Globalisation: interesting article putting it straight

DadaKopf

This article appeared in The Observer last Sunday. With all the attempts by the O'Connell Street shop owners trying to stop people from marching down the street, the 'Sweatshop' Nikes and anti-capitalist coverage gearing up for May day and protests in Genoa, I thought you guys might be interested in this:

This an abbreviated version:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">People have lost faith in politics, because they no longer know what governments are good for. Thanks to the steady withdrawal of the state over the past 20 years from the public sphere, it is corporations, not governments, that increasingly define the public realm.

Unregulated or under-regulated by governments, corporations set the terms of engagement themselves. In the Third World we see a race to the bottom: multinationals pitting developing countries against each other to provide the most advantageous conditions for investment, with no regulation, no red tape, no unions, a blind eye turned to environmental degradation. It's good for profit, but bad for workers and local communities [...] Globalisation may deliver liberty, but not fraternity or equality.

When the European Union tried to ban synthetic hormones from beef on the basis of strong evidence that they could cause cancer, reduce male fertility and in some cases result in the premature onset of puberty in young children, it found itself unable to do so thanks to a WTO ruling which put the interests of Monsanto, the US National Cattlemen's Association, the US Dairy Export Council and the National Milk Producers Federation first.

This is the world of the Silent Takeover, a world in which governments can no longer be relied on to protect the people's interests [...] So it is left to us, through individual action, to take the lead. In a world in which power increasingly lies in the hands of corporations rather than governments, the most effective way to be political is not to cast one's vote at the ballot box but to do so at the supermarket or at a shareholders' meeting.

Because, when provoked, corporations respond. While governments dithered about the health value of GM foods, supermarkets faced with consumer unrest pulled the products off their shelves overnight. While nations spoke about ethical foreign policy, corporations pulled out of Burma rather than risk censure by customers. George W may have backed down on his campaign pledges to limit CO 2 emissions, but BP, a corporation, continues to spearhead their reduction. And when stories broke over the world of children sewing footballs for Reebok for a pittance, what did governments do? Nothing. But the corporation, fearing a consumer boycott, stepped in with innovative plans for dealing with the child labour problem.

60 per cent of UK consumers are prepared to boycott stores or products because they are concerned about their ethical standards. [...] Monsanto was brought to its knees by a coalition of eco-warriors and Britain's Women's Institute members. In America, the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility, with $110 billion at its disposal, is among the ethical investors now using shareholder power to 'regulate' corporate manoeuvres and get corporations to do good.

Can we entrust the public interest to consumer and shareholder activists? Can shopping adequately replace voting? No, it cannot. The world cannot be simplified to the extent that consumer politics tends to demand. Is GM food necessarily always bad for consumers or the environment? Or could this technology be harnessed for good? Child labour may be distasteful to Western expectations, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of Third World children?

Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest. Moreover, populist politics can easily result in tyranny, not necessarily of the majority, but by those who can protest most effectively. Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism give greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those with the greatest purchasing power, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest that favours the middle classes and the outpouring of dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie.

Nor should the takeover by corporations of governments' responsibilities be viewed as a reason for governments to withdraw. Despite the roles corporations are beginning to play in the social sphere, despite the fact that they may be able to play some role in alleviating poverty and inequity and protecting the environment, social investment and social justice will never become their core activity. Their contribution to society's needs will always remain at the margins. Corporate social responsibility cannot be thought of as a reasonable proxy for state responsibility.
We must also ask ourselves whether a price will be exacted for acts of corporate benevolence. Today Microsoft puts computers in our schools; will it tomorrow determine what our children learn? When Mike Cameron, a 19-year-old student, turned up at Greenbriar High School in Evans Georgia on official 'Coke Day' wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo he was suspended. Channel One Network is now notorious for having provided 12,000 American schools with money and goods in exchange for beaming their commercials directly into the classroom.

[...]

In New Zealand, a country that embraced free market fundamentalism with enthusiasm in the early 1980s, the new Labour administration is implementing changes that for the past 20 years would have been considered heretical. Workplace accident insurance has been renationalised, a state-run People's Bank will open soon in which personal banking fees will be 20 to 30 per cent lower than those charged by private banks, tax cuts for high earners have been reversed and trade union rights boosted. As Prime Minister Helen Clark has said, New Zealand's experiment in market fundamentalism has failed.

[...]

As far back as 1968, Margaret Thatcher said in a famous speech: 'There are dangers in consensus: it could be an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything. No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do.' The irony is that by buying so wholeheartedly into the form of capitalism initiated by Thatcher and Reagan, British politics has fallen into this very trap, leaving us the electorate increasingly alienated from and distrustful of politics, and providing us with little alternative but to protest rather than vote. Until the Government regains the trust of the electorate, the people will continue to scorn democracy. Until the state reclaims the people, the people will not reclaim the state.
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Yossarian

This also in the news,
Europe adopts DCMA equivelent...


http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/intprop/news/copyright.htm



[This message has been edited by Yossarian (edited 12-04-2001).]

--Kaiser--

In University of Limerick a referendum was passed yesterday to ban Nescafe products from the campus, because of Nestle's heavy marketing of baby milk powder in devoloping countries as an alternative to breastfeeding.

But the water quality in third world countries is not very good.So the baby milk powder results in about a million infant deaths a year.

2100 students voted.
Motion passed 1900 - 200

Belisarius

Those poor 200 ,where will they get thier gold blend 37? lol
Seriously though ,crackin stuff Koph

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Shrewgar!

adnans

about the kid that got suspended for wearing the pepsi t-shirt.

"perhaps the most infamous of these experiments (branding experiments)occured in 1998, when Coca-Cola ran a competition asking several (American) schools to come up with a strategy for disturbing Coke coupons to students. The school that devised the best promotional strategy would win $500. Greenbriar High School in Evans, Georgia took the contest extremely seriously, calling an official Coke day in late March during which all students came to school in Coca-Cola t-shirts, posed for photograph in a formation spelling Coke, attended lectures given by Coca-Cola executives and learned about all things black and bubbly in their classes. It was a little piece of branding heaven untill it came to the principal's attention that in an act of hideous defience, one Mike Cameron, a nineteen-year-old senior, had come to the school wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo. He was promptly suspended for the offense. "I know it sounds bad - 'Child suspended for wearing Pepsi T-shirt on Coke Day.'" said principal Gloria Hamilton. "It really would have been acceptable... if it had been in-house, but we had the regional president here and people flew in from Atlanta to do us the honour of being resource speakers. These students knew we had guests."

and it gets worse for the American schools, corporate businesses invest money into schools and colleges and become the official sponsor for the development and design of the new courses.

Channnel One (as mentioned above) provides schools with educational videos and with this it includes all the commercials and adverts thrown in, meanwhile it charges advertisers top dollar for accessing its pipeline to classrooms - twice as much as regular TV stations because, with mandatory attendance and no-channel changing or volume control, it boasts something no other broadcaster can "no audience erosion"

btw, channel one broadcasts in 12,000 American Schools.

scary indeed.

adnans

Evil Phil

Unfortunately this article is very true. I don't vote in elections, but I do try to shop "ethically".

Does anybody know which organisation was responsible for the anti-globalisation protests in Prague? I'd be interested in finding out more about them.

Jim Daniels

You probably have already, but read Naomi Klein's excellent No Logo.
Its all about this kind of stuff.

Blitzkrieger

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Until the state reclaims the people, the people will not reclaim the state.</font>

I posted a topic on that last week but it disappeared while the board was having problems. I can't be arsed typing it again

DadaKopf

UCD also voted to ban Nestlé products from its Union shop a few years ago after all those recent allegations of human rights abuses and unethical advertising and packaging.

It doesn't happen half enough as it should, but sometimes students do care about stuff!

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"I collect spores, moulds and fungus."

amp

It p!sses me off too, with new charges trying to be set up for refuse collection, water etc, you've got to start wondering where all the tax money's going.
Obviously the government like many others is trying to charge for services normally paid for by our tax's so that they can cut tax to make themselves more popular.
Then they're also selling off the semi-states. Eircom, then Aer lingus (eventually) and god knows what else. Trouble is, they were set up and subsidised by our tax money.
When they're sold any profits they make go to shareholders not back into the public coffers.
Ok so the idea is to bring in compitetion and get rid of the "evil" monopolies. So how many postal services should we have?

Honestly, it's like our government is in the playground and all the other kids are smoking and telling Bertie that it's only great and he should try it.

The worlds population tire of politics and the fact that they all seem to stand for the same thing, and most of the time they do. But that's no reason not to vote.

So the answer is to use your vote, vote for Ming the Mericless or the Greens or whoever you feel genuinely stands for something. Or just go in and spoil your vote. Whatever, if enough people voted the system would have to change.

After all we've only had our own government for the last 78 odd years.

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