GLOBALIZATION – A FAILURE OF MAMOUTH PROPORTIONS
I have always claimed I see nothing clever about a factory being closed down in Youngstown PA and production moving to Bangladesh, where the cost of labor moves from $20.00/hour to twenty cents. I am about starting lifting the average lot of the desperate in these impoverished nations by creating an environment that pulls them up from the bootstraps and provides hope for the masses. And it is not about exploitation, through cheap labor, which globalization has been brilliant at achieving. The third world needs the first world being benevolent despots. Building schools and providing teachers, building hospitals and providing medical staff, building roads and providing buses and trucks, turning swamps and plains (while protecting the environment) into arable farmland is exactly the tonic that will raise the hopes of the poor, not some sweatshop, employing child labor in appalling conditions making Hanes underpants which can be sold at 1980 prices through Wal*Mart.
Let the industrialized countries continue to make the goods it consumes and channel some of those profits into alleviating poverty by creating an environment of hope. The only industry the third world should be involved in is the distribution of food to all its inhabitants. Some of these countries have huge potential in also expanding their cottage industries and no matter how junky the products are, the first world should buy them at fair prices and even promote the first world into becoming consumers of the third world’s indigenous goods. No disrespect, take Fiji in the South Pacific. The natives there have been drinking Kava, made from a root, for centuries. The drink has a similar effect to marijuana, without the addictive ingredients. Hey, over-proof rum is promoted as a great additive to Coca Cola, what is wrong with Kava? We already have an insatiable appetite for expensive Fiji Water (the company is actually owned by a greedy American, hence the price), why not Kava? To me, we would have a greater appreciation for the culture if we just gave the third world a chance to show us who they really are. India is better off making jewelry than being the telephone service center for General Electric. A Gambian is better off tending to his rice field than sitting under a tree and sending his children to the sweatshop instead of school.
To me it is all about horses for courses. China is the grandest example. Over 50% of its toy factories have closed down in the last eighteen months. Why? Even employing cheap labor, the goods the factories made were simply just junk. Add the cost to the environment with the pollution created by all those factories. How about the hapless workers? Are they any better off? Hell no. Sure corrupt government officials are driving around in their Buicks spewing out toxic carbon monoxide into an already polluted atmosphere. China needs to feed, properly educate its 1.2 billion peoples and look after their health first. Instead this Bolshevik nation is doing its best living up to its communist principles of seeking to take over and dominate the world through its political, military and economic might. Just a word of advice to all those bespectacled Chinese geriatrics leaders; you don’t fool me with you smarmy smiling faces. If you could personally profit by selling your pet dog off for a sumptuous restaurant meal, dog casserole, you would. You need the benefits of a western style education, where the first tenet we are taught is the sanctity of life itself. Instead of building the Three Gorges Dam which destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile farmland and the lives of millions of people, you should have been replacing horses with tractors, promoting growing alternate staple varieties of foods and paying tobacco farmers to become orchardists. It is healthy and nourishing food for the masses that the Chinese need, not an Olympic Games, plasma TV’s or infant milk powder contaminated with melamine.
Globalization has enriched the few mainly corrupt government officials/ “quasi” entrepreneurs at the top in these third world countries. The third world is not ready for democracy, nor is it ready for capitalism. What it needs is trickle up, not the trickle down deal. The poor have to be brought out of poverty and given the chance to rise up. This can only be done with investment in basic infrastructure, not sweatshop factories.
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