. We also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of money, such as insurance companies. Finally, we analyze how global networks of centralized power—the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments in their service—plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their continued concentration of wealth and power. We demonstrate how the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital in the world.”
Davos elite alarmed at prospect of nominee Trump
” ‘Unbelievable’, ’embarrassing’ even ‘dangerous’ are some of the words the financial elite gathered at the World Economic Forum conference in the Swiss resort of Davos have been using to describe U.S. Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump….Trump’s nationalist rhetoric, particularly proposals to ban Muslims from entering the United States, tax goods made abroad and build a wall on the Mexican border, were never the sort of thing to appeal to the free trade crowd that typically gathers at events like the annual Davos economic forum.”
Trump angst looms over economic elite at IMF meetings
“The world’s economic elite spent this week invoking fears of protectionism and the existential crisis facing globalisation while avoiding any mention of Donald Trump by name. But the US presidential candidate and his anti-establishment politics have loomed large at this week’s annual meetings in Washington of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. He has been a sort of Voldemort for the global economic order — like the villain in Harry Potter, his name is spoken only in hushed tones and behind closed doors.”
This Was the Week the World Got Really Anxious About Globalization’s Future
“Weak global trade, fears that the U.K. is marching towards a hard Brexit, and polls indicating that the U.S. election remains a tighter call than markets are pricing in have led a bevy of analysts to redouble their warnings that a backlash over globalization is poised to roil global financial markets—with profound consequences for the real economy and investment strategies. From the economists and politicians at the annual IMF meeting in Washington to strategists on Wall Street trying to advise clients, everyone seems to be pondering a future in which cooperation and global trade may look much different than they do now.”
Globalization & Cultural Imperialism
Globalization Threatening Latin American Cultural Expression, Expert Says
“Latin American cultural expression is being threatened by globalization and new technologies, which have serious consequences that people are beginning to lose their separate identities, Silvia Rosa Martinez, a Peruvian expert in Intangible Cultural Heritage said.”
Diego Fusaro: Defending Culture Against Globalisation
“At a time in which cultural arguments are made to defend political unions based purely on neoliberal economic models, it is important to remember the difference between culture and economics. Political unions are principally made for political and economic purposes, not cultural ones. In confusing culture with political models derived from the sphere of economics we damage the original idea of culture itself, and we ultimately become accomplices to the anti-cultural project of economic globalisation: the destruction of cultural variety in the name of misunderstood notions of equality. This ultimately leads to a world with One dominant culture, which according to Fusaro’s logic means the end of all culture itself.”
Globalization, NGOs, & “Humanitarian Intervention”
Imperial Abduction Lore and Humanitarian Seduction
“Two of the most enduring beliefs, among at least the political elites and a substantial portion of the wider population in North America, are that military intervention abroad and all sorts of other less forceful interventions, are: (a) for the good of other societies, whose lives and whose very nature as human beings will experience progress as a result of our intervention; and, (b) that the security of the intervening society will thus be enhanced, while its global leadership will also be secured.”
Iatrogenic Imperialism: NGOs and CROs as Agents of Questionable Care
“Military interventions by powerful nations have increasingly occurred under the justification of humanitarian values and principles. In deploying a moral imperative to act for the benefit of the maximum number of innocent lives, the destructive aspects and politics of intervening are often overlooked. This chapter concerns a similar pattern being reproduced in healthcare worldwide. In the wake of the retreat of the state in matters of welfare provoked by the pressures of International Financial Institutions (IFIs), various actors have filtered into the daily lives of people across the world and have offered themselves up as options for providing care. I will speak here only of certain health-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and contract research organizations (CROs) as they relate to neoliberal imperialism.”
US Imperialism and Disaster Capitalism in Haiti
“…the militarization of humanitarian aid serves to facilitate the imposition of neoliberal economic policies through the exploitation of weakened states—a strategy known as ‘disaster capitalism’. Disaster capitalism is a defining feature of US imperialism. It is used to exploit nation states during times of crises and to implement neoliberal corporate policies that favor US capitalism.”
Who Needs Me Most? New Imperialist Ideologies in Youth-Centred Volunteer Abroad Programs
“David Harvey describes the new imperialism as the imposition of American neoliberal values and policies on other nations (Harvey, 2003). The new imperialist project is supported in part by narratives which aim to produce good neoliberal capitalist subjects both at home and abroad. One of the spaces in which this becomes evident is in the messages, both explicit and implicit, within student or youth-centred volunteer abroad programs. Examinations of the narratives produced by these programs in their recruitment efforts and mission statements reveal deeply ingrained and unquestioned neoliberal values and assumptions. Youth are encouraged to consider self-improvement and individual efforts as solutions to issues of global inequalities, rather than addressing political and economic systems and underlying relationships of exploitation and domination. The language used in these recruitment messages to youth enforces neoliberal, capitalist understandings of the problem of and potential solutions to global inequalities. Problems are thus decontextualized and depoliticized. The messages reinforce a desired image of the Western youth as a powerful actor, an impetus for change, and an inspiration.”
Globalization, Compression, and the Desire for Intervention
Why, and how, do some people come to feel a need to intervene in the affairs of other nations, and what does it have to do with globalization?
Western do-gooders need to resist the allure of ‘exotic problems’
“Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in the US, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to the US. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about the gun violence there. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to the US after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organisation that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naive? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the global south.”
11 of the best aid parodies
“To round up the end of the Global Development Professionals Network 2014 coverage, we’ve taken a more lighthearted look at the development sector and picked 11 of the best spoofs or parodies that have made us chuckle.”
Gates Foundation accused of ‘dangerously skewing’ aid priorities by promoting ‘corporate globalisation’
“Far from a ‘neutral charitable strategy’, the Gates Foundation is about benefiting big business, especially in agriculture and health, through its ‘ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation,’ according to the report published by the campaign group Global Justice Now. Its influence is ‘dangerously skewing’ aid priorities, the group says.
Globalization & “Dollar Imperialism”
Dollar Imperialism, 2015 Edition
“This latest round of financial warfare has to be seen in the context of financial imperialism in general. Countries struggling for sovereignty are also being hit by sanctions, speculative currency attacks, commodity price manipulation, biased evaluations from US ratings agencies, massive fines on some banks for what the US has deemed inappropriate practices, and the prohibition of certain banks from participating in the international banking system. All of these weapons – like their lethal counterparts – are used toward weakening rivals (whether US allies in the global North or competitors in the global South and East) and maintaining dollar hegemony.”
Globalization & the Spread of US Power
Map: The U.S. is bound by treaties to defend a quarter of humanity
“….thanks to various treaties and deals set up since 1945, the U.S. government might be legally obligated to defend countries containing 25 percent of the world’s population….69 countries have some form of defense pact with the United States…they make up around 75 percent of the world’s economic output….the combined population of these countries and the United States itself is in excess of 2 billion. That’s a remarkably large amount of the world for the United States to be obligated to protect, especially considering that the country largely kept clear of alliances for the first 165 years of its existence….In fact, America’s founding fathers had promised to avoid alliances like this altogether.”
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2015
Map: 200 years of US military interventions
Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List
“Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War.|
35 countries where the U.S. has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists
“The U.S. is backing Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.”
Chapter 12, The Empire and the People, by Howard Zinn
“Expansion overseas was not a new idea. Even before the war against Mexico carried the United States to the Pacific, the Monroe Doctrine looked southward into and beyond the Caribbean. Issued in 1823 when the countries of Latin America were winning independence from Spanish control, it made plain to European nations that the United States considered Latin America its sphere of influence. Not long after, some Americans began thinking into the Pacific: of Hawaii, Japan, and the great markets of China….”
The American Quest for Empire
“…Robert Kagan, a conservative historian, in Dangerous Nation agrees with Bender on one major point – that we have always been an imperialist nation and in fact, that we have always been a dangerous nation in the international community. Kagan, however praises the U.S. for this imperialist mission, using the language of American exceptionalism to support our mission….”
America’s 100 Years of Overthrow
“Author Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq is an infuriating recitation of our government’s military bullying over the past 110 years — a century of interventions around the world that resulted in the overthrow of 14 governments — in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Iran, Grenada, Afghanistan, and … Iraq.”
Author Kinzer Charts ‘Century of Regime Change’
Excerpt from Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq.
When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results
“What are the electoral consequences of attempts by great powers to intervene in a partisan manner in another country’s elections? Great powers frequently deploy partisan electoral interventions as a major foreign policy tool. For example, the U.S. and the USSR/Russia have intervened in one of every nine competitive national level executive elections between 1946 and 2000. However, scant scholarly research has been conducted about their effects on the election results in the target. I argue that such interventions usually significantly increase the electoral chances of the aided candidate and that overt interventions are more effective than covert interventions. I then test these hypotheses utilizing a new, original dataset of all U.S. and USSR/Russian partisan electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000. I find strong support for both arguments.”
Database Tracks History Of U.S. Meddling In Foreign Elections
“the United States is the most common user of this technique. Russia or the Soviet Union since 1945 has used it half as much. My estimate has been 36 cases between 1946 to 2000. We know also that the Chinese have used this technique and the Venezuelans when the late Hugo Chavez was still in power in Venezuela and other countries.”
Public Uncertain, Divided Over America’s Place in the World
“The public views America’s role in the world with considerable apprehension and concern. In fact, most Americans say it would be better if the U.S. just dealt with its own problems and let other countries deal with their own problems as best they can.”
Four Horsemen
On this page you can download the free ebook from the producers of the documentary, plus read a series of articles dealing with topics central to the documentary.
Public Uncertain, Divided Over America’s Place in the World
“57% of Americans want the U.S. to deal with its own problems, while letting other countries get along as best they can. Just 37% say the U.S. should help other countries deal with their problems. And more Americans say the U.S. does too much (41%), rather than too little (27%), to solve world problems, with 28% saying it is doing about the right amount.The public’s wariness toward global engagement extends to U.S. participation in the global economy. Nearly half of Americans (49%) say U.S. involvement in the global economy is a bad thing because it lowers wages and costs jobs; fewer (44%) see this as a good thing because it provides the U.S. with new markets and opportunities for growth…”
Trump and the demise of the American global order
“the era of American dominance – a period that started at the end of World War Two and reached its peak following the collapse of the Soviet Union – is coming to an end. This has profound consequences for the international order and the global economy.”
America is pulling back from the world
“the way in which the United States reacts appears to be subtly shifting. Almost without noticing, America is beginning to dramatically rethink the way in which it interacts with the world.As with so many things, Donald Trump is the clearest manifestation of the trend. For all his talk of “making America great again,” the foreign policy he has begun to outline — particularly in interviews with senior editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post — smacks of outright isolationism.”
Donald Trump and Empire: An Assessment
“If we were to use his terminology, how can Donald Trump make the decline in US global power ‘beautiful,’ and how can he turn withdrawal into ‘greatness’? This is the truly daunting challenge that any US leader moving to change the current order must confront, while trying to hold off all the damage of a precipitous decline: effecting a transformation while appealing to American pride, speaking through the symbols and values cherished and understood by most, while projecting confidence and pointing to concrete benefits. That is a monumental task. In case it’s not understood: shaming Americans, decrying national pride, diminishing their quality of life, and telling them to suck it up—is not a viable strategy, not for maintenance of the status quo, and even less for taking the US into a post-imperial future. If Trump had not existed, then there would have been a need for history to invent him.”
The decline of the American empire and rise of Donald Trump
“The result of globalization and attack on labour rights was wages in the US and Canada (and in Europe too) stagnated – and have done so for more than 40 years. Unionization in the US has fallen from 35 per cent of all workers in 1954, down to 11.3 per cent today – and only 6.6 per cent in the private sector. Consequently, the capacity of workers and the middle class to garner a bigger portion of the economic pie began to fall.”
US against the world? Trump’s America and the new global order
Francis Fukyama: “Donald Trump’s stunning electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton marks a watershed not just for American politics, but for the entire world order. We appear to be entering a new age of populist nationalism, in which the dominant liberal order that has been constructed since the 1950s has come under attack from angry and energised democratic majorities. The risk of sliding into a world of competitive and equally angry nationalisms is huge, and if this happens it would mark as momentous a juncture as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989….systems designed by elites — liberalised financial markets in the US case, and European policies such as the euro and the Schengen system of internal migration — collapsed dramatically in the face of external shocks. The costs of these failures were again much more heavily borne by ordinary workers than by the elites themselves. Ever since, the real question should not have been why populism has emerged in 2016, but why it took so long to become manifest.”
Neoliberalism: Insider Critiques
Neoliberalism: Oversold?
A report from the IMF itself, that is critical of how neoliberal globalization has been hyped. The report explicitly criticizes the failure to achieve sustained economic growth, while inequality has increased. See the report in HTML format here.
The Cost of Overhyping Globalization
“To be sure, there have been efforts to grasp the current slowdown. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook devotes an entire chapter to it. But no significant new barriers to trade have been identified. Instead, the IMF declares, some three-quarters of the slowdown in trade growth is a result of “overall weakness in economic activity,” especially investment. The Fund also asserts that “the waning pace of trade liberalization and the recent uptick in protectionism” have played a role, though it is not quantifiable. Even without establishing a clear understanding of what is driving current trends, however, the IMF report calls for action to revive the “virtuous cycle of trade and growth.” Clearly, faith in trade is very strong. But faith is part of the problem. Blind faith in globalization led many to overhype it, creating impossible expectations for trade liberalization. When those expectations were not met, many people felt duped and rejected free trade.”
The IMF and the Crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing on the report: “The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory. This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions. It describes a ‘culture of complacency’, prone to ‘superficial and mechanistic’ analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.”
Lagarde Says Globalization’s Benefits Need to Be Shared by All
“World leaders need to better manage the frustration over the failure of globalization to deliver widely shared benefits, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said.”
World Bank admits globalization leads to inequality
“According to an internal memo from the Washington-based organization seen by the British broadcaster, the side effects ‘may have led to rising wage inequality.’ The document, written by World Bank economists, says ‘trade has played a powerful role in creating jobs and contributing to rising incomes in advanced economies,’ but also highlights its cons. ‘Recent evidence from the US suggests that adjustment costs for those employed in sectors exposed to import competition from China are much higher than previously thought. While trade may have contributed to rising inequality in high income economies, so has technological change and the weakening of institutions that used to represent the interests of labor,’ the report said.”
Voters deserve responsible nationalism not reflex globalism
“Reflex internationalism needs to give way to responsible nationalism or else we will only see more distressing referendums and populist demagogues contending for high office.”
The rules have to change again – we must tame globalization
“Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not been doing well: In the United States, the bottom 90 per cent has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their levels of 60 years ago. The effects of economic pain and dislocation are even showing up in health statistics. For example, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, this year’s Nobel laureate, have shown that life expectancy among segments of white Americans is declining.”
A Harvard Professor explains the populist revolt against immigration & globalization
“Experts know and have told us many times that immigrants do not make anyone worse off. And how do they know that? By buying lock, stock, and barrel into any evidence that points in that direction. By nit-picking apart any evidence that lies outside the narrative. And, as David Frum himself pointed out a few months ago, by engaging in ‘data dredging on an industrial scale’ when an unpleasant result needs to be utterly destroyed.”
Globalization: Beyond Discontent
“Today, globalization is being challenged around the world….for millions of people globalization has not worked. Many have actually been made worse off, as they have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become more insecure. They have felt increasingly powerless against forces beyond their control. They have seen their democracies undermined, their cultures eroded”
Defending Globalization
Why we shouldn’t turn our backs on globalization
“A retreat from globalization is a clear and present danger to the world economy. As Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the appeal of Donald Trump show, too many people are rebelling against the free flow of goods, capital and people because they have not benefited from them. The G20 can stop the rot at its summit in Hangzhou, China, in September by pledging vigorous efforts to share the fruits of globalization more equitably.”
Why globalization is the only way forward
“The Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential race in the United States have shown, among other things, that public distrust of global integration is on the rise. That distrust could derail new trade agreements currently in the works, and prevent future ones from being initiated.”
Globalization, the European Union, BREXIT
Interview with Joseph Stiglitz: “The cost of keeping the Eurozone together probably exceeds the cost of breaking it up”
“I think it’s pretty clear now that it was a mistake to start the euro at that time, with those institutions. There will be a cost to breaking it up, but whichever way you look at it, over the last 8 years the euro has generated enormous costs for Europe. And I think that one could manage the cost of breaking it up and that under the current course, the cost of keeping the Eurozone together probably exceeds the cost of breaking it up….Part of the issue is that in the most recent trade agreements, for instance, the societal benefits are low or even negative. I’m talking about deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the United States. These agreements are largely vehicles for corporatist agendas. They’re not about restructuring the global rules of the game to make everyone better off, they’re about altering the rules to make them more favourable for corporations.”
The Poisoned Chalice: From Eurozone to Dead Zone
“The euro’s creation can best be viewed as a legalistic coup d’état to replace national parliaments with a coterie of financial managers acting on behalf of creditors, drawn largely from the ranks of investment bankers. Tax policy, regulatory and pension policies are assigned to these unelected central planners. Empowered to override sovereign self-determination and national referendums on economic and social policy, their policy prescription is to impose austerity and force privatization selloffs that are basically foreclosures on indebted economies. Galbraith rightly calls this financial colonialism.”
Europeans not convinced growing diversity is a good thing, divided on what determines national identity
“In no nation does a majority say increasing diversity is a positive for their country. At most, roughly a third in Sweden (36%), the UK (33%) and Spain (31%) describe growing racial, ethnic and national diversity in favorable terms.”
Immigration and Capital
“When we turn our attention to the current political economy of immigration in Europe and North America, and the relationship between immigration and capital, we might discover two odd absences. One is that those on the left who in past years were vocal critics of mass immigration, especially of the illegal kind, have either been silent on the topic in current debates, or have reversed positions without any explanation. Second, you may find Marxist writers who, armed with all of the necessary conceptual and empirical tools, avoid drawing explicit connections in their own work that could be the basis for a critique of immigration. My guess is that what explains both absences is this fear of being stigmatized as xenophobic, or worse yet, racist—such fear is illogical and should be pushed aside”
Free Trade Agreements, Fair Trade & Protectionism
EU / Trade agreements: UN rights expert warns against bypassing national parliaments
“United Nations human rights expert Alfred de Zayas today warned that any plan by the European Union to bypass national parliaments to push through controversial trade deals would violate international human rights norms and standards. ‘Trade deals prepared and negotiated in secret, excluding key stakeholders such as labour unions, consumer associations, health professionals and environmental experts and now parliaments, have zero democratic legitimacy,’ said the UN Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order.”
Investor-State dispute settlement undermines rule of law and democracy, UN expert tells Council of Europe
“Today before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, UN expert Alfred de Zayas explained why the investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms contained in trade agreements are incompatible with democracy, the rule of law and human rights. ‘Existing ISDS should be phased out and no new investment treaty should contain any provision for privatized or semi-privatized dispute settlement. It is wholly unnecessary in countries that are party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which commits States to due process and the rule of law,’ said Mr. de Zayas.”
Free Trade Feud
“In the black-and-white world of economics textbooks, free trade is good for everyone. Each country figures out what it does best, then exchanges the wine or cloth or software it makes with other nations, creating wealth. Where jobs are lost, they’ll be replaced by more suitable ones. Or so the theory goes. For two centuries, the virtue of free trade went almost unchallenged by economists and politicians. Now it’s under attack. Plans for the most ambitious set of new trade agreements in a generation have brought together an unlikely coalition of politicians, unions, religious groups, internet freedom activists and conservationists to galvanize public opinion against them. They’ve refocused the debate on trade’s winners and losers, arguing that the deals threaten to aggravate inequality, degrade labor and health standards and weaken democracy. What happened to faith in free trade?”
Why We Need a Moratorium on Trade Deals Like the TPP
“Business as usual would be a big mistake. A different approach to trade is in order. Trump and Sanders are delivering a double-barreled message from across the political spectrum, one that is deeply felt in American society and unlikely to go away soon. Thus the voters’ uprising of 2016 warrants more than the oft-repeated bromides about the virtues of economic integration. The politics of trade has changed in a profound way, especially now that the Republican Party—until recently, led by ardent free-traders and a reliable supplier of congressional votes for trade agreements—has shown that its grass-roots voters will rally to a candidate who scorns the old orthodoxy.”
TPP vs. Democracy: Leaked Draft of Secretive Trade Deal Spells Out Plan for Corporate Power Grab
“Newly leaked classified documents show that the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, if it goes through as written, will dramatically expand the power of corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge—and supersede—domestic laws, including environmental, labor, and public health, and other protections. The tribunals, made infamous under NAFTA, were exposed in the ‘Investment Chapter’ from the TPP negotiations, which was released to the public by WikiLeaks…”
WikiLeaks Exposes Text from Secretly Negotiated TISA Trade Deal
“The website WikiLeaks released on Wednesday classified documents from the Trade in Services Agreement, or TISA, which is a huge trade agreement being negotiated in secret by the United States, the European Union and 22 other countries. The documents include a previously unknown annex to the TISA core chapter on “State Owned Enterprises,” which imposes unprecedented restrictions on SOEs and will force majority owned SOEs to operate like private sector businesses. The leaked documents show how stipulations outlined in the TISA documents advanced the “deregulation” of big corporations entering overseas markets. According to the leaked documents, the TISA rules would also restrict governments’ ability to determine the size or growth of certain economic activities and entities, preventing nations from limiting the size of foreign companies in the market. ‘The TISA provisions in their current form will establish a wide range of new grounds for domestic regulations to be challenged by corporations – even those without a local presence in that country,’ WikiLeaks warned”.
How TTIP Lost Steam
“One of the most contentious issues at the SPD’s convention was the party’s stance on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the European Union and Canada, negotiations for which concluded in 2014. It took a raucous intraparty battle and a political gambit by Sigmar Gabriel—the SPD leader, economic minister, vice chancellor, and likely challenger to Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2017 elections—to push support for the pact into the SPD’s platform. The CETA vote matters because some Europeans, particularly in Austria, France, and Germany, regard the controversy around the agreement as a dry run for a much larger clash over the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the mammoth free trade agreement between the United States and the EU. The fates of CETA and TTIP are intertwined, and like the CETA, TTIP, which is still being negotiated, is not out of the woods. As France and Germany prepare for major elections, opposition to TTIP has become a cause célèbre among Europe’s right-wing populists, farmers, environmentalists, antiglobalization activists, and some trade unions (particularly in the service sector). Together with some broader factors conspiring against TTIP’s completion, this opposition has made the pact’s prospects—and those of trade negotiations more generally—seem grim. The era of the big trade deal is certainly in hibernation. The question now is whether it is dead altogether.”
Globalization and free trade: wonders of a past era, now enemies of America?
“Globalization — the free flow of capital, jobs, and trade — was a pillar of the post-WWII geopolitical regime. Economists and the foreign policy establishment assure us that this globalization is an unqualified good thing — a ‘win-win’ for all parties. That is, of course, absurd. Globalization in its current form has clearly become problematic for America. It has weakened us in important ways during the past 3 decades. Unless we start to think more clearly about trade, the ill effects will grow both during this downturn and in the following recovery.”
Are We Witnessing the Beginning of the End of Globalization?
“So-called trade deals empower transnational corporations by radically compromising the nation-state’s capacity for democratic governance. This emasculation of democracy is accomplished in large part through the investor-state provisions which allow corporations to directly sue government for profits lost due to environmental, health or other legislation. Governments sign these agreements enthusiastically promising jobs and growth. But, while it has taken almost two generations, millions of American workers simply no longer believe the rhetoric.”
“Unfettered” Free Trade? If Only…
“although the United States maintains a relatively low average import tariff of around 3 percent, it also applies high tariffs on a wide array of “politically-sensitive” (read: highly lobbied) products: 131.8% on peanuts; 35% on tuna; 20% on various dairy products; 25% on light trucks; 16% on wool sweaters, just to name a few. (Agriculture is particularly bad in this regard.) We also maintain a long list of restrictive quotas on products like sugar, cheese, canned tuna, brooms, cotton, and baby formula. And although the U.S. has 14 free trade agreements (FTAs) with 20 different countries and is a longstanding member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), many of these same “sensitive” products have been exempted from the agreements’ trade liberalization commitments. Free trade for thee, but not for me….”
The Closing of the World Economy
“Support for freer trade and greater openness had in fact begun to falter well before economic nationalists like Trump and Farage took center stage. The same governments that count themselves among globalization’s greatest champions have been rolling it back steadily since the global financial crisis.”
Why we’re seeing the ugly new face of capitalism
“Employers have told workers to suck it up before. After the free-trade deals of the 1980s and 1990s, companies moved Canadian jobs to lower-wage climates. In the 1930s, bosses fought unions to prevent costs from increasing. But you have to go all the way back to the 1880s and 1890s to see profitable firms — running railroads and coal mines — demand workers keep working for less so they could make more. Today some companies in the advanced economies are trying to get workers to accept terms of employment that roll the clock back decades, simply to boost profits further. Costs of production in select job-starved markets are starting to close in on costs of production in emerging economies, once transportation and productivity concerns are factored in. Low-wage havens are found, and created, at home. If memory serves, globalization was sold as an opportunity to export the First World economy and conditions, not import a Third World standard for workers.”
Why Voters Don’t Buy It When Economists Say Global Trade Is Good
“According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted last month, only 35 percent of registered voters thought the United States gained from globalization, while 55 percent thought it lost. On issues of international trade, the current crop of candidates is following public opinion.”
How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump
“What happened with Chinese imports is an example of how much of the conventional wisdom about economics that held sway in the late 1990s, including the role of trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled.”
Free trade v populism: The fight for America’s economy
“There is no doubt that globalisation is facing its biggest political test in decades. The UK’s June vote to leave the EU and the prospect that this year’s US presidential contest could see the election of an avowed protectionist have raised fears that the model that has governed the global economy for more than 70 years is unravelling. So too has the growing opposition in the US and Europe to trade deals such as US President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership and the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.”
The Trans-Pacific Partnership would hurt black and Hispanic workers even more than white workers
“The White House is making one last push for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. However, growing imports of goods from low-wage, less-developed countries, which nearly tripled from 2.9 percent of GDP in 1989 to 8.4 percent in 2011, reduced the wages of the typical non-college educated worker in 2011 by ‘5.5 percent, or by roughly $1,800—for a full-time, full year worker earning the average wage for workers without a four-year college degree’….Overall, there are nearly 100 million American workers without a 4-year degree. The wage losses suffered by this group amount to roughly a full percentage point of GDP—about $180 billion per year. Workers without a 4-year degree constitute a bit less than 70 percent of the overall workforce, but three-quarters of black workers (75.5 percent) and more than four-fifths (85.0 percent) of Hispanic workers do not have a 4-year degree.”
Three more reasons why we need to stop CETA
“1. CETA really is TTIP by the backdoor. 2. Canada’s law could threaten our own protections. 3. Our negotiators said ‘yes’ to tar sands so they could rip open Canadian local government.”
Joint statement by Minister Freeland and France’s Minister of State Matthias Fekl: Opportunities for sustainable trade
When the authorities speak of the “challenges” posed by free trade agreements, are they signalling that there are deep problems? “Canada and France have identified three main challenges, which we intend to respond to in a coordinated manner by consulting and working together in appropriate forums: the democratic challenge, the environmental challenge, and the social challenge.”
Ottawa to talk compensation with dairy farmers for Canada-EU trade deal
How good of a deal is it, when Canadians need to be compensated for it, by other Canadians paying taxes? Why is Canada importing what it already produces? “The federal government will meet Canadian dairy farmers within 30 days to discuss a compensation package designed to ease any pain caused by Canada signing the Canada-European Union trade deal….After the Liberal government tabled its first budget, questions emerged about a $4.3-billion compensation package for Canadian farm groups that had been negotiated with Stephen Harper’s Conservative government….The compensation package was not only designed to help farmers ease into the Canadian-EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) but also the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Freeland signed in February.”
The Brexit vote and CETA
“Prior to the vote, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau commented, ‘Great Britain has always been a strong and positive voice around the European table in support of CETA. So we certainly hope that the outcome of tomorrow will continue to assure that CETA has as many strong voices in support of it as we move forward towards ratification and implementation of an important deal for Canadians, for jobs and for our shared future.’ Beyond the British government being represented on the Council of the European Union (which would have a critical say in the ratification of CETA), the UK also has 73 members in the 751-member European Parliament. It remains to be seen how their departure would impact the final ratification vote on CETA that is expected to take place in November-December of this year or in January-February 2017.”
CETA to be considered a “mixed” agreement, now more vulnerable to defeat
“It would appear that the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, will back down from its earlier statements and present the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) as a ‘mixed’ agreement rather than an ‘EU-only’ agreement. This is a dramatic turn of events and good news for opponents of the deal in that it prolongs the ratification process (one report suggests it could now take as long as four years to ratify) and makes it much more difficult for CETA to be passed given the growing number of European jurisdictions with deep concerns about the deal that will now be able to vote on it.”
EU Council decides to sign CETA trade agreement with Canada
“The Council of the EU has announced its decision to sign the free trade agreement with Canada (CETA), as well as to request the consent of the EU parliament to conclude the agreement, it said in a statement. The Council’s decision also involves provisional application of the agreement, says the statement published on the EU body’s official website.”
CETA and the Liberals’ faith-based reality
“The federal government makes its own ‘reality’ by crafting ‘facts’ to fit its policy objectives — no matter how outrageous they are when put to the test. Three numbers stand out in the talking points of federal governments under both Harper and Trudeau: that CETA will increase GDP by $12 billion, that it will create 80,000 jobs and that the newly created wealth will boost income by $1,000 per family.”
CETA Without Blinders: How Cutting ‘Trade Costs and More’ Will Cause Unemployment, Inequality and Welfare Losses
“CETA will lead to a reduction of the labor income share….CETA will lead to wage compression….CETA will lead to net losses of government revenue….CETA will lead to job losses….CETA will lead to net losses in terms of GDP”
Sovereignty, Borders, Immigration, and anti-Free Trade: The Rise of De-Globalization
Terminal Condition: Neoliberal Globalization
“After decades of protests and riots against neoliberal structural adjustment; after anti-globalization mass movements flourished across North America and Europe; after a large portion of Latin America and the Caribbean elected socialist governments; after waves of anti-Western cultural and religious revitalization movements (some violent, some not) have spread from Indonesia to Europe; after nationalist and nativist movements have achieved unprecedented political prominence in Europe since the 1930s; and, with entire libraries of research produced to show all of the illogic and injustices of corporate globalization which make sense only as the orchestration of the most massive transfer and concentration of wealth in history–after all of this, it would have been surprising if we were not yet in a position to speak of the impending death of neoliberalism. The neoliberal elites know this, and they are seized by an absolute panic as they see the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism come under mass, electoral repudiation in the heart of the international capitalist system, the US itself. Discussion of the collapse of the neoliberal imperial disorder is therefore far from premature; it is overdue.”
The inescapable trilemma of the world economy
“If we want more globalization, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty. Pretending that we can have all three simultaneously leaves us in an unstable no-man’s land.”
The Closing of the World Economy
“Support for freer trade and greater openness had in fact begun to falter well before economic nationalists like Trump and Farage took center stage. The same governments that count themselves among globalization’s greatest champions have been rolling it back steadily since the global financial crisis.”
Trump or not, America is pulling back from the world
“Almost without noticing, America is beginning to dramatically rethink the way in which it interacts with the world. As with so many things, Donald Trump is the clearest manifestation of the trend.”
Why Borders Matter: Paul Hirst
“We do not live in a borderless world. Borders still matter. Borders and national citizenship rules are a primary check upon migration. Migration is not limited just because of xenophobia. The great nineteenth-century flows occurred because of the vast demand for labour in the new neo-Europes, and migrants to countries like the USA or Argentina had to make do, as there were few welfare rights. Unregulated migration now would undermine both citizenship and welfare rights. This would threaten democracy, which depends of the notion of a national community. Thus a degree of exclusion of outsiders is essential to democracy, and democracy is a key basis for the legitimacy of a government’s external actions. The present system of international governance could not survive without populations defined by and governed within national borders.”
Why the Establishment Hates Trump
“Trump even challenges ‘the Enemy’ cornerstone of US ideology when he says ‘wouldn’t it be nice to get along with Russia and China for a change?’ Not very fascist of him. He was also open to nationalizing the Wall Street banks after 2008. None of this sees the light of day in the hate-Trump culture that been effectively mounted across even left-right divisions. Most of all, Trump rejects the whole misnamed ‘free trade’ global system because it has ‘hollowed out the lives of American workers’ with rights to corporations to move anywhere to get cheaper labour and import back into the US tariff-free. But again the connected meaning is repressed. That Trump also wants to get the US out of foreign wars at the same time, the other great pillar of corporate globalization, is the real danger to the transnational corporate state he has set in motion.”
How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen
“Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage.”
In Their Coastal Citadels, Democrats Argue Over What Went Wrong
“For decades, Democrats have been losing support from the white working class. In presidential elections of the 1990s, those voters split evenly between the parties. By 2012, white voters without college degrees favored millionaire Republican Mitt Romney over Mr. Obama in all but one competitive state, Iowa. This year, 67% of non-college-educated whites nationwide voted for Mr. Trump, according to exit polls. The Democratic Party’s white working-class base has deteriorated with the diminishing ranks of organized labor. Even within that typically reliable voting bloc, fissures emerged. Exit polls show that 43% of voters in union households went for Mr. Trump, just 8 percentage points behind Mrs. Clinton. The coasts and cities are home to the core coalition of women, minorities and young voters that powered Mr. Obama to two presidential victories, and had been expected to buoy the party for years to come. But without Mr. Obama on the ballot, the disparate elements of the party have lost elections in 2010, 2014 and 2016.”
101 Things We Learned from WikiLeaks’ Podesta Emails
“The information [provided in this review] is loosely organized into broad thematic groups. These include discussion of foreign policy; foreign campaign donors; the Clinton Foundation and suggestions of corruption; media manipulation; the corruption of the political system; Hillary Clinton’s private server scandal; campaign staffers ridiculing Bill Clinton; insider criticisms of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate; confusion over Hillary Clinton’s political stances; the corporate oligarchy; free trade; Hillary Clinton as a member of the establishment; the employment of identity politics; religion; and, the white working class.”
Blame the identity apostles – they led us down this path to populism
“The apostles of identity liberalism have fallen into Mill’s trap. They see authoritarianism in others, but not in themselves. They see discrimination in others, but not their own. In guarding their chosen tribes, they fail democracy’s ultimate test, of tolerance for the concerns of those with whom they disagree. Someone else is always to blame. Such tunnel vision has jeopardised the progress made by the cause of European liberalism over the past half-century. It has been given a bloody nose, and there are more on the way.”
Farewell, left versus right. The contest that matters now is open against closed
“The [US Republican and Democratic party] conventions highlighted a new political faultline: not between left and right, but between open and closed (see article). Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, summed up one side of this divide with his usual pithiness. ‘Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,’ he declared. His anti-trade tirades were echoed by the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.”
Meet the intellectuals leading France to the right
“For the new movement, political issues defined by the term ‘souverainisme’ — national sovereignty, migration, border controls, security, the constitution and cultural identity — are no longer extreme-right territory, they are also of legitimate concern to the left.”
J’accuse: Leftist intellectuals turn right
“Unusual ideological bedfellows in France are uniting against globalization and the euro.”
Death predicts whether people vote for Donald Trump
“It seems that Donald Trump performed the best in places where middle-aged whites are dying the fastest.”
Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here’s why
“We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.”
How Obama’s Economy Spawned Trump
“most Americans are not comparing the U.S. performance with that of other countries. They are comparing it with previous recoveries in this country, and they are evaluating it in light of their own circumstances. They are painfully aware that their household income is still lower than it was at the end of the Clinton administration and that the jobs many of them have gotten during the recovery pay much less than the jobs they lost during the recession.”
The Place That Wants Donald Trump Most
“Mr. Trump won Buchanan County with 69.7% of the vote in the March 1 Republican primary, the highest percentage vote he has collected in any U.S. county so far. A close look at the white, working-class enclave, which is in Virginia’s southwest, provides a clearer picture of why Mr. Trump inspires supporters and poses problems for anti-Trump GOP strategists. Voters here say Mr. Trump understands their frustration and will fight the Washington establishment on their behalf. In an area awash in uncertainty—Will mines remain open? Will the river flood? Must the young leave to find work?—he is a reassuring presence, someone who has visited their living rooms for years via television. Here, as elsewhere, his message of American renewal, closed borders and antigovernment populism resonates despite his brashness, even among Democrats.”
Donald Trump and Empire: An Assessment
“If we were to use his terminology, how can Donald Trump make the decline in US global power ‘beautiful,’ and how can he turn withdrawal into ‘greatness’? This is the truly daunting challenge that any US leader moving to change the current order must confront, while trying to hold off all the damage of a precipitous decline: effecting a transformation while appealing to American pride, speaking through the symbols and values cherished and understood by most, while projecting confidence and pointing to concrete benefits. That is a monumental task. In case it’s not understood: shaming Americans, decrying national pride, diminishing their quality of life, and telling them to suck it up—is not a viable strategy, not for maintenance of the status quo, and even less for taking the US into a post-imperial future. If Trump had not existed, then there would have been a need for history to invent him.”
The decline of the American empire and rise of Donald Trump
“The result of globalization and attack on labour rights was wages in the US and Canada (and in Europe too) stagnated – and have done so for more than 40 years. Unionization in the US has fallen from 35 per cent of all workers in 1954, down to 11.3 per cent today – and only 6.6 per cent in the private sector. Consequently, the capacity of workers and the middle class to garner a bigger portion of the economic pie began to fall.”
Why Trump Wins: He knows border wars have replaced culture wars
“Opposition to this establishment consensus has been advancing, by fits and starts, and is now too large to be ignored. Michael Lind of the New America Foundation argues that the 2016 election ratifies a party realignment that began in 1968, when white working-class voters started moving towards the GOP. The core of Trump’s supporters are the political descendants of what had been the backbone of the Democratic New Deal coalition: working-class whites, politically strongest in the South and flyover states. On the triad of trade, immigration, and foreign policy these voters are nationalist, not globalist—they would limit America’s intervention in foreign conflicts and subject the importation of products and people from the rest of the world to a more rigorous is-it-good-for-us test. (And by “us” they mean themselves, not the Fortune 500.) By nominating Trump, the Republican Party has finally been forced to come to terms with these sentiments, choosing a candidate who is largely disdainful of the globalist consensus of GOP donors, pundits, and think-tank experts. For Trump and his voters, the “Reaganite” basket of so-called “conservative” issues—free trade, high immigration, tax cuts for those with high incomes and entitlement cuts for the middle class—was irrelevant or actually undesirable.”
Donald J. Trump: Declaring America’s Economic Independence
“The Transpacific-Partnership is the greatest danger yet. The TPP would be the death blow for American manufacturing. It would give up all of our economic leverage to an international commission that would put the interests of foreign countries above our own. It would further open our markets to aggressive currency cheaters. It would make it easier for our trading competitors to ship cheap subsidized goods into U.S. markets – while allowing foreign countries to continue putting barriers in front of our exports. The TPP would lower tariffs on foreign cars, while leaving in place the foreign practices that keep American cars from being sold overseas. The TPP even created a backdoor for China to supply car parts for automobiles made in Mexico. The agreement would also force American workers to compete directly against workers from Vietnam, one of the lowest wage countries on Earth. Not only will the TPP undermine our economy, but it will undermine our independence. The TPP creates a new international commission that makes decisions the American people can’t veto.”
TRUMP ADVISER: Putting our national economic interest first — a new approach to trade agreements
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, the modern ‘globalization’ framework of free trade agreements and the international agencies that govern them were actually established to promote US foreign policy interests following World War II, not the interests of America’s domestic economy. Today, these foreign strategic objectives and the policies that advanced them are no longer relevant. The Marshall Plan is ancient history. Bretton Woods collapsed in the early 1970s. There hasn’t been a successful GATT round in over 20 years. The rebuilding of Europe and Japan are long completed. And fear of the Soviet Union is a distant memory. The world has changed, but globalization’s original architecture has failed to keep pace. As a result, the multi-lateral trade agreements and the massively complex bureaucratic institutions that govern them have become clouded, convoluted and impossible to interpret. America’s outdated trade architecture is unsettling American workers, who are fed up with what they interpret as elitist rhetoric of professorial cost-benefit analysis. In the face of outsourcing, offshoring and currency manipulations, American workers believe that only foreign countries, major multinational corporations and the wealthiest one percent benefit from current trade policy. The problem is compounded as central banks intervene with negative interest rates and governments accumulate mountains of new debt, while economic growth languishes, real wages stagnate, and inequality rises.”
Election 2016 Is Propelled by the American Economy’s Failed Promises
“The past decade and a half has proved so turbulent and disappointing it has upended basic assumptions about modern economics and our political system. This string of disappointments has resulted in one of the most unpredictable and unconventional political seasons in modern history, with the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Median household income, accounting for inflation, has dropped 7% since 2000, and the income gap widened between the wealthy and everyone else. Even though official measures of unemployment have receded from postrecession peaks, seven in 10 Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found. The 2016 election is shaping up in large part as a referendum on an economic model that is widely seen as failing.”
Donald Trump Does Have Ideas—and We’d Better Pay Attention to Them
“If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.”
Unique “Front Porch Focus Group” Explores the Appeal of Trump’s Right-Wing Message with White Working-Class Voters
“Worry is more prevalent than bigotry in determining voter choices. Historically, about one-third of the people we encounter on the canvass are ideologically right-leaning – and this test was no different. Among these voters, attacks on immigrants; on African-Americans, including President Obama; and on Muslims resonate, and hold sway. However, a far greater number of prospective voters are more deeply concerned about the economy and about their fates, and the future of their families, in a time of rapid change. When a conversation about the issues comes to the fore, many are willing to hear new information. This ability to connect with more and better information, and to gain a different perspective on the systemic reasons for economic, political and social inequality, is a major antidote to the dog-whistle politics of bigotry.”
Trump, Trade and Working Class Discontent
“The record of U.S. free trade policies for working and middle-class America reveals devastation, not benefit. For example, total U.S. employment since NAFTA and China trade the past two decades has witnessed a loss of more than 6 million U.S. manufacturing jobs. Perhaps as many as two thirds of which have been due to free trade alone, according to studies. Additional millions of jobs have been lost in communications, professional services, and other non-manufacturing industries. For the jobs that remain, moreover, wages in U.S. companies that export more have risen less than wages have fallen in companies harmed by the rise in imports. The net result is that both jobs and wages—and therefore median working-class incomes—are both negative. And that’s due to direct export-import effects….”
On Trade, Angry Voters Have a Point
“What seems most striking is that the angry working class — dismissed so often as myopic, unable to understand the economic trade-offs presented by trade — appears to have understood what the experts are only belatedly finding to be true: The benefits from trade to the American economy may not always justify its costs. In a recent study, three economists — David Autor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Dorn at the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson at the University of California, San Diego — raised a profound challenge to all of us brought up to believe that economies quickly recover from trade shocks. In theory, a developed industrial country like the United States adjusts to import competition by moving workers into more advanced industries that can successfully compete in global markets. They examined the experience of American workers after China erupted onto world markets some two decades ago. The presumed adjustment, they concluded, never happened. Or at least hasn’t happened yet. Wages remain low and unemployment high in the most affected local job markets. Nationally, there is no sign of offsetting job gains elsewhere in the economy. What’s more, they found that sagging wages in local labor markets exposed to Chinese competition reduced earnings by $213 per adult per year. In another study they wrote with Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price from M.I.T., they estimated that rising Chinese imports from 1999 to 2011 cost up to 2.4 million American jobs.”
Transcript: Donald Trump Speech in West Palm Beach Florida, October 13, 2016
“For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind. Our campaign represents a true existential threat like they haven’t seen before….It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities. Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit; Flint, Michigan; and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and all across our country. Take a look at what’s going on. They stripped away these town bare. And raided the wealth for themselves and taken our jobs away out of our country never to return unless I’m elected president.”
Why Trump and Sanders Were Inevitable
“There were, in retrospect, clear signs of what was to come—signs that if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did not appear on the scene, someone else like them would have. We’ve had decades of forewarnings as the top income earners —the ‘one percent’—began taking bigger shares of our economy starting in the 1980s: The anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s. The rise of Ross ‘NAFTA-will-suck-our-jobs-away’ Perot and Pat ‘Pitchforks’ Buchanan against the GOP establishment. The brief but intense Occupy Wall Street movement. The adoration of Elizabeth Warren. The warnings from superstar economist Thomas Piketty in recent years that the United States was suffering the worst income inequality in the developed world, worse than anything since the 1920s—and that it was not sustainable.”
Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016
“Any true understanding of this election requires an appreciation of the one huge political fault line that is driving America into a period of serious political tremors, certain to jolt the political Richter scale. It is nationalists vs. globalists. Globalists captured much of American society long ago by capturing the bulk of the nation’s elite institutions—the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations. So powerful are these institutions—in themselves and, even more so, collectively—that the elites running them thought that their political victories were complete and final. That’s why we have witnessed in recent years a quantum expansion of social and political arrogance on the part of these high-flyers. Then along comes Donald Trump and upends the whole thing.”
We Are Not the World: From Brexit to Trump to the rise of nationalist parties across Europe, the old division between left and right is giving way to a battle between self-styled patriots and confounded globalists
“Supporters of these disparate movements are protesting not just globalization—the process whereby goods, capital and people move ever more freely across borders—but globalism, the mind-set that globalization is natural and good, that global governance should expand as national sovereignty contracts. The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional left-right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron? But globalism is an ideology, and its struggle with nationalism will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last.”
Putin, ISIS, Ebola: How Globalization Is Harming Us More Than Helping Us
“Globalization as defined and led by the US and Europe has some deep flaws, deal-breaking ones, and large parts of the globe don’t want it. In the new global order, for example, borders are so porous that Ebola can make its way into the First World effortlessly, so it seems. The multicultural poly-sexual utopia without borders that American-style globalism sells as a matter of principle represents a threat of dissolution to many majority populations abroad. It is a huge losing bet on the part of the West and will lead to our system being rejected in the short and medium term. Instead, the alternative offered by our rivals of managed democracy or populist autocracy promises to hold back the uncontrolled Leviathan of globalization in markets, morals, sexual freedoms, media freedoms and even bacterial freedom. Many of the post-Soviet countries have only just emerged from the Socialist version of a global order only to find the integrity of their nation-states overwhelmed by the Western version.”
Putin’s anti-globalisation strategy
“…at a deeper level what Putin is doing is elaborating Russia’s response to globalisation. He is adamantly not following the advice of the ardent globalisers who believe that ‘globalisation is good!’…The fight against insecurity and risk is central to Putin’s strategy. By offering the Russian population, which had been traumatised by the disorder of the Yeltsin years, protection from the unpredictable impact of globalisation, Putin has secured a considerable measure of popular support.”
Column: Why there’s a backlash against globalization and what needs to change
“Globalization is under attack. The electoral victory of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote and the rise of an aggressive nationalism in mainland Europe and around the world are all part of a backlash to globalization. In each instance, citizens have upset the political order by voting to roll back economic, political and cultural globalization. Support for Brexit came in large part from those worried about their jobs and the entry of immigrants. Similarly, the Midwest of the U.S. – the industrial heartland hurt by global competition – was the linchpin of Donald Trump’s victory. But what exactly are these globalizations and why the discontent? A deeper examination of global integration sheds some light on how we got here and where we should go next.”
League of nationalists: All around the world, nationalists are gaining ground. Why?
“All societies draw on nationalism of one sort or another to define relations between the state, the citizen and the outside world. Craig Calhoun, an American sociologist, argues that cosmopolitan elites, who sometimes yearn for a post-nationalist order, underestimate ‘how central nationalist categories are to political and social theory—and to practical reasoning about democracy, political legitimacy and the nature of society itself’…”
Trump win spells doom for European Atlanticists
“The era of popular revolt is upon us. Disaffected and defiant, the mass of citizens are fed up with unresponsive, unrepresentative governments, on both sides of the Atlantic, that seem to only serve an unelected oligarchy….With Brexit and Trump there seems to be a long overdue renewal of democracy – albeit reactionary in some forms to date. The old order with its pretensions of ‘liberal values’ is being assailed. And Merkel, Hollande and their Atlanticist ilk sound uncannily like the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.
Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch: Higher education is isolated, insular and liberal. Average voters aren’t.
“The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as ‘educated’ voters and those who are described as ‘working class’ voters. The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump. College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities.”