Globalism is a net Loss for Countries Such as Haiti

Countries such as Haiti are a reminder that the global economy is a failure for the great majority of people in 3rd world countries. Haitians who lived in the 1800's (after slavery ended but long before international corporations started infiltrating) were overall at least as well off as those who lived there since 1970. The lack of electricity and the lack of a few other amenities that had not been invented yet was offset by food and shelter (crude though it was) being virtually free and by everyone being able to easily get employment (mostly in agriculture but there were a few other options).

Fast forward to today, and we see that the global economy as run by the massively rich corporations is all about extracting marginal profit in just the right places and times, but obviously it does not care about people as a whole or about national economies as a whole. So in Haiti for example the international corporations might open a few factories employing 1% of the population, but the other 99% of the population not only does not get the income from the factories but faces higher prices and lesser employment opportunities due to the displacement of domestic agriculture and the displacement of other indigenous industries due to encroachment by those same global corporations. Globalism is a net loss for countries such as Haiti.

GUEST COMMENT

phoenix20 January 14th, 2010 12:17 pm
tremaine: Well said. Ghandighost above spoke (a la Klein's disaster capitalism thesis) of how disasters create extraordinary opportunities for exploitation by the vultures who go to the scenes of disasters. And so they do, and I expect the birds are already circling in search of carrion. But comments like yours are useful in reminding us that there is another opportunity that uniquely occurs with disaster: the opportunity to focus our ever-distracted attention on the real conditions of human beings in this world. I recall many post-Katrina commentaries that found as a "bright spot" in all this tragedy that it laid bare the structural racism in our society in a way that not any number of lectures by learned professors of sociology could do. We had, in other words, a brief shining "learning moment" in which we learned, among other things, that the right wing assault on "government" had succeeded so well that there was no effective government ready at any level (city, state, national) to deal with a human disaster. (Given the "tax revolt" component of the currently popular tea-baggers, I doubt we made the best use of that moment).

Now we have another "opportunity": to see through a new focus on Haiti as a virtual poster child for the neo-liberal destruction of the world an awareness of what-the-hell we having been doing to the rest of the world. I'm not too optimistic that we will do much better with this opportunity than we did with the New Orleans one. But the appearance today of this article and the companion one by Peter Hallward encourages me to "hope" at least that a vigilant and courageous alternative press can pound on the heads of our consciousness to produce some semblance of awakeness.

The above was in response to this article.
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