> >I'm tired of the corporate-owned media calling people opposed to
> >corporate globalization, anti-globalization. They might as well
> >call us flat earthers.
mbs: nothing wrong with 'anti-glob'. It's an empty vessel and will mean whatever you can persuade people it means. "Globalization" can have negative connotations too.
BDL:
> We neoliberals at least have broad agreement that developing-country
> governments are corrupt, by and large (East Asia excepted) lack the
> competence to run successful developmental states, and hence the best
> chance is to try to shrink them to keep them out of the way of
> economic development for a generation or so. We have broad agreement
> that maximizing economic contact--trade, investment, et cetera--is
> our best chance for accelerating technology transfer to poor
> economies and hence putting ourselves on the road to what may for the
> first time in history become a truly human world.
>
> You can't even agree whether the big problem is that the U.S.
> Congress does not exercise enough or exercises too little dominion
> over India...
mbs: Conoisseurs of debating tactics will note that BDL's paraphrase of the anti-glob movement is done mostly in procedural terms, whereas that of the neo-libs is in substantive terms. The effect is to drain the AG's of content.
We could as easily note that Republicans like states' rights in matters of race, but don't in matters of product liability or tort reform, or that Dems like it conversely. Or that the U.S. likes international judicial bodies when they rule on the Balkans, but not when they delve into Central America. Are they all incoherent? If so, then incoherence is too ubiquitous to be worth citing as a distinguishing feature of anything.
Political interests gravitate to the procedural course that they hope gets them their preferred substantive outcome. The anti-democratic nature of the WTO/WB/IMF, aside from their substantive effects or lack thereof, could not be more obvious. The AG movement is united on that.
In substantive terms, the AG movement supports labor rights, enviro protection, and a thriving turtle population, among other unambiguously humane outcomes.
There is division on procedural grounds, especially among the lesser fringes of the AG movement, but the outlook of its social- democratic core -- social clauses in trade agreements -- is perfectly straightforward, as is the overall outlook.
The interests of textile workers in Bengla Desh v. North Carolina is an unavoidably pesky issue which we've gone around before. I will only note that it distracts from the broader issue of whether liberalization is succeeding in its own terms -- whether it is delivering the goods or not. On the evidence of the latest EPI study that I quoted, and Dean Baker's a few months ago, among others, it is not. The neo-liberal success stories seem to be dominated by managed economies with managed trade policies. Certainly in the wake of such success, we can see why such countries are eager to get into a "free trade" game that permits them to ream those less fortunate than themselves. The notion that countries in other parts of the world (i.e., Africa, South America; why not?) cannot be developmental states has the character of a self- fulfilling prophecy, insofar as the developed countries could be accused of upholding such a uniquely humane rationale for the satiation of their base desire for plunder.
mbs