Saturday, 7 May 2011
POST
Globalisation as a challenge to attempts to produce a just society.
What is globalisation?
The term used neutrally describes the process by which societies, and cultures around the world have become closely integrated, perhaps through associations, telecommunications or IT.
Most people are in favour of this concept, if I want to phone my friend in USA for example no one would say that this is a bad thing. Many clubs, associations and Unions have international affiliations so in this respect they too are global institutions, with this sort of globalisation no one would deny that they are positive asset to people all around the world.
However the word ‘globalisation’ also has another meaning; it has to a large extent been appropriated by super powerful commercial interests that exploit the innocuous, neutral concept of globalism and use it as a weapon with which deflect criticism of their own behaviour by portraying the opponents of globalisation as backward looking luddites.
Some people enjoy unimaginable wealth, at the same time two hundred million children under the age of five are under weight because of lack of sufficient food supply. Some fourteen million children die each year because of hunger related illnesses. (Unicef 2006)
This type of deprivation is not only confined to the third world; even in wealthy countries like the US some 6M adults and 3.5M children experience outright hunger.
According to the US Department of Agriculture some 10% of US households do not have enough food to meet their basic needs.
Human activity particularly fossil fuel consumption is estimated to have increased the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to the highest levels for 20 M years, according to The World watch Institute; an environmental think tank, global disasters from weather related events and natural disasters like the ones seen in New Orleans, Haiti and Japan have affected some two billion people.
We have all been made aware of recent events through the prism of a global media.
In this atmosphere one would have thought it would be ever more imperative to rethink human priorities and restructure institutions by the day.
However the Global Capitalists are in total denial about the situation, they repeat their mantra that time and patience will create the wealth necessary to resolve global poverty and looming environmental disaster.
However many observers and thinkers dispute this assumption and maintain that corporate globalisation and their’ winner takes all’ mentality will only widen the gap between the rich and poor. They reject completely the argument that exploiting the poor and raping the planets resources can generate the necessary funding available to solve huge global issues.
The defining political struggles of the 20th C were capitalism and Socialism, both concentrated power in institutions that were not accountable, in socialism it was the state and capitalism it was the corporations. Both systems work against a system of localised markets in which communities organise themselves within a framework of democratically determined rules.
We now have a crazy situation in the UK where prawns caught in the North Sea are frozen in the UK and then shipped to Asia to be peeled refrozen and sent back to the UK to be sold in high street shops.
The globalist economic model is based on continual growth through free trade, accompanied by deregulation of international activity. The four basic freedoms of the EU are; free movement of people, Goods, services and finance, with punitive measures in place for breaches of rules. The idea is to remove as many impediments to global free trade as possible and to expand corporate activity.
However the philosophy of continual growth is completely unsustainable because of finite resources.
The advocates of this free trade like to claim that the beneficiaries of all this trade will be the poor as they benefit from the trickle down of wealth. However in reality the benefit of this growth mainly trickles up.
This new globalisation of trade is not restricted to products and services of multinational companies like Microsoft and MacDonald’s, or out sourcing of domestic services to other parts of the world like call centres. Even elements that were until now considered to be a non commoditised form such as the genetic structures of our bodies are now becoming part of the commodity trading system through biotechnology with the process greatly assisted by WTO rules on intellectual property rights.
Similarly indigenous crop seeds freely shared and exchanged for hundreds of years are now subject to long term monopoly ownership by global corporations through patenting.
There are similar pressures to privatise fresh water, rivers and lakes once considered free and the basic elements of sustenance. These too are being converted into commodities as part of the global trade system. These have all become mere raw materials to be invested, and traded in. Note that the majority of British water is now owned by French, German and Australian companies
Even local public services are being out sourced to huge multinational companies, as well as areas previously reserves for local government such as public health and hospitals, police, prisons, broadcasting and entertainment are all being commoditised, and opened to foreign investment and domination, eventually we may end up in a situation where multinational companies like Mitsubishi are running our social security and Disney are running our Broadcasting, whilst Deutschbank are running our jails and parks! This may sound farfetched but it is already happening.
There is also the comodification of Money itself, made available for speculation and investment; right now the overwhelming majority of global transactions under free trade are not in goods but in finance.
Through IT is possible to transfer unimaginably large amounts of funds across borders anywhere in the world almost instantaneously without any controls on the transaction by the authorities. In fact such transactions are readily facilitated by organisations such as the EU, World Bank. This had a disastrous effect of destabilising many countries and was one of the causes of the 97/98 financial crisis that began in Asia.
There is now the tenet of a new Globalisation project that we are now seeing immerging; a single centralised super system, counties with economies and traditions as varied as those in India, Asia, South America, and Africa all meant to adopt similar tastes, values and lifestyles. They are meant to buy the same objects, drive the same cars, watch the same films, listen to the same music, eat the same food and of course be served by the same few multinational companies; global cultural diversity is going the way of bio-diversity.
Note China is now moving to a more Capitalist society and on current trends is expected to become the world’s richest nation by 2016. Furthermore if the developing nations of the world were to continue to develop until comparative to European levels then we would need approximately six planets in order to sustain the world’s population.
Bush, Brown, and Blair all spoke of creating a NWO, such as homogeneous model serves only the needs of the largest corporations, who act on a global level duplicating their production and marketing strategies on borderless terrain.
Corporate globalisation favours orienting all barriers to foreign investment and removing the restraints on speculative money across borders. These preferences encourage production for sale to other countries rather than the domestic consumption. These activities favour the multi-national corporations but leave people everywhere dependant on the actions of absentee owners on whom they have no influence.
The underlying rationale for this export orientated production centres on the theory of ‘comparative advantage’. According to the theory every country should only produce only those products over which it has a relative advantage, thus some countries should produce only single crops like coffee, sugarcane, forest products or high tech assembly. Theoretically they can meet their other needs by using the earning from these specialised exports to buy goods and services over which others have an advantage.
‘Comparative advantage’ is a crucial component in the theory of globalisation. It facilitates the replacement of diverse local or regional economic trading systems and instead replaces it with a large scale mono-cultural export system. Around the world this is a reversal of the 20th C model of economics which focused on diversifying their industry and agriculture in order to recover from the colonial model in which pineapple plantations, coffee plantations, banana plantations or more recently assembly works was imposed on them.
Once independent the governments of these countries decided that this kind of specialised production left them extremely vulnerable to political decisions taken abroad and to the shocks and whims of the market and commodity pricing systems. This self reliance was intended to help countries regains some degree of control over their domestic economies.
The assumption that hyper growth can continue forever is clearly false, how can exponential growth possibly sustained given the limited resources on a finite planet? Where will all the resources come from, the wood, the water, the land, come from to feed the hyper expansion without killing the planet and ourselves? How many cars and refrigerators can be built, how many fish can be vacuumed from the sea before species disappear and the ecosystem fails.
So who actually benefits the most from globalisation? It is not the farmers who are forced to mass produce crops at a minimum profit, it’s not the workers caught in a downward wage spiral. It is not the indigenous peoples facing hordes of corporate invaders seeking their decreasing resources and it is surely not nature. The beneficiaries are multinational companies and their directors some of whom rake in hundreds of millions of dollars while the wages of ordinary workers barely rose and in some case fallen in the last 25 years
What is globalisation?
The term used neutrally describes the process by which societies, and cultures around the world have become closely integrated, perhaps through associations, telecommunications or IT.
Most people are in favour of this concept, if I want to phone my friend in USA for example no one would say that this is a bad thing. Many clubs, associations and Unions have international affiliations so in this respect they too are global institutions, with this sort of globalisation no one would deny that they are positive asset to people all around the world.
However the word ‘globalisation’ also has another meaning; it has to a large extent been appropriated by super powerful commercial interests that exploit the innocuous, neutral concept of globalism and use it as a weapon with which deflect criticism of their own behaviour by portraying the opponents of globalisation as backward looking luddites.
Some people enjoy unimaginable wealth, at the same time two hundred million children under the age of five are under weight because of lack of sufficient food supply. Some fourteen million children die each year because of hunger related illnesses. (Unicef 2006)
This type of deprivation is not only confined to the third world; even in wealthy countries like the US some 6M adults and 3.5M children experience outright hunger.
According to the US Department of Agriculture some 10% of US households do not have enough food to meet their basic needs.
Human activity particularly fossil fuel consumption is estimated to have increased the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to the highest levels for 20 M years, according to The World watch Institute; an environmental think tank, global disasters from weather related events and natural disasters like the ones seen in New Orleans, Haiti and Japan have affected some two billion people.
We have all been made aware of recent events through the prism of a global media.
In this atmosphere one would have thought it would be ever more imperative to rethink human priorities and restructure institutions by the day.
However the Global Capitalists are in total denial about the situation, they repeat their mantra that time and patience will create the wealth necessary to resolve global poverty and looming environmental disaster.
However many observers and thinkers dispute this assumption and maintain that corporate globalisation and their’ winner takes all’ mentality will only widen the gap between the rich and poor. They reject completely the argument that exploiting the poor and raping the planets resources can generate the necessary funding available to solve huge global issues.
The defining political struggles of the 20th C were capitalism and Socialism, both concentrated power in institutions that were not accountable, in socialism it was the state and capitalism it was the corporations. Both systems work against a system of localised markets in which communities organise themselves within a framework of democratically determined rules.
We now have a crazy situation in the UK where prawns caught in the North Sea are frozen in the UK and then shipped to Asia to be peeled refrozen and sent back to the UK to be sold in high street shops.
The globalist economic model is based on continual growth through free trade, accompanied by deregulation of international activity. The four basic freedoms of the EU are; free movement of people, Goods, services and finance, with punitive measures in place for breaches of rules. The idea is to remove as many impediments to global free trade as possible and to expand corporate activity.
However the philosophy of continual growth is completely unsustainable because of finite resources.
The advocates of this free trade like to claim that the beneficiaries of all this trade will be the poor as they benefit from the trickle down of wealth. However in reality the benefit of this growth mainly trickles up.
This new globalisation of trade is not restricted to products and services of multinational companies like Microsoft and MacDonald’s, or out sourcing of domestic services to other parts of the world like call centres. Even elements that were until now considered to be a non commoditised form such as the genetic structures of our bodies are now becoming part of the commodity trading system through biotechnology with the process greatly assisted by WTO rules on intellectual property rights.
Similarly indigenous crop seeds freely shared and exchanged for hundreds of years are now subject to long term monopoly ownership by global corporations through patenting.
There are similar pressures to privatise fresh water, rivers and lakes once considered free and the basic elements of sustenance. These too are being converted into commodities as part of the global trade system. These have all become mere raw materials to be invested, and traded in. Note that the majority of British water is now owned by French, German and Australian companies
Even local public services are being out sourced to huge multinational companies, as well as areas previously reserves for local government such as public health and hospitals, police, prisons, broadcasting and entertainment are all being commoditised, and opened to foreign investment and domination, eventually we may end up in a situation where multinational companies like Mitsubishi are running our social security and Disney are running our Broadcasting, whilst Deutschbank are running our jails and parks! This may sound farfetched but it is already happening.
There is also the comodification of Money itself, made available for speculation and investment; right now the overwhelming majority of global transactions under free trade are not in goods but in finance.
Through IT is possible to transfer unimaginably large amounts of funds across borders anywhere in the world almost instantaneously without any controls on the transaction by the authorities. In fact such transactions are readily facilitated by organisations such as the EU, World Bank. This had a disastrous effect of destabilising many countries and was one of the causes of the 97/98 financial crisis that began in Asia.
There is now the tenet of a new Globalisation project that we are now seeing immerging; a single centralised super system, counties with economies and traditions as varied as those in India, Asia, South America, and Africa all meant to adopt similar tastes, values and lifestyles. They are meant to buy the same objects, drive the same cars, watch the same films, listen to the same music, eat the same food and of course be served by the same few multinational companies; global cultural diversity is going the way of bio-diversity.
Note China is now moving to a more Capitalist society and on current trends is expected to become the world’s richest nation by 2016. Furthermore if the developing nations of the world were to continue to develop until comparative to European levels then we would need approximately six planets in order to sustain the world’s population.
Bush, Brown, and Blair all spoke of creating a NWO, such as homogeneous model serves only the needs of the largest corporations, who act on a global level duplicating their production and marketing strategies on borderless terrain.
Corporate globalisation favours orienting all barriers to foreign investment and removing the restraints on speculative money across borders. These preferences encourage production for sale to other countries rather than the domestic consumption. These activities favour the multi-national corporations but leave people everywhere dependant on the actions of absentee owners on whom they have no influence.
The underlying rationale for this export orientated production centres on the theory of ‘comparative advantage’. According to the theory every country should only produce only those products over which it has a relative advantage, thus some countries should produce only single crops like coffee, sugarcane, forest products or high tech assembly. Theoretically they can meet their other needs by using the earning from these specialised exports to buy goods and services over which others have an advantage.
‘Comparative advantage’ is a crucial component in the theory of globalisation. It facilitates the replacement of diverse local or regional economic trading systems and instead replaces it with a large scale mono-cultural export system. Around the world this is a reversal of the 20th C model of economics which focused on diversifying their industry and agriculture in order to recover from the colonial model in which pineapple plantations, coffee plantations, banana plantations or more recently assembly works was imposed on them.
Once independent the governments of these countries decided that this kind of specialised production left them extremely vulnerable to political decisions taken abroad and to the shocks and whims of the market and commodity pricing systems. This self reliance was intended to help countries regains some degree of control over their domestic economies.
The assumption that hyper growth can continue forever is clearly false, how can exponential growth possibly sustained given the limited resources on a finite planet? Where will all the resources come from, the wood, the water, the land, come from to feed the hyper expansion without killing the planet and ourselves? How many cars and refrigerators can be built, how many fish can be vacuumed from the sea before species disappear and the ecosystem fails.
So who actually benefits the most from globalisation? It is not the farmers who are forced to mass produce crops at a minimum profit, it’s not the workers caught in a downward wage spiral. It is not the indigenous peoples facing hordes of corporate invaders seeking their decreasing resources and it is surely not nature. The beneficiaries are multinational companies and their directors some of whom rake in hundreds of millions of dollars while the wages of ordinary workers barely rose and in some case fallen in the last 25 years
Sovereign
Globalisation as a challenge to attempts to produce a just society.
What is globalisation?
The term used neutrally describes the process by which societies, and cultures around the world have become closely integrated, perhaps through associations, telecommunications or IT.
Most people are in favour of this concept, if I want to phone my friend in USA for example no one would say that this is a bad thing. Many clubs, associations and Unions have international affiliations so in this respect they too are global institutions, with this sort of globalisation no one would deny that they are positive asset to people all around the world.
However the word ‘globalisation’ also has another meaning; it has to a large extent been appropriated by super powerful commercial interests that exploit the innocuous, neutral concept of globalism and use it as a weapon with which deflect criticism of their own behaviour by portraying the opponents of globalisation as backward looking luddites.
Some people enjoy unimaginable wealth, at the same time two hundred million children under the age of five are under weight because of lack of sufficient food supply. Some fourteen million children die each year because of hunger related illnesses. (Unicef 2006)
This type of deprivation is not only confined to the third world; even in wealthy countries like the US some 6M adults and 3.5M children experience outright hunger.
According to the US Department of Agriculture some 10% of US households do not have enough food to meet their basic needs.
Human activity particularly fossil fuel consumption is estimated to have increased the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to the highest levels for 20 M years, according to The World watch Institute; an environmental think tank, global disasters from weather related events and natural disasters like the ones seen in New Orleans, Haiti and Japan have affected some two billion people.
We have all been made aware of recent events through the prism of a global media.
In this atmosphere one would have thought it would be ever more imperative to rethink human priorities and restructure institutions by the day.
However the Global Capitalists are in total denial about the situation, they repeat their mantra that time and patience will create the wealth necessary to resolve global poverty and looming environmental disaster.
However many observers and thinkers dispute this assumption and maintain that corporate globalisation and their’ winner takes all’ mentality will only widen the gap between the rich and poor. They reject completely the argument that exploiting the poor and raping the planets resources can generate the necessary funding available to solve huge global issues.
The defining political struggles of the 20th C were capitalism and Socialism, both concentrated power in institutions that were not accountable, in socialism it was the state and capitalism it was the corporations. Both systems work against a system of localised markets in which communities organise themselves within a framework of democratically determined rules.
We now have a crazy situation in the UK where prawns caught in the North Sea are frozen in the UK and then shipped to Asia to be peeled refrozen and sent back to the UK to be sold in high street shops.
The globalist economic model is based on continual growth through free trade, accompanied by deregulation of international activity. The four basic freedoms of the EU are; free movement of people, Goods, services and finance, with punitive measures in place for breaches of rules. The idea is to remove as many impediments to global free trade as possible and to expand corporate activity.
However the philosophy of continual growth is completely unsustainable because of finite resources.
The advocates of this free trade like to claim that the beneficiaries of all this trade will be the poor as they benefit from the trickle down of wealth. However in reality the benefit of this growth mainly trickles up.
This new globalisation of trade is not restricted to products and services of multinational companies like Microsoft and MacDonald’s, or out sourcing of domestic services to other parts of the world like call centres. Even elements that were until now considered to be a non commoditised form such as the genetic structures of our bodies are now becoming part of the commodity trading system through biotechnology with the process greatly assisted by WTO rules on intellectual property rights.
Similarly indigenous crop seeds freely shared and exchanged for hundreds of years are now subject to long term monopoly ownership by global corporations through patenting.
There are similar pressures to privatise fresh water, rivers and lakes once considered free and the basic elements of sustenance. These too are being converted into commodities as part of the global trade system. These have all become mere raw materials to be invested, and traded in. Note that the majority of British water is now owned by French, German and Australian companies
Even local public services are being out sourced to huge multinational companies, as well as areas previously reserves for local government such as public health and hospitals, police, prisons, broadcasting and entertainment are all being commoditised, and opened to foreign investment and domination, eventually we may end up in a situation where multinational companies like Mitsubishi are running our social security and Disney are running our Broadcasting, whilst Deutschbank are running our jails and parks! This may sound farfetched but it is already happening.
There is also the comodification of Money itself, made available for speculation and investment; right now the overwhelming majority of global transactions under free trade are not in goods but in finance.
Through IT is possible to transfer unimaginably large amounts of funds across borders anywhere in the world almost instantaneously without any controls on the transaction by the authorities. In fact such transactions are readily facilitated by organisations such as the EU, World Bank. This had a disastrous effect of destabilising many countries and was one of the causes of the 97/98 financial crisis that began in Asia.
There is now the tenet of a new Globalisation project that we are now seeing immerging; a single centralised super system, counties with economies and traditions as varied as those in India, Asia, South America, and Africa all meant to adopt similar tastes, values and lifestyles. They are meant to buy the same objects, drive the same cars, watch the same films, listen to the same music, eat the same food and of course be served by the same few multinational companies; global cultural diversity is going the way of bio-diversity.
Note China is now moving to a more Capitalist society and on current trends is expected to become the world’s richest nation by 2016. Furthermore if the developing nations of the world were to continue to develop until comparative to European levels then we would need approximately six planets in order to sustain the world’s population.
Bush, Brown, and Blair all spoke of creating a NWO, such as homogeneous model serves only the needs of the largest corporations, who act on a global level duplicating their production and marketing strategies on borderless terrain.
Corporate globalisation favours orienting all barriers to foreign investment and removing the restraints on speculative money across borders. These preferences encourage production for sale to other countries rather than the domestic consumption. These activities favour the multi-national corporations but leave people everywhere dependant on the actions of absentee owners on whom they have no influence.
The underlying rationale for this export orientated production centres on the theory of ‘comparative advantage’. According to the theory every country should only produce only those products over which it has a relative advantage, thus some countries should produce only single crops like coffee, sugarcane, forest products or high tech assembly. Theoretically they can meet their other needs by using the earning from these specialised exports to buy goods and services over which others have an advantage.
‘Comparative advantage’ is a crucial component in the theory of globalisation. It facilitates the replacement of diverse local or regional economic trading systems and instead replaces it with a large scale mono-cultural export system. Around the world this is a reversal of the 20th C model of economics which focused on diversifying their industry and agriculture in order to recover from the colonial model in which pineapple plantations, coffee plantations, banana plantations or more recently assembly works was imposed on them.
Once independent the governments of these countries decided that this kind of specialised production left them extremely vulnerable to political decisions taken abroad and to the shocks and whims of the market and commodity pricing systems. This self reliance was intended to help countries regains some degree of control over their domestic economies.
The assumption that hyper growth can continue forever is clearly false, how can exponential growth possibly sustained given the limited resources on a finite planet? Where will all the resources come from, the wood, the water, the land, come from to feed the hyper expansion without killing the planet and ourselves? How many cars and refrigerators can be built, how many fish can be vacuumed from the sea before species disappear and the ecosystem fails.
So who actually benefits the most from globalisation? It is not the farmers who are forced to mass produce crops at a minimum profit, it’s not the workers caught in a downward wage spiral. It is not the indigenous peoples facing hordes of corporate invaders seeking their decreasing resources and it is surely not nature. The beneficiaries are multinational companies and their directors some of whom rake in hundreds of millions of dollars while the wages of ordinary workers barely rose and in some case fallen in the last 25 years.
What is globalisation?
The term used neutrally describes the process by which societies, and cultures around the world have become closely integrated, perhaps through associations, telecommunications or IT.
Most people are in favour of this concept, if I want to phone my friend in USA for example no one would say that this is a bad thing. Many clubs, associations and Unions have international affiliations so in this respect they too are global institutions, with this sort of globalisation no one would deny that they are positive asset to people all around the world.
However the word ‘globalisation’ also has another meaning; it has to a large extent been appropriated by super powerful commercial interests that exploit the innocuous, neutral concept of globalism and use it as a weapon with which deflect criticism of their own behaviour by portraying the opponents of globalisation as backward looking luddites.
Some people enjoy unimaginable wealth, at the same time two hundred million children under the age of five are under weight because of lack of sufficient food supply. Some fourteen million children die each year because of hunger related illnesses. (Unicef 2006)
This type of deprivation is not only confined to the third world; even in wealthy countries like the US some 6M adults and 3.5M children experience outright hunger.
According to the US Department of Agriculture some 10% of US households do not have enough food to meet their basic needs.
Human activity particularly fossil fuel consumption is estimated to have increased the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to the highest levels for 20 M years, according to The World watch Institute; an environmental think tank, global disasters from weather related events and natural disasters like the ones seen in New Orleans, Haiti and Japan have affected some two billion people.
We have all been made aware of recent events through the prism of a global media.
In this atmosphere one would have thought it would be ever more imperative to rethink human priorities and restructure institutions by the day.
However the Global Capitalists are in total denial about the situation, they repeat their mantra that time and patience will create the wealth necessary to resolve global poverty and looming environmental disaster.
However many observers and thinkers dispute this assumption and maintain that corporate globalisation and their’ winner takes all’ mentality will only widen the gap between the rich and poor. They reject completely the argument that exploiting the poor and raping the planets resources can generate the necessary funding available to solve huge global issues.
The defining political struggles of the 20th C were capitalism and Socialism, both concentrated power in institutions that were not accountable, in socialism it was the state and capitalism it was the corporations. Both systems work against a system of localised markets in which communities organise themselves within a framework of democratically determined rules.
We now have a crazy situation in the UK where prawns caught in the North Sea are frozen in the UK and then shipped to Asia to be peeled refrozen and sent back to the UK to be sold in high street shops.
The globalist economic model is based on continual growth through free trade, accompanied by deregulation of international activity. The four basic freedoms of the EU are; free movement of people, Goods, services and finance, with punitive measures in place for breaches of rules. The idea is to remove as many impediments to global free trade as possible and to expand corporate activity.
However the philosophy of continual growth is completely unsustainable because of finite resources.
The advocates of this free trade like to claim that the beneficiaries of all this trade will be the poor as they benefit from the trickle down of wealth. However in reality the benefit of this growth mainly trickles up.
This new globalisation of trade is not restricted to products and services of multinational companies like Microsoft and MacDonald’s, or out sourcing of domestic services to other parts of the world like call centres. Even elements that were until now considered to be a non commoditised form such as the genetic structures of our bodies are now becoming part of the commodity trading system through biotechnology with the process greatly assisted by WTO rules on intellectual property rights.
Similarly indigenous crop seeds freely shared and exchanged for hundreds of years are now subject to long term monopoly ownership by global corporations through patenting.
There are similar pressures to privatise fresh water, rivers and lakes once considered free and the basic elements of sustenance. These too are being converted into commodities as part of the global trade system. These have all become mere raw materials to be invested, and traded in. Note that the majority of British water is now owned by French, German and Australian companies
Even local public services are being out sourced to huge multinational companies, as well as areas previously reserves for local government such as public health and hospitals, police, prisons, broadcasting and entertainment are all being commoditised, and opened to foreign investment and domination, eventually we may end up in a situation where multinational companies like Mitsubishi are running our social security and Disney are running our Broadcasting, whilst Deutschbank are running our jails and parks! This may sound farfetched but it is already happening.
There is also the comodification of Money itself, made available for speculation and investment; right now the overwhelming majority of global transactions under free trade are not in goods but in finance.
Through IT is possible to transfer unimaginably large amounts of funds across borders anywhere in the world almost instantaneously without any controls on the transaction by the authorities. In fact such transactions are readily facilitated by organisations such as the EU, World Bank. This had a disastrous effect of destabilising many countries and was one of the causes of the 97/98 financial crisis that began in Asia.
There is now the tenet of a new Globalisation project that we are now seeing immerging; a single centralised super system, counties with economies and traditions as varied as those in India, Asia, South America, and Africa all meant to adopt similar tastes, values and lifestyles. They are meant to buy the same objects, drive the same cars, watch the same films, listen to the same music, eat the same food and of course be served by the same few multinational companies; global cultural diversity is going the way of bio-diversity.
Note China is now moving to a more Capitalist society and on current trends is expected to become the world’s richest nation by 2016. Furthermore if the developing nations of the world were to continue to develop until comparative to European levels then we would need approximately six planets in order to sustain the world’s population.
Bush, Brown, and Blair all spoke of creating a NWO, such as homogeneous model serves only the needs of the largest corporations, who act on a global level duplicating their production and marketing strategies on borderless terrain.
Corporate globalisation favours orienting all barriers to foreign investment and removing the restraints on speculative money across borders. These preferences encourage production for sale to other countries rather than the domestic consumption. These activities favour the multi-national corporations but leave people everywhere dependant on the actions of absentee owners on whom they have no influence.
The underlying rationale for this export orientated production centres on the theory of ‘comparative advantage’. According to the theory every country should only produce only those products over which it has a relative advantage, thus some countries should produce only single crops like coffee, sugarcane, forest products or high tech assembly. Theoretically they can meet their other needs by using the earning from these specialised exports to buy goods and services over which others have an advantage.
‘Comparative advantage’ is a crucial component in the theory of globalisation. It facilitates the replacement of diverse local or regional economic trading systems and instead replaces it with a large scale mono-cultural export system. Around the world this is a reversal of the 20th C model of economics which focused on diversifying their industry and agriculture in order to recover from the colonial model in which pineapple plantations, coffee plantations, banana plantations or more recently assembly works was imposed on them.
Once independent the governments of these countries decided that this kind of specialised production left them extremely vulnerable to political decisions taken abroad and to the shocks and whims of the market and commodity pricing systems. This self reliance was intended to help countries regains some degree of control over their domestic economies.
The assumption that hyper growth can continue forever is clearly false, how can exponential growth possibly sustained given the limited resources on a finite planet? Where will all the resources come from, the wood, the water, the land, come from to feed the hyper expansion without killing the planet and ourselves? How many cars and refrigerators can be built, how many fish can be vacuumed from the sea before species disappear and the ecosystem fails.
So who actually benefits the most from globalisation? It is not the farmers who are forced to mass produce crops at a minimum profit, it’s not the workers caught in a downward wage spiral. It is not the indigenous peoples facing hordes of corporate invaders seeking their decreasing resources and it is surely not nature. The beneficiaries are multinational companies and their directors some of whom rake in hundreds of millions of dollars while the wages of ordinary workers barely rose and in some case fallen in the last 25 years.
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
UKIP party leader Nigel Farage has dealt his party a death blow by “cheerfully” announcing that he has taken “more than £2 million in expenses” from his time in the European parliament - over and above his salary.
The shocking comment was revealed during a lunch Mr Farage had with former Labour Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane MP, after a Foreign Press Association conference on the future of the European Union yesterday (image alongside).
The news firmly places UKIP into the same bracket as all the other Westminster political parties with regards to ripping off the hard pressed taxpayers in the shocking expenses scandal which has engulfed all the political parties in Britain - except the BNP.
Talking on today’s BBC 2 Daily Politics Show, Mr Macshane was trying to defend his own personal outrageous expenses claims - and those of his colleagues - when he suddenly announced that this sort of thing was everywhere.
“I was with Nigel Farage of UKIP yesterday afternoon debating and he said quite cheerfully - you know what Nigel is like - I have got two million pounds in expenses from the European Parliament,” Mr Macshane said, obviously hoping that the announcement of this bit of thievery would somehow excuse his own.
Mr Farage’s outrageous claims could not have come at a worse time for his party, struggling as it is after losing 25 percent of its MPs after the 2004 election, with two of them being arrested for fraud.
With the latest revelation, observers are now asking the question if Mr Farage himself - over whom there have long been questions about his financial probity linked to his refusal till now to reveal any audited statement of his expenses - will be able to avoid the fate of his colleagues already arrested for exploiting the expenses system.
A secret European Parliament report, the details of which were earlier leaked but largely suppressed by the media, uncovered what it described as “extensive, widespread and criminal abuse” by Euro-MPs of staff allowances worth almost £100 million a year.
Senior Euro-MPs and European Union officials have tried to hush up an internal audit that found severe problems and endemic misuse of funds worth at least £98.4 million a year, more than £125,000 for each of the 785 Euro-MPs.
Such is the extent of the abuse found in a sample group of 167 Euro-MPs that “terrified” parliamentary authorities have shrouded the report in secrecy and security.
Only Euro-MPs on the Parliament’s budget control committee are allowed to see the report. To do so, they must apply to enter a “secret room”, protected by biometric locks and security guards. They may not take notes and must sign a confidentiality agreement.
The shocking comment was revealed during a lunch Mr Farage had with former Labour Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane MP, after a Foreign Press Association conference on the future of the European Union yesterday (image alongside).
The news firmly places UKIP into the same bracket as all the other Westminster political parties with regards to ripping off the hard pressed taxpayers in the shocking expenses scandal which has engulfed all the political parties in Britain - except the BNP.
Talking on today’s BBC 2 Daily Politics Show, Mr Macshane was trying to defend his own personal outrageous expenses claims - and those of his colleagues - when he suddenly announced that this sort of thing was everywhere.
“I was with Nigel Farage of UKIP yesterday afternoon debating and he said quite cheerfully - you know what Nigel is like - I have got two million pounds in expenses from the European Parliament,” Mr Macshane said, obviously hoping that the announcement of this bit of thievery would somehow excuse his own.
Mr Farage’s outrageous claims could not have come at a worse time for his party, struggling as it is after losing 25 percent of its MPs after the 2004 election, with two of them being arrested for fraud.
With the latest revelation, observers are now asking the question if Mr Farage himself - over whom there have long been questions about his financial probity linked to his refusal till now to reveal any audited statement of his expenses - will be able to avoid the fate of his colleagues already arrested for exploiting the expenses system.
A secret European Parliament report, the details of which were earlier leaked but largely suppressed by the media, uncovered what it described as “extensive, widespread and criminal abuse” by Euro-MPs of staff allowances worth almost £100 million a year.
Senior Euro-MPs and European Union officials have tried to hush up an internal audit that found severe problems and endemic misuse of funds worth at least £98.4 million a year, more than £125,000 for each of the 785 Euro-MPs.
Such is the extent of the abuse found in a sample group of 167 Euro-MPs that “terrified” parliamentary authorities have shrouded the report in secrecy and security.
Only Euro-MPs on the Parliament’s budget control committee are allowed to see the report. To do so, they must apply to enter a “secret room”, protected by biometric locks and security guards. They may not take notes and must sign a confidentiality agreement.
Saturday, 4 April 2009
Allowancesgate: MPs “not available for comment”
February 17, 2008
According to a report in today’s Sunday Times “MEMBERS of parliament who represent constituencies less than an hour’s commuting distance from Westminster are claiming upward of £20,000 of taxpayers’ money a year to fund “overnight” homes in central London.” Which, of course, they can then sell at a time of their choosing and pocket all the considerable profit - including EVERY PENNY of taxpayers’ money that went into subsidising that property!
The report then adds: “The latest expenses dodge by MPs has caused outrage among senior politicians who want colleagues who live within commuting distance of parliament to be barred from claiming the cash.” Really? It was our distinct impression that “senior politicians”, many of whom are benfiting from the same “arrangement”, are only “outraged” due to the fact that the greed of their colleagues is likely to rebound on them and their activities in the form of unwelcome publicity!
Furthermore we learn: “A committee of MPs set up by Michael Martin, the Speaker, to review Commons expenses is to consider whether London MPs should be banned from claiming housing allowances which were created when late-night sittings were the norm. It will also examine whether the system of housing allowances for MPs across the rest of Britain should be scrapped.” The less said about “the committee” the better - save to suggest to the media that they should look a little closer at its constituent members - particularly in relation to allowance claiming and support for transparency in Parliamentary affairs!
Interestingly, we do learn that: “Twenty-four MPs with seats in Greater London claimed almost £400,000 of public money to fund second homes last year.” – which is interesting because a Freedom of Information enquiry lodged by our researchers revealed the figure to be eighteen.
However, in an issue first raised by the BNP on this very site, we are gratified to be reminded: “Two Labour MPs with neighbouring constituencies in west London, Alan and Ann Keen, a junior health minister, have claimed more than £175,000 in allowances since 2002 even though their family home in her constituency is less than 10 miles from parliament. Among the highest claimants are the Keens, who share a family home in Brentford which has frequent train services to Waterloo taking half an hour. In 2002 the couple bought a £500,000 flat which is a 15-minute walk from Westminster. Both were unavailable for comment.”
Furthermore, a fact that we were unaware of: “A third MP, John Austin, who claimed £22,110, bought a London flat which is approximately the same travelling time from Westminster as his constituency home”
This and a great deal more concerning the Mother of all Parliaments, can be found: here .
According to a report in today’s Sunday Times “MEMBERS of parliament who represent constituencies less than an hour’s commuting distance from Westminster are claiming upward of £20,000 of taxpayers’ money a year to fund “overnight” homes in central London.” Which, of course, they can then sell at a time of their choosing and pocket all the considerable profit - including EVERY PENNY of taxpayers’ money that went into subsidising that property!
The report then adds: “The latest expenses dodge by MPs has caused outrage among senior politicians who want colleagues who live within commuting distance of parliament to be barred from claiming the cash.” Really? It was our distinct impression that “senior politicians”, many of whom are benfiting from the same “arrangement”, are only “outraged” due to the fact that the greed of their colleagues is likely to rebound on them and their activities in the form of unwelcome publicity!
Furthermore we learn: “A committee of MPs set up by Michael Martin, the Speaker, to review Commons expenses is to consider whether London MPs should be banned from claiming housing allowances which were created when late-night sittings were the norm. It will also examine whether the system of housing allowances for MPs across the rest of Britain should be scrapped.” The less said about “the committee” the better - save to suggest to the media that they should look a little closer at its constituent members - particularly in relation to allowance claiming and support for transparency in Parliamentary affairs!
Interestingly, we do learn that: “Twenty-four MPs with seats in Greater London claimed almost £400,000 of public money to fund second homes last year.” – which is interesting because a Freedom of Information enquiry lodged by our researchers revealed the figure to be eighteen.
However, in an issue first raised by the BNP on this very site, we are gratified to be reminded: “Two Labour MPs with neighbouring constituencies in west London, Alan and Ann Keen, a junior health minister, have claimed more than £175,000 in allowances since 2002 even though their family home in her constituency is less than 10 miles from parliament. Among the highest claimants are the Keens, who share a family home in Brentford which has frequent train services to Waterloo taking half an hour. In 2002 the couple bought a £500,000 flat which is a 15-minute walk from Westminster. Both were unavailable for comment.”
Furthermore, a fact that we were unaware of: “A third MP, John Austin, who claimed £22,110, bought a London flat which is approximately the same travelling time from Westminster as his constituency home”
This and a great deal more concerning the Mother of all Parliaments, can be found: here .
Allowancesgate: Westminster’s contempt for the public
February 16, 2008
We understand that pressure is mounting on the Speaker, Labour MP Michael Martin, to take a tougher line on MPs’ expenses. This is apparently because, many – including ourselves, do not believe that the “review” he ordered following the Derek Conway affair will produce radical reforms. Indeed, quite the contrary, that apart from a little “window dressing” the perception in some minds is that nothing of any consequence will change. Life for serial allowance and expenses claimants in Westminster will continue just as sweetly as it has always done. Although Martin has been criticised for choosing a team of MPs seen as “establishment figures” to conduct the review, was there any real expectation that anything else was likely we wonder? After all, Martin’s team include David Maclean, the former Tory chief whip, who – wait for it - tried to bring in a Bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act - precisely to avoid disclosing details of their expenses and allowances claims! This inclusion saying more about the objectives of the team in our opinion, than any amount of Westminster waffle could ever do! To make matters even more interesting it is generally understood that the Speakers “urgent review” is likely to drag on into the autumn of this year and possibly even longer.
And of course, it has to be said, that there are those MPs – not many of them admittedly – who consider Mr. Speaker to be “part of the problem, not the solution”! This is because he has attracted no little publicity himself over his own expenses, including £4,000 in taxi bills for his wife Mary and £50,000 for his air travel.
But that’s not all! Even if that isn’t enough to raise an eyebrow or two, then the “icing” on this particular “cake” is that he has also, allegedly, thwarted demands for full disclosure of MPs’ expenses previously!
It would appear that Labour have found the right man for an urgent root and branch review of MPs expenses and allowances! As an aside it was reported in Thursday’s Independent that: “The disgraced Conservative MP Derek Conway will keep his place among a group of MPs paid a £13,000-a-year bonus for chairing parliamentary proceedings. Mr Conway’s political career was apparently in ruins after he was suspended from the Commons after being criticised for employing his son as a researcher. But he has retained a prestigious and lucrative position as a member of the “chairmen’s panel” appointed by the Speaker Michael Martin to oversee detailed debates on Bills.Members get £13,107 on top of their £61,000 MP’s salary to reflect their extra status and workload chairing standing committees.”
Fills you with confidence - does it not?
We understand that pressure is mounting on the Speaker, Labour MP Michael Martin, to take a tougher line on MPs’ expenses. This is apparently because, many – including ourselves, do not believe that the “review” he ordered following the Derek Conway affair will produce radical reforms. Indeed, quite the contrary, that apart from a little “window dressing” the perception in some minds is that nothing of any consequence will change. Life for serial allowance and expenses claimants in Westminster will continue just as sweetly as it has always done. Although Martin has been criticised for choosing a team of MPs seen as “establishment figures” to conduct the review, was there any real expectation that anything else was likely we wonder? After all, Martin’s team include David Maclean, the former Tory chief whip, who – wait for it - tried to bring in a Bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act - precisely to avoid disclosing details of their expenses and allowances claims! This inclusion saying more about the objectives of the team in our opinion, than any amount of Westminster waffle could ever do! To make matters even more interesting it is generally understood that the Speakers “urgent review” is likely to drag on into the autumn of this year and possibly even longer.
And of course, it has to be said, that there are those MPs – not many of them admittedly – who consider Mr. Speaker to be “part of the problem, not the solution”! This is because he has attracted no little publicity himself over his own expenses, including £4,000 in taxi bills for his wife Mary and £50,000 for his air travel.
But that’s not all! Even if that isn’t enough to raise an eyebrow or two, then the “icing” on this particular “cake” is that he has also, allegedly, thwarted demands for full disclosure of MPs’ expenses previously!
It would appear that Labour have found the right man for an urgent root and branch review of MPs expenses and allowances! As an aside it was reported in Thursday’s Independent that: “The disgraced Conservative MP Derek Conway will keep his place among a group of MPs paid a £13,000-a-year bonus for chairing parliamentary proceedings. Mr Conway’s political career was apparently in ruins after he was suspended from the Commons after being criticised for employing his son as a researcher. But he has retained a prestigious and lucrative position as a member of the “chairmen’s panel” appointed by the Speaker Michael Martin to oversee detailed debates on Bills.Members get £13,107 on top of their £61,000 MP’s salary to reflect their extra status and workload chairing standing committees.”
Fills you with confidence - does it not?
Introducing “Traitorsgate”
February 11, 2008
As from today we shall be launching a news initiative to be known as “Traitorsgate” – so-named for reasons that will shortly become obvious.
Articles published under “Traitorsgate” will concern themselves with Westminster’s treasonous collusion with the EU, in the same way that “Allowancesgate” concerns itself with issues of Westminster abuses of Parliamentary privilege, commonly perceived as fraud.
It should also be noted that we use the term “traitors” in connection with Parliament, not as a term of abuse, but as an appellation of absolute fact! Today we present a brief article that outlines the Treason Act of 1702 and its relevance to the treasonous Lisbon “Constitutional Reform” Treaty.
The provision of the Treason Act 1702 is the important one, as it states that treason may be defined as meaning that any person who signs away the power of the Crown over the territory of the realm or dominion; also meaning the APPLICATION OF THE POWER of the Royal Prerogative over Britain itself.
Dominions and territories apply not just to the Commonwealth but also Britain itself.
The Crown is not just the person of the Queen or King; it is the power of the Crown in Parliament and the power of the Royal Prerogative. The imperial crown represents the sovereignty of the Crown in this country, meaning the power of the Crown is the ultimate authority of Parliament and the Royal Prerogative.
Power may not be lawfully be exercised unless done through the Crown. Treason is therefore done when a Minister of the Crown signs a treaty that permanently revokes the power of the Crown as exercised via Parliament or through the Royal Prerogative in Britain. This is because they have signed a treaty that ensures the Crown no longer has the exclusive authority to apply the Royal Prerogative in those areas defined in the treaty AFTER THE PRESENT QUEEN ABDICATES, as it from henceforth binds all her successors, and therefore makes the Crown subservient to the EU.
This is also confirmed by the fact that Parliament may no longer prevent foreign judges from imposing laws directly upon British citizens simply by bypassing Parliament and the Crown.
In previous treaties the power of the Crown was said to be operated in the name of the Crown via the EU and that the authority of the EU laws was based on them being produced as a result of this shared control of the power of the Crown and the Prerogative with the EU. The government allowed the EU to enact laws in the name of the Crown via the EU treaties and this meant those laws became laws in the UK under the authority of the Crown.
The EU did not permanently revoke the power of the Crown but exercised the power of the Crown in the name of the Crown via the EU. This treaty though removes and surrenders totally the power of the Crown over those areas defined in the treaty and hands full power over exclusively in perpetuity to the EU. That is a fundamental legal shift.
The Reform treaty removes the power of the Crown and Royal Prerogative from the Crown and hands it to the EU. Therefore the Reform Treaty binds the next monarch, and makes the Crown subservient to the EU and the EU judges. This means the Crown loses sovereign control of British territory and British dominions.
This means the Reform Treaty is treason and those British citizens who support, promote and implement it are traitors!
Articles published under “Traitorsgate” will concern themselves with Westminster’s treasonous collusion with the EU, in the same way that “Allowancesgate” concerns itself with issues of Westminster abuses of Parliamentary privilege, commonly perceived as fraud.
It should also be noted that we use the term “traitors” in connection with Parliament, not as a term of abuse, but as an appellation of absolute fact! Today we present a brief article that outlines the Treason Act of 1702 and its relevance to the treasonous Lisbon “Constitutional Reform” Treaty.
The provision of the Treason Act 1702 is the important one, as it states that treason may be defined as meaning that any person who signs away the power of the Crown over the territory of the realm or dominion; also meaning the APPLICATION OF THE POWER of the Royal Prerogative over Britain itself.
Dominions and territories apply not just to the Commonwealth but also Britain itself.
The Crown is not just the person of the Queen or King; it is the power of the Crown in Parliament and the power of the Royal Prerogative. The imperial crown represents the sovereignty of the Crown in this country, meaning the power of the Crown is the ultimate authority of Parliament and the Royal Prerogative.
Power may not be lawfully be exercised unless done through the Crown. Treason is therefore done when a Minister of the Crown signs a treaty that permanently revokes the power of the Crown as exercised via Parliament or through the Royal Prerogative in Britain. This is because they have signed a treaty that ensures the Crown no longer has the exclusive authority to apply the Royal Prerogative in those areas defined in the treaty AFTER THE PRESENT QUEEN ABDICATES, as it from henceforth binds all her successors, and therefore makes the Crown subservient to the EU.
This is also confirmed by the fact that Parliament may no longer prevent foreign judges from imposing laws directly upon British citizens simply by bypassing Parliament and the Crown.
In previous treaties the power of the Crown was said to be operated in the name of the Crown via the EU and that the authority of the EU laws was based on them being produced as a result of this shared control of the power of the Crown and the Prerogative with the EU. The government allowed the EU to enact laws in the name of the Crown via the EU treaties and this meant those laws became laws in the UK under the authority of the Crown.
The EU did not permanently revoke the power of the Crown but exercised the power of the Crown in the name of the Crown via the EU. This treaty though removes and surrenders totally the power of the Crown over those areas defined in the treaty and hands full power over exclusively in perpetuity to the EU. That is a fundamental legal shift.
The Reform treaty removes the power of the Crown and Royal Prerogative from the Crown and hands it to the EU. Therefore the Reform Treaty binds the next monarch, and makes the Crown subservient to the EU and the EU judges. This means the Crown loses sovereign control of British territory and British dominions.
This means the Reform Treaty is treason and those British citizens who support, promote and implement it are traitors!
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