Re: Imposing the US Dollar on Canada

["Alan G. Isaac" <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Ian Murray wrote:
> What, the kids putting their bodies on the line to expose the
> hypocrisies of the FTAA investor rights treaty that goes far beyond
> talking about simple tariff reduction schedules and the like, are
> supposed to tell the cops "your policy paradigm is flawed, we
> suggest operationalizing X,Y & Z instead"? Would that be before or
> after the tear gas is lobbed at them?






Well, since you brought it up,
we might as well hear another view
of what's going on.
Alan





Hearts and Heads
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT 22 April 2001

There is an old European saying: anyone who is not
a socialist before he is 30 has no heart; anyone
who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no
head.  Suitably updated, this applies perfectly to
the movement against globalization ? the movement
that made its big splash in Seattle back in 1999
and is doing its best to disrupt the Summit of the
Americas in Quebec City this weekend.

The facts of globalization are not always pretty.
If you buy a product made in a third-world
country, it was produced by workers who are paid
incredibly little by Western standards and
probably work under awful conditions.  Anyone who
is not bothered by those facts, at least some of
the time, has no heart.

But that doesn't mean the demonstrators are right.

On the contrary: anyone who thinks that the answer
to world poverty is simple outrage against global
trade has no head ? or chooses not to use it.  The
anti-globalization movement already has a
remarkable track record of hurting the very people
and causes it claims to champion.

The most spectacular example was last year's
election.  You might say that because people with
no heads indulged their idealism by voting for
Ralph Nader, people with no hearts are running the
world's most powerful nation.  Even when political
action doesn't backfire, when the movement gets
what it wants, the effects are often startlingly
malign.

For example, could anything be worse than having
children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes.  In 1993,
child workers in Bangladesh were found to be
producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom
Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from
countries employing underage workers.  The direct
result was that Bangladeshi textile factories
stopped employing children.  But did the children
go back to school? Did they return to happy homes?
Not according to Oxfam, which found that the
displaced child workers ended up in even worse
jobs, or on the streets ? and that a significant
number were forced into prostitution.

The point is that third-world countries aren't
poor because their export workers earn low wages;
it's the other way around.  Because the countries
are poor, even what look to us like bad jobs at
bad wages are almost always much better than the
alternatives: millions of Mexicans are migrating
to the north of the country to take the low-wage
export jobs that outrage opponents of Nafta.  And
those jobs wouldn't exist if the wages were much
higher: the same factors that make poor countries
poor ? low productivity, bad infrastructure,
general social disorganization ? mean that such
countries can compete on world markets only if
they pay wages much lower than those paid in the
West.

Of course, opponents of globalization have heard
this argument, and they have answers.  At a
conference last week I heard paeans to the
superiority of traditional rural lifestyles over
modern, urban life ? a claim that not only flies
in the face of the clear fact that many peasants
flee to urban jobs as soon as they can, but that
(it seems to me) has a disagreeable element of
cultural condescension, especially given the
overwhelming preponderance of white faces in the
crowds of demonstrators.  (Would you want to live
in a pre-industrial village?) I also heard claims
that rural poverty in the third world is mainly
the fault of multinational corporations ? which is
just plain wrong, but is a convenient belief if
you want to think of globalization as an
unmitigated evil.

The most sophisticated answer was that the
movement doesn't want to stop exports ? it just
wants better working conditions and higher wages.
But it's not a serious position.  Third-world
countries desperately need their export industries
? they cannot retreat to an imaginary rural
Arcadia.  They can't have those export industries
unless they are allowed to sell goods produced
under conditions that Westerners find appalling,
by workers who receive very low wages.  And that's
a fact the anti- globalization activists refuse to
accept.

So who are the bad guys? The activists are getting
the images they wanted from Quebec City: leaders
sitting inside their fortified enclosure, with
thousands of police protecting them from the
outraged masses outside.

But images can deceive.

Many of the people inside that chain-link fence
are sincerely trying to help the world's poor.
And the people outside the fence, whatever their
intentions, are doing their best to make the poor
even poorer.