Clarence
Valley Environment Centre
Winter 2000 Newsletter
Globalism - Free Flow For
Who?
Economics
- the root cause of most of the world's environmental and social problems?
While we rail against bad environmental and social outcomes, they're often
symptoms of the global financial order that reverberates in every corner
of the world. Who understands what's going on? Let's try to work it out.
Economics is about who controls the means of production - land, labour and capital. Capitalism is the political dominance of private owners of the means of production. It's about the free play of market forces.
What's global capitalism?
It's about the free flow of goods and services throughout the world, with profitability as the measure of success. It's the world as one big market place. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation set the rules. What's wrong with that? Those rules set economic efficiency ahead of human rights, workets rights and the environment. They force countries to remove protection for their domestic food producers. This drastically changes the ability of the global community to feed itself, and of individual nations to control their food security. It means greater freedom of the big to drive out the small. It means people will depend on distant markets with unpredictable price swings for their daily meals. In the global market, competition means keeping costs low, and the easiest to control are wages. Open markets in farm products, or clothing, or computers, pit workers in different countries against each other. That's why we end up with cheap t-shirts. Whoever made it didn't get paid much. The Australian t-shirt company which pays a fair wage can't compete.
That's why factrories close down. Poorer nations are forced to cut spending on education and health care, close down unions, sell off precious natural resources, and undermine smalll businesses and farmers in order to compete. That's why all those people demonstrated at Seattle and Washington. There's a growing movement against globalism. People are demanding a rethink of international trade rules, beginning with the premise that capital has social obligations. There's a social and economic mortgage on all capital - it's been built on generations of human labour and use of natural resources. Corporations have a debt to pay back to society and nature.
Locally, what can we do?
- First, get informed. Find out what's what in economics. Look on the Internet for more innformation about peoples' movements against globalism, like wwww.subvertise.org.
- Second, use your information in you buying decisions.
- Third, use LETS (join through the CEC).
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