Question for Discussion: What are the basic economic
assumptions behind Globalization?

Readings: Korten, "The Moral Justification of
Injustice"; Cavanagh, pp. 32-54; Meadows,
"Just So Much and No More" ; Faux, "Good Jobs?" ;
Stiglitz, "The World is Not Flat"

Video: Now: Jobs to India (2005)

Two Competing Models of Globalization

• Two Competing Models of Globalization ( in-class)
  
  
• The Key Questions on Globalization (in-class)
  
  
• Korten: The Moral Justification of Injustice ( in-class)
  
  
• Basic Assumptions behind Corporate Globalization
  ( in-class)
  
  
• Cavanugh: Key Ingredients of Globalization Model
  ( in-class)
  
  
• Global Development Model of Corporate Globalization ( in-class)
  
  
• The Promises of Economic Growth and Corporate Globalization ( in-class)
  
  
• Three basic assumptions of Economic Growth Supporters ( in-class)
  
  
• Critics of Globalization and Global Economic Growth
  ( in-class)
  
  
• America's Ecofootpring compared to other countries
  ( in-class)
  
  
• Beyond the Limits to Growth Computer Model
  (in-class)
  
  
• The Limits to Economic Growth ( in-class)
  
  
• Korten's Arguments against Economic Growth
  ( in-class)
  

---

The Limits to Growth Argument

• Beyond the Limits to Growth
  
  
• Beyond the Limits to Growth Computer Model
  (in-class)
  
  
• Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome
  
  
• Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem
  
  
• Development, Heresy, and the Ecological
  Revolution: A Challenge to the Economic
  
  
• Myths of the Polictical-Economic Worldview
  (in-class)
  
  
• WILL LIMITS OF THE EARTH'S RESOURCES
  CONTROL HUMAN NUMBERS?
  
  
• Die-Off.org
  
  
• Science Summit on World Population (1993)

---

Living Rights versus Property Rights

• THERE'S A DANGEROUS FLAW IN "GLOBAL
  ECONOMY" CONCEPT by David Korten
  
  
• PROPERTY RIGHTS VERSUS LIVING RIGHTS:
  DEFINING ISSUES FOR HABITAT II
  
  
• A NOT SO RADICAL AGENDA FOR A
  SUSTAINABLE GLOBAL FUTURE
  
  
• People-centered Development Forum
  
  
• Living Economies for a Living Planet:
  by David Korten

What are the Rules of Corporate Globalization?

• Fiddling as Rome Burns:
  Congress Stalls on the Financial Bailout
  
  
• Two Competing Models of Globalization ( in-class)
  
  
• The Key Questions on Globalization (in-class)
  
  
• Korten: The Moral Justification of Injustice ( in-class)
  
  
• Whitehouse For Sale.org
  
  
• Open Secrets: Money in Politics --
  Buying Political Favors and Influence ( in-class)
  
  
• Wallar, Global Wealth: The Great Divide gets Larger
  (Summary of the U.N. Study) ( in-class)
  
  
• U.N Study shows that Richest Two Percent
  Own Half of the World's Wealth ( in-class)
  
  
• Global Development Model of Corporate Globalization ( in-class)
  
  
• Cavanugh: Key Ingredients of Globalization Model
  ( in-class)
  
  
• Basic Assumptions behind Corporate Globalization
  ( in-class)
  
  
• Three basic assumptions of Economic Growth Supporters ( in-class)
  
  
• The Promises of Economic Growth and Corporate Globalization ( in-class)
  
  
• AFL-CIO: Exporting America ( in-class)
  
  
• Critics of the Corporatate Globalization and
  the Economic Growth Model ( in-class)
  
  
• The Limits to Economic Growth ( in-class)
  
  
• Korten's Arguments against Economic Growth
  ( in-class)
  
  
• Beyond the Limits to Growth Computer Model
  (in-class)
  
  
• America's Ecofootprint compared to other countries
  ( in-class)

Dobbs on Exporting Jobs

Lou Dobbs Tonight: see links on Corporations
Exporting American jobs

AFL-CIO: Exporting America

AFL-CIO: Problems with Exporting Jobs

---

The Global Rich and Poor

Global Map (1997)

How Unequal Are We?

Korten Graph of Income Inequality (1992)

Graph of Global Rich and Poor (1997)

The Global Rich and Poor: Percentage share (1997)

Where the Rich live in the Global Economy

Where the Rich live in Percentages per
Global region (1997)

Development and Globalization (2004)

---

Two models of globalization:

1. Corporate globalization--globalization from above

2. Democratic globalization--globalization from below

1. Democratic Globalization:
Globalization from Below

The World Social Forum

International Forum on Globalization

The Third World Network

People-centered Development Forum

Susan George: Another World is Possible

The Anti-Thomas Friedman Page

2. Corporate Globalization:
Globalization from Above

The World Bank

The World Trade Organization

The World Economic Forum

World Business Council for Sustainable Development

Thomas Friedman: Senseless in Seattle (1999)

---

Korten:The Moral Justification of Injustice

"The moral philosophers of market liberalism perpetrate similar distortions by neglecting the distinction between the rights of property and the rights of people. Indeed, they equate the freedom and rights of individuals with market freedom and property rights. The freedom of the market is the freedom of those with money. When rights are a function of property rather than personhood, only those with property have rights.

It is a basic premise of democracy that each individual has equal rights before the law and an equal voice in political affairs--one person, one vote..."

"It seems the corporate libertarians are a good deal more concerned with making money for the rich than with meeting human needs. Even the oft-cited claim of neo-classical economics to "value-free objectivity " supports this bias as it rests on the questionable premise that a decision is objective and value free if it is based solely on financial return. Never mind that such calculations almost always work to the advantage of those who have the money..."

"In his capacity as chief economist of the World Bank. Summers argued that it is economically most efficient for the rich countries to dispose of their toxic wastes in poor countries, because poor people have both shorter life spans and less earning potential than wealthy people . 22 In a subsequent commentary on the Summers memo, The Economist argued that it is a moral duty of the rich countries to export their pollution to poor countries because this provides poor people with economic opportunities of which they would otherwise be deprived."

"In a further twist of moral logic, corporate libertarians also argue that it is the moral duty of the rich to help the poor by consuming more. In international affairs this translates into an appeal for rich countries to increase their consumption of exports from poor countries--a convenient rationalization for colonizing more of the world's resources to support more consumption by those least in need. The possibility that the productive resources of low income countries might better be used by their own people to produce the things they need to improve their own lives is never considered."

"Those who work within our major corporate, academic, political, governmental, and other institutions find the culture and reward systems so strongly aligned with the corporate libertarian ideology that they dare not speak out in opposition for fear of jeopardizing their jobs and their careers. We must break through the veil of illusion and misrepresentation that is holding us in a self-destructive cultural trance and get on with the work of
re-creating our economic systems in service to people
and the living earth."

---

---

What is the larger argument of The Future of Progress? This book is an edited collection of papers and talks delivered by First and Third World environmental activists. These activists believe that the continued global development of the Earth threatens the future of our global industrial society. They argue that instead of bringing progress and solving the growing environmental and economic problems we face, further development and economic growth threatens to make these problems worse and even more difficult to solve. In order to understand their argument against progress and global development, we must first understand the basic assumptions that underlie the model of industrial development and progress that our current global economy and society is based on.

Since 1945, Northern developed countries have tried to help the Southern underdeveloped countries develop and become as economically successful and advanced as they are. Northern support for global development is based on the "myth of progress." Northern politicians, governments, and corporate leaders believe that there is one development path that all peoples will eventually follow; they believe that progress will eventually help develop so-called underdeveloped peoples and take them further along the development path taken by the so-called developed countries. This development path assumes an ascending ladder of progress, from primitive to modern to advanced industrial society. Development and progress will bring increased economic growth, wealth, advanced science and technology, more control over nature and human life, higher living standards, increased individual freedom, and more rational, moral, human societies. The North's development efforts are based on this ladder of progress and development.

In response to environmental critics of progress and development, its proponents argue that there is no other path that modern, industrial societies and the underdeveloped world can take. If we limit economic growth, reduce our consumption of resources, reduce and scale-back industrial agriculture, reduce our efforts to use science and technology to control the Earth, and limit our wealth, modern, industrial society and the underdeveloped world striving to become modern will be increasingly unable to solve their growing problems. If we stop progress and development, they argue, how will we feed our exploding populations, reduce and end poverty, conserve and protect the environment and resources, improve living standards, and reduce pollution and clean-up the environment. Supporters of progress believe that we have no other choice but to continue down the development path that we are on. They can't conceive of a viable alternative to the future promised by further progress and development.

Critics of progress counter that there are, indeed, other alternative paths to the human future. They argue that continued progress and global development far from being our only alternative is the absolute wrong choice. Progress and global development, they argue, have created the very problems that its supporters argue can only be solved my more progress. What is the larger argument that the editors of The Future of Progress make to support their thesis that further progress and development will undermine our future?

Their thesis is that "the global development model--far from offering solutions--is in fact a fundamental cause of present problems. They now argue that a series of interdependent variables together form the larger system that our global, industrial society is based on. These variables include: economic growth, increasing development of science and technology, increasing development of infrastructure to support growth, urbanization, ethnic and civil strife, increasing dependence on the global economy and trade, increasing population growth, increasing cultural breakdown,and increasing industrialization of agriculture. Let's now look at how together these interdependent variables create a larger system that threatens the future of our global industrial civilization.

Economic growth is the central assumption of the global development model. Increasing economic growth is said to create more wealth and resources that will improve the standard of living and help solve the growing problems that societies face. But increasing economic growth requires expanded production and use of scarce global resources and increased pollution and waste. If the First World, with 20 percent of the world's population, already consumes 80 percent of the global resources and wealth, how can the 80 percent of the world that only consume 20 percent of the resources and wealth ever hope to catch up with the standard of living of the First World? In order to do so, the global economy would have to grow to 16 times its current level? They argue that the global environment, which cannot sustain our current rates of growth, could not support such massive levels of production, resource depletion, and pollution. Long before we reached this level of growth, the global environment would have collapsed due to our increasing demands on global resources, biological services, and on the environment to absorb waste and pollution.

But proponents of continued economic growth argue that we don't have to worry about such environmental limits to growth. They declare that advances in science and technology will enable the economy to continue to grow and expand the ability of the Earth to support such growth and absorb such waste and pollution. But critics argue that our increasing reliance on science and technology to expand the Earth's environmental limits to growth is creating new problems that we may not be able to predict and control.

In order to support continued economic growth, governments and societies must create and expand new infrastructure, such as roads, communications, housing, water and sewage systems, and energy resources. In order to pay for this infrastructure, Third World countries had to borrow billions and billions of dollars from 1945 to the present from the World Bank and First World Banks. First World development agencies promised these countries that if they invested in the infrastructure that the resulting economic growth would more than pay off their loans. However, this didn't happen. Instead, Third World countries were increasingly forced to dedicate more and more of their agriculture, forestry, and fisheries to export crops and resources to the First World in order to pay off their debts. This focus on export crops forced millions of small farmers off their lands and drove them into the cities. In many cases, Third World governments and global corporations expropriated their land for export crops, forcing them to move to the exploding cities of the Third World.

As a result of the increasing growth of Third World cities, urban problems such as crowding, lack of affordable housing, pollution, lack of water and sewage, and lack of high-paying jobs quickly got out of hand in much of the Third World. But these problems were soon made worse, because in order to pay off their debt to the First World, Third World governments were forced to cut government spending on housing, education, water and sewage, transpiration, and health care. This made it increasingly impossible for Third World cities to solve the increasing problems they faced.

But many supporters of development countered that these problems were just temporary. They argued that global corporations were increasingly moving to such Third World cities and providing jobs and opportunities. If these people worked hard and invested in their future, they could afford to educate their children, pay the taxes needed to support city services, and create a higher standard of living in these crowded urban areas. But this unfortunately rarely happens, because of the increasing number of children Third World families have, they find that what ever additional money and resources they make is consumed by their larger families. However, this is a little misleading. They are having larger families because having more children is their only insurance that the family will bring in enough money and food to support the family. Often, Third World families force their children as young as seven and eight to work in the factories created by global corporations.

Now, supporters still argue that these children and their families might be suffering now, but if they continue to work hard they will very quickly improve their standard of living. But this doesn't often happen. The problem Third World families face is that their salaries don't increase rapidly enough to help them provide for their families. So they continue to live in a hand to mouth existence. Why is this? The global economy has made it possible for global corporations to keep the wages of Third World peoples down. If workers in one country demand increasing wages and higher living standards, then these global companies will move their factory to another country where the workers will often work for even less money. This is true for Mexico today. Because of global trades, Mexican clothing workers are losing their jobs because global companies are moving their factories from Mexico to China.

As a result of global competition for jobs, Third World workers aren't able to improve their already low standards of living. But it gets worse. Because so many Third World countries are trying to export their crops and resources to the First World in order to pay off their debts, the price they get for their exports are falling. So what do they have to do? These countries produce more crops and export more resources to be able just to pay the interest on their debt. This only further destroys the environment and resources of these Third World countries. But there are additional pressures on the environment and natural resources. In order to keep global corporations in their countries, Third World government promise not to enforce labor, environmental, and health regulations. If they attempt to regulate these global companies, there is always the threat that they will move somewhere else with even less regulations. All of this, causes the environment in these Third World countries to deteriorate even faster. Thus economic development, efforts to pay off their debts, and the need to attract global corporations is causing and exacerbating the environmental crisis in these Third World countries.

So what do peoples in these countries now do, facing continued poverty and a growing environmental threat to their health and futures? These problems often lead to ethnic and civil strife and conflict. Competing ethnic groups attempt to use the government and limited economic resources to protect their ethnic groups at the expense of others. This quickly leads to social and economic conflict, violence, and in the case of Somalia and Rwanda genocide. In the face of these growing threats to their future, many Third World peoples face cultural breakdown, the loss of hope, and despair.

But increasing numbers of Third World peoples, having given up on their futures in their own country, are migrating to the First World. They have seen wonderful advertising and TV programs describing the wondrous lifestyles and wealth and affluence of the First World. Instead of suffering in unbearable conditions, with little hope for a better future, many attempt to illegally migrate to the First World. Illegal immigrants are flooding into Europe, the United States, and into Japan and Korea. This growing illegal immigration from the Third World has caused First World peoples and governments to try to restrict and greatly limit their immigration. First World peoples claim that they aren't responsible for the problems that these Third World immigrants are escaping in their own countries. But are they?

Faced with these growing systemic problems created by global development in the Third World, First World economic and political elites continue to argue that only increased economic growth and development will solve these problems. But, as the editors of The Future of Progress have argued, it is precisely this progress and development that is causing these problems. If progress and development aren't the solutions to these increasing global economic and environmental problems, then what are the solutions? Can we afford to continue on our current path, desperately clinging the myth of progress? This is the larger question that this book attempts to answer.