- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
The Stiglitz 1.0 version of the Holiwell nightmare reads
like this:
Luxury in New York requires starvation in Michigan. In
fact, Luxury in Mahattan requires starvation of Queens,
Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Don't believe it? Wait a few years.
"There has got to be a better way." And there is.
Its called....Protectionism.
But as long as Rich People own the government and run
the country, we have Free Trade. So shut up and get back
to work. What do you MEAN, "what work"? Oh, that's right.
I guess I forgot. Well shut up and go back to your box.
Making globalization work for the poor is like making slavery work for the slaves. The whole point of globalization is to allow the rich to make even more wealth. *If* the middle class and poor can get some crumbs, great. If not, who cares. It was never about us in the first place, except as a way to break the institutions we had put in place to get a piece of the pie.
The zero sum nightmare you allude to might not be too far from the truth. I recommend taking a look at L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: Morrow, 1981). Global Rift is a history tome that, starting from 1400, traces the emergence of the third world. While Global Rift does not paint a zero sum nightmare per se, it does present the case that First World wealth is born on the backs of the Third World. A sort of pyramid scheme, if you will. It seems unlikely to me that the entire world could live at First World standards. The First World lifestyle is premised on (dare I say defined by) access to cheap resources: energy, labor, and other natural resources. Where can the Third World turn to for access to cheap resources that the First World isn't already using?
The last page of the text (814) quotes an Army report that is interesting in light of recent events (and note the second author): "Major Danial W. Christman and Major Wesley K. Clark concluded in a a study . . . that 'U.S. military forces will be ineffective in coercing petroleum-producing states to respond to America's wishes.'"
