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

The scandal-ridden UKIP party, still reeling under the revelations that its leader Nigel Farage has swindled claimed more than £2 million in expenses, has now been exposed as a thoroughly non-British party whose candidates include an Argentinian who now resides in and is a citizen of Spain, and a Sri Lankan – both of whom are on record as enthusiastic supporters of the European Union.
UKIP’s adoption of the Argentinean-born, Spanish citizen and resident Marta Andreasen as an MEP candidate must be one of the most hypocritical, ridiculous and outrageous events of this year’s entire European election campaign.
Mr Farage has had to specially waive his own party’s rules which forbid non-UK nationals from standing for his fake party. Ms Andreasen’s candidacy in fact has given legitimacy to the entire EU concept. She does not live in Britain, holds an EU passport, yet is standing for election in the South East of England with Mr Farage.
More importantly, Ms Andreasen is actually in favour of the EU, and is diametrically opposed to its disbandment, which Mr Farage claims is the purpose of his party.
In fact, Ms Andreasen is on record as stating the following:
“I have been called a Eurosceptic, but I am not one. I want to fight for a good EU project. To do that we must fight for transparency, for responsibility, for accountability. We need real reform of the EU; but the new constitution will do nothing to combat the Brussels culture of graft, secrecy and corruption that so tarnishes the European dream.” - Marta Andreasen, The Times — 6th December 2004.

“And I asked myself, to whom was I not loyal? I wonder who can say that I’m not a true European, so to speak. I have been called eurosceptic and anti-European when I risked my job for defending the interests of the citizens of Europe.” -Marta Andreasen, speech to an International Rally hosted by the DM, CAEF & TEAM, 9th April 2005.

The fact that Ms Andreasen is a number two candidate for UKIP is conclusive evidence that this party is nothing but a front, designed to try and deceive patriotic British voters into thinking they are voting for a Eurosceptic party when it is nothing of the sort.
To add insult to injury, Mr Farage has alienated most of his East Midlands activists by parachuting Sri Lankan-born Deva Kumarasiri into his party’s candidate list in that region.
Mr Kumarasiri, who was appointed without UKIP East Midlands even being consulted, was until only a few weeks ago a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, which is the most heavily pro-EU party out there.

According to a disgruntled UKIP insider, Mr Kumarasi is now almost a daily visitor to UKIP’s Nottingham office “where he spends most of the day drinking coffee and doing very little else.”
“Mr Kumarasiri is set to be one of the ’star’ speakers at Farage’s much vaunted Exeter rally. No doubt he will regale members with tales of how he used to refuse to serve certain customers,” the disgruntled UKIP insider blogged.

“Members may be interested to know that Mr Kumarasiri has said that unless UKIP pay all his travelling and hotel expenses he will be unable to attend the rally. Kumarasiri has also demanded that all his MEP election expenses — including his deposit — be paid for by UKIP. I can confirm that Farage has agreed to this.
“I wonder if Stuart Wheeler is happy with the cavalier way Farage has spent his £100,000 donation? As Kumarasiri owns two houses I would have thought that he could have at least managed to find the money to pay his deposit.”

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.