globalization

voir aussi sur le site de Ritimo "Questionner la mondialisation"

Beyond “liddism”: towards real global security

The first decade of the 21st century has been dominated by wars that have killed or injured close to half a million people, wars that arose after determined paramilitaries used parcel-knives to exploit the weaknesses of the world’s most advanced state. That incident might in principle have been a lesson in the impossibility of preserving the status quo - and that, as a consequence, “liddism” (“keeping the lid on things”) will not work. Read (...) read

Globalization Marches On

> Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India. There is yet another significant shift in global power: from the general population to the principal architects of the global system, a process aided by the undermining of functioning democracy in the United States and other of the Earth’s most powerful states. Read (...) read

World’s biggest cities merging into ’mega-regions’

UN-HABITAT launched its report State of the World Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide in the run up to the World Urban Forum 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast "mega-regions" which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people, according to this major new UN report. The world’s largest 40 mega-regions cover only a tiny fraction of the habitable surface of our planet and are home to fewer than (...) read

China Lassoes its Neighbors Through CAFTA Trade Agreement

It might be the world’s largest free trade area, writes columnist Walden Bello, but Southeast Asia is still getting a raw trade deal from China. Read read

Globalization on the rocks

Corporate globalization in the ‘real’ world economy lay behind what appeared at first to be a strictly financial crisis. It was hooked on debt, a deadly vice which eventually crushes everything in its grip, to the point where no-one knows the value of anything. So it could be that, in August 2007, seemingly marginal ‘sub-prime’ people who started posting their house keys through the letterboxes of loan sharks across the US signalled the shipwreck of a misbegotten ‘global’ enterprise. Read (...) read

Crisis of the Capitalist System: Where Do We Go from Here?

Immanuel Wallerstein comments on the global financial crisis from a long-term historical perspective, and on the opportunities it offers for global justice movements (Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009). Read more read

Writing History in the Streets: Berlin, Seattle, Copenhagen, and Beyond

Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals (...) read

The Migrant Condition

Migrants’ rights have to be addressed on two fronts: end the neoliberal policies that are responsible for creating poverty in their home countries, thus forcing them to emigrate, and demand that they are given full rights in their host countries. Read more read

Form, not substance, hoped in G-20 Summit

> Focus on the Global South

As the self appointed economic guardians of the world and thousands of protesters converge on Pittsburgh for the third summit of the Group of 20, expectations are low that a breakthrough in the form of some coordinated action to come to grips with the global economic crisis will issue from the meeting. Despite President Nicolas Sarkozy’s threat to walk out of the summit if leaders do not agree to put a cap on executive pay and bonuses, which are seen as key causes of the financial (...) read

Will China save the world from depression?

> Foreign Policy in Focus

The world is looking at China to save it from depression, but China has built its export based economy on the backs of its rural population, which is too poor to absorb the industry’s output now that global demand has slumped. Will China be the "growth pole" that will snatch the world from the jaws of depression? This question has become a favorite topic as the heroic American middle class consumer, weighed down by massive debt, ceases to be the key stimulus for global production. Although (...) read

The routes and possibilities of a South - South subversive globalization: Africa and Brazil

> Pambazuka News

Jacques Depelchin reflects on the growing economic, political and cultural relationship between Brazil and the Africa and urges for a solidarity from below that is cognizant of black revolutionary history. Almost everyone knows about Brazilian football, especially Pelé; but, it is a fair bet that a very tiny percentage of the same people will know about one of the foremost intellectuals of Brazil in the 20th century: Milton Santos (MS), winner in 1994 of the Vautrin Lud prize given to the (...) read

The Forum at the Crossroads

> Focus on the Global South

A new stage in the evolution of the global justice movement was reached with the inauguration of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001. The WSF was the brainchild of social movements loosely associated with the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil. Strong support for the idea was given at an early stage by the ATTAC movement in France, key figures of which were connected with the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. In Asia, the Brazilian proposal, floated in June 2000, (...) read

Globalization in retreat

> Foreign Policy in Focus , December 27th, 2006

When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, « globalization » was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of the so-called « borderless world ». The process by which relatively autonomous national economies become functionally integrated into one global economy was touted as « irreversible ». And the people who opposed globalization were (...) read

WTO talks on resumption of Doha talks

> Third World Network

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/twn (...)

Members of the World Trade Organization appear to be in favour of resuming the Doha negotiations, suspended by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy (and endorsed by the Trade Negotiations Committee) in July, and subsequently "taken note of" by the General Council.
At a Lamy-convened ’Green Room’ meeting Friday evening, while delegations generally favoured resumption, opinion was divided whether it should be restarted formally or informally.
Some key countries advised caution, and suggested that there should be informal consultations and discussions on whether there was flexibility in the positions of key members. Others, including several of the chairs of committees, appeared to favour formal resumption of negotiations.  read

Annual World Bank and IMF Meetings Close Under Heavy Criticism

> International Financial Institutions Under Fire with Regard to Developing Country Voting Rights and Civil Society Repression

http://www.liberationafrique.org/spi (...)

As the annual World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings closed under heavy fire, both from within and from civil society activists, Africa Action today condemned the undemocratic nature and harmful policies of these institutions. The organization underscored that the countries most affected by World Bank and IMF policies, particularly the debt-burdened countries of Africa, must have a greater say within the international financial institutions.
This week, the IMF re-organized the system of voting rights, increasing the voting power of China, Mexico, South Korea and Turkey, and the World Bank indicated that it would also be willing to consider a similar shift. But Africa Action notes that while developing country finance ministers and civil society from around the world have pushed for a more representative voting structure, these latest minor changes still leave power disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest nations.
Ann-Louise Colgan, Acting Co-Executive Director of Africa Action, said today, "The World Bank and IMF persist in ignoring the priorities of the developing world, and African countries continue to pay the price. The decisions made by these institutions have long-lasting effects on African countries, and yet there is little opportunity to hold them accountable. As a result, Africa’s illegitimate debt burden remains at overwhelming levels, and the World Bank and IMF continue to impose unfair conditions on Africa’s economies."  read

The hopes and illusions of world trade liberalisation for women in Africa

> Pambazuka News

http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-A (...)

Africa has faced ten years of unfettered liberalisation that, argues Cheikh Tidiane Dièye, has left the continent on its knees. Women, more than any other group, suffer the weight of the constraints of poverty largely brought about by the world trade system. It is women that must play a crucial role in winning the struggle for a better trading system.
Even though over the last twenty years many African nations have adopted sometimes draconian economic reforms, the benefits of trade liberalisation that were promised have not materialised. On the other hand, developed nations have enjoyed 70% of the wealth generated by trade liberalisation. In some respects, world trade regulations, defined for the most part by industrialised countries during the Uruguay Round agreements between 1986 and 1994, have only increased Africa’s economic problems.
Before an “ambiguous consensus”1 was reached at Doha, which was at the heart of the launch of the round of multilateral negotiations that tool place at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the “battle of Seattle” or “Seattle showdown”2 revealed to the world the growing dissatisfaction of developing countries with regard to the WTO, whose way of working did not appear to respond to their profound desire for economic progress and development.  read

Trade talks deadlock brings new hope for the poorest and the environment

OMC - Cycle de Doha

> Libération Afrique, juillet 2006

http://www.liberationafrique.org/spi (...)

Campaigners from Friends of the Earth International today welcomed the collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s trade negotiations. This means that there is now time to review and reconsider the multilateral trading system in its entirety. This will be welcome news to millions of people around the world who feared that a WTO deal would have further impoverished the world’s poorest people and caused irreparable damage to the environment. Developing countries, including India, also fear that a WTO deal would cause immense harm to millions of small and subsistence farmers.  read

Whatever is the IMF to do about the US?

STIGLITZ Joseph

> The US’ staggering trade deficit and continued borrowing threaten to undermine the relevance of the IMF

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit (...)

The IMF’s meeting this spring was lauded as a breakthrough, with officials given a new mandate for "surveillance" of the trade imbalances that contribute significantly to global instability. The new mission is crucially important, both for the health of the global economy and the IMF’s own legitimacy. But is the fund up to the job? There is obviously something peculiar about a global financial system in which the richest country in the world, the US, borrows more than US$2 billion a day from poorer countries — even as it lectures them on principles of good governance and fiscal responsibility. So the stakes for the IMF, which is charged with ensuring global financial stability, are high: If other countries eventually lose confidence in an increasingly indebted US, the potential disturbances in the world’s financial markets would be massive.  read

An African Perspective on Globalization

> Pan African Movement

http://www.panafricanmovement.org/Gl (...)

Africa and Europe have had a continuous contact of more than 400 years. It has been a relationship of domination, exploitation and oppression. Whatever happens in Europe tends to have ripple effects in Africa. Therefore any idea that has become fashionable in Europe trickles down into intellectual and political discussions/battles in Africa.  read

Oligopoly, Inc. 2005 - Concentration in Corporate Power

> ETC group, Dec 2005, PDF

http://www.etcgroup.org/upload/publi (...)

This report compares the ETC’s findings from 2003 to the current situation to reveal the dramatic increase in corporate concentration in 2005. Furthermore, it demonstrates how what looks like buying and selling between countries is very often the redistribution of capital among subsidiaries of the same parent multinational corporation.  read