[PEN-L:11017] Globalization (2 & 3 of 3 fine thoughtful articles)

[Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Sid Shniad in Canada for sharing these:
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http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbserge.html

IS GLOBALISATION INEVITABLE AND
DESIRABLE?

When Market Journalism Invades the World
	SERGE HALIMI
	Le Monde diplomatique

What should we - journalists, intellectuals - do in a world where 358
billionaires have more assets than the combined incomes of nearly half
of the planet's population? What should we do when Mozambique,
where 25% of children die before the age of five from infectious
diseases, spends twice as much paying off its debt as it does on health
and education? What should we do in a world where, according to the
UNDP administrator, if present trends continue, economic disparities
between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to
inhuman? What should we do when, within democratic countries
themselves, money dominates the political system until it becomes the
system, those who write the checks write the laws and ask the questions,
and increasingly citizens seem to be replaced with investors?

But can we still, as journalists and intellectuals, denounce this situation
and suggest remedies when so many of these billionaires - the Bill
Gates, Rupert Murdochs, Jean-Luc Lagarderes, Ted Turners, Conrad
Blacks of the world - own the papers in which we write, the radios on
which we speak, the television networks in which we appear? When so
much of the news and culture that is fed into developing nations comes
from industrial countries and so little of the news the industrial countries
ever hear about seeps in from developing nations? When those who
write the checks and write the laws and ask the questions and invest and
divest and downsize, are also our employers, our providers of
advertising revenue, our trend-setters, our decision-makers our news-
makers?

In other words, can we even think of doing what we must in this global
world, doing what we should, as journalists and as intellectuals,
comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, being a counter-
power, a voice for the voiceless, when so many of us are as much a part
of the ruling class as the business elite itself? When so many of us echo
the speeches of the powerful and blame the attitudes of the poor?

Unfortunately, if the questions are necessary, the answers are obvious.
Most of us cannot, most of us will not do what they must. And this too
is the result of the type of globalisation we have let happen. Although I
do not believe this globalisation to be inevitable, the media are trying to
make it seem inevitable and to pretend it to be desirable. And no one -
least of all us journalists and intellectuals - should deny the power of the
ideas which we disseminate and back to the drumbeat of around-the-
clock propaganda in a sleepless and borderless world.

Two and a half years ago, at Le Monde diplomatique, we called this
propaganda pensee unique. The expression caught on so fast that, within
a month, candidate Jacques Chirac used it to re-ignite his sputtering
presidential campaign. And three months later, he had become president
of France. Needless to say, the sense of the expression has lost a lot
with its new popularity... So what is pensee unique, or more precisely
what was it before its meaning became so blurred? And why should we
oppose it?

 It is the ideological translation of the interests of global capital, of the
priorities of financial markets and of those who invest in them. It is the
dissemination through leading newspapers of the policies advocated by
the international economic institutions which use and abuse the credit,
data and expertise they are entrusted with: such institutions as the World
Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the World Trade Organization.

Easy to spot in most countries, and in constant expansion because of
globalisation, this new orthodoxy results in submitting democratically-
elected governments to the one and only policy claimed to be
sustainable, that which has the consent of the rich. Speaking of this, and
trying to sound rational and Anglo-Saxon, a French essayist, Alain Minc
explained: The totalitarianism of financial markets does not please me. I
find it alienating. But I know it is there. And I want everyone in the elite
to know it too. I am like a peasant who does not appreciate hail and yet
he knows he will have to live with it. What I mean is simple: I don't
know whether the markets think right. But I know one cannot think
against the markets. If you do not respect a certain number of canons, as
rigorous as those of the Church, the 100,000 illiterates who make the
markets will blow the whole economy away. Experts have to be the
propagandists of that reality. When he said experts, he also implied
journalists of course. And, in this respect, he is served well enough.

But should one accept this nice vignette of pensee unique, this suave
legitimation of a new dictatorship, that of financial markets, politics will
amount - and it largely does - to little more than a pseudo-debate
between parties of government shouting out the minuscule differences
that separate them and silencing the significant convergences that unite
them. Electoral disaffection will be, is already, the result of this non-
debate.

 In the United States, where foreign companies heavily invested in the
White House coffees funding the President's reelection - thereby
blurring even further the line between national politics and global
commerce - only 48,8% of the eligible voters went to the polls last
November, the lowest number since 1924. This indifference almost
amounted to a quiet expression of civil disobedience.

But I would like to take another example, this one from Greece, and see
how the mainstream press, in this instance The Washington Post,
reacted to it by drilling into our brains the major postulates of what we,
at Le Monde diplomatique, also like to call market journalism. Last
December, as Greek peasants were barring the roads in protest of
austerity measures threatening their survival, one of them complained:
The only right we have is the right to vote and it leads us nowhere. An
election had been held, leading to the victory of a pro-business socialist
party. And when it happened, The Washington Post had concluded: This
was the first truly modern election in the history of the birthplace of
democracy ... The two parties essentially agree on most of the major
issues.

Can we, as journalists, as intellectuals, accept the idea that a modern
democracy is one in which the major parties agree on most issues? And
if we do, as is too often the case, how dare we bemoan the rise of so-
called extremism and populism when it is but the mere consequence of
the legitimate anger that comes from a truncated political debate in a
socially polarised society? We all make fun of the tendency, especially
in America, to be politically correct. But don't we fall in the trap of
being economically correct - cheerleaders for the stock market, asleep at
the switch when Robert Maxwell was robbing his companies, or maybe
just too busy then writing fawning profiles of Carlos Salinas's economic
miracle...?

In three years, the new millenium, a bridge to the 21st century: the
definition of modernity and of its opposite is, I believe, one of the most
telling instances of the weight of this pensee unique. When one listens
to the mass media, modernity is almost invariably equated with free
trade, strong currencies, deregulation, privatisations, communication (of
those who have the means to communicate with each other in the virtual
communities they create), Europe (insofar as it is that of free trade,
strong currencies, privatizations, and communication).

 Outdated notions, on the other hand, are almost invariably associated
with the welfare state, government in general (unless it shrivels into a
lean and mean law-and-order machine), unions (which are said to
defend special interests, unlike those of, say, big business), the nation-
state (guilty of fostering nationalism), the people (always likely to be
entranced by populism).

Then let me say this: their modernity is archaic. It is as old as the steam
machine. And their outdated notions have never been more necessary.
Too often, we journalists pretend the opposite. So, yes indeed we must
oppose globalisation and its logical consequences. And, most of all, we
must fight the belief that it is inevitable. In this respect, Le Monde
diplomatique and the Financial Times cannot but be allies. Because,
what, at Le Monde diplomatique, could we add to the excellent analysis
of Martin Wolf in an article he wrote two years ago. The article was
entitled: The Global Economy Myth. and it said: Global economic
integration is far from irresistible. Governments have chosen to lower
trade barriers and eliminate foreign exchange controls. They could, if
they wished, halt both processes. They must. Let us help them.

But, clearly, this is not the sense of the comments we have just heard.
Because, what strikes me in the discourse of the apostles of the market
and of globalisation is its extremism, its oblivion of the notion of
healthy doubt. It's the analogy one easily can draw with the cant of
communists thirty or forty years ago.

According to you, markets have to be a great model for human kind, and
so does globalisation. And when these don't quite work out, we hear:
Give us more time, Let's go one more step, Change is always painful,
What we've seen wasn't quite pure enough, If only the people were
better, more pliable, things would have worked beautifully.

Social inequalities? Let's deny their existence or claim they exist
because ... we don't have enough markets. Not enough school or hospital
vouchers. Not enough enterprise zones. Not enough tax breaks. Not
enough pension funds. Not enough competition within the civil service.
Like with Stalinism before, every stumble in the march toward a pure,
radiant, bountiful market society is explained by the timidity of the
march, not by its direction. And, like with Stalinism before, the critics of
your model have to be irrational, in need of a reeducation program or of
a mental treatment?

Well, it might be - just might be - that the market is a model that doesn't
work well for most people; that markets can be a great wealth-creating
machine, but not so great when it comes to building a human, just, and
decent society for most of us. And what will it take us to learn that?
How many people living in poverty? How many people sealed out of
what Mr Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, called
the irrational exhuberance of the market? How many people sealed out
of the gated communities of the rich? How many people behind bars?
How many riots? And which proportion of us convinced that democracy
is not for them?

If the fall of communism and of its related certainties about the nature of
mankind have taught us anything, it should not be the need for another
totalitarianism, for another tyranny - that of financial markets. But the
value of doubt and the need for dissidents.

Let us all relearn the value of doubt.
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http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbpet.html

IS GLOBALISATION INEVITABLE AND
DESIRABLE?

The great war machine
	Riccardo Petrella
	Le Monde diplomatique

To be opposed to the kind of aggressive globalisation typical of a market
economy that is capitalist, liberalised, deregulated, privatised, highly
technocratic and competitive does not imply opposition to other forms
of government and globalisation that rely on cooperation - quite the re-
verse. This, after all, is a need perceived by hundreds of thousands of
organisations that are trying to set in place, in every corner of the globe,
new principles and new, cooperative forms of world government.

These are organisations active in all areas with an impact on the security
of mankind. In the military field they oppose the proliferation of nuclear
weapons and promote general disarmament; in the environmental field
they encourage sustainable development in line with the recommenda-
tions of the 1992 Rio Conference; and, in relation to security of food
supply, they are seeking to bring to an end the scandal of the 800 mil-
lion people suffering from malnutrition. Those organisations are also
strongly represented in the dialogue between different cultures and civi-
lisations and in the development of scientific and technological research
geared towards human and social needs etc. The most serious obstacle
in their path is globalisation in its current form, based on the primacy of
the interests of private enterprise and its freedom of action that is sub-
ject to no boundaries, and the sovereignty of an - allegedly - self-
regulating market.

Instead of distributing the planet's material and non-material resources -
never mind its human resources - in the best possible way, globalisation
is a source of wide-spread dysfunctionalism and brazen waste. Catering
for the needs of society is not, admittedly, one of its objectives. And that
is why claims as to the effectiveness of globalisation made in some
quarters are quite simply absurd.

After the dollar ceased to be gold-convertible at a fixed rate - a decision
taken by US President Richard Nixon in 1971 - and capital movements
became generally liberalised (in the United States in 1974 and through-
out the European Community as of 1990) the world has been in a state
of total monetary instability. We have seen the development of a finan-
cial economy that is purely speculative and increasingly dissociated
from - when it is not completely at odds with - the real economy and a
genuine industrial culture. In some areas, the aim of short term profit-
ability triggers crises of overproduction (in the car industry, the elec-
tronics industry, the information technology industry and the steel indus-
try); in others it is the cause of shortages (in housing, education and
food supply) and in many other sectors it leads to falls in productivity
(basic cereals and data processing systems etc).

Globalisation steers economies towards production structures geared to
the ephemeral and the evanescent (because the lifespan of products and
services is generally and extensively reduced) and to the precarious
(temporary work, flexible working and the imposition of part-time
working). Instead of constantly enhancing the available resources it ren-
ders them obsolete, useless and unable to be recycled as rapidly as pos-
sible). All this is to the detriment of work with a human face and social
interaction.

On the pretext of exploiting the right resources, from the right place, for
the right product, on the right market and at the right time, for the right
consumer, globalisation of production structures allows the big networks
of multinationals to exploit small and medium-sized enterprises inten-
sively and at the lowest possible cost, at a world level. Marginalised into
the role of increasingly vulnerable subcontractors, these SMEs are con-
sidered to be nothing more than profit centres at the service of the big
corporations. The situation is worse still for those SMEs which are
themselves subcontracting from larger subcontractors. Insecurity and a
sense of exploitation is no longer the prerogative of workers, peasants
and the self-employed - small businesses are now genuinely prey to the
same uncertainties.

Re-engineering, flexible production, externalisation, downsizing: all
these new management techniques are contributing to the development
of the great global machine of the capitalist free market, whose sole ob-
jective is to extract the maximum profit at the lowest cost from the
world's resources. Resources, individuals, groups within society, towns,
regions, indeed whole countries are abandoned or excluded: they have
not been judged profitable enough by - or for - the global machine.
Hence the frenzy of competition they engage in order to be competitive,
that is to say simply in order to survive.

Are we then going to allow this great war machine to be the sole arbiter
of the economic, technological, political and social history of the 21st
century?

* Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, President of the
Reader's Association, Le Monde diplomatique