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Occupy vs. the Global Race to the Bottom
Incorporating corporate globalization into the Occupy analysis and agenda
Ever since the first tent was pitched in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, the Occupy protests have been giving life to a “99 percent movement.” Expect to hear a lot more from them: plans for a 99 percent spring—starting as early as April—are now in the making.
(Photo: Glenn Halog)
This still very young movement has focused attention on a well-reasoned explanation of the vast suffering in this country, an explanation that is resonating with the broader U.S. public. It is often posed this way: For thirty years, Wall Street firms have successfully lobbied the US government to give them freer reign, by removing regulations and lowering taxes. In the process, these firms became uprooted and detached from lending to Main Street businesses and instead became more like casinos making money for the one percent through risky instruments such as derivatives based in subprime mortgages. This casino Wall Street economy increased inequality, corrupted our politics and politicians, and provoked the economic crash in 2008—a crash that left tens of millions unemployed, homeless, mired in debt, and vulnerable.
This narrative is not only compelling and tragic, it is also correct. But the Occupy analysis is thus far primarily a US-centric one; it often leaves out the reality that all of us in this country are part of a corporate-driven global economy.
So here is a fuller picture:
In addition to Wall Street speculators, the other dominant forces of the U.S. economy over the past three decades have been global firms like General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Apple. These firms spread their global assembly lines and resource extraction to countries like Mexico, China, and the Philippines where, in a quest for cheaper costs, they can more easily evade worker rights and environmental regulations. This global corporate economy pits U.S. workers and communities against poorly enforced Third World worker rights and environmental rules in a “race to the bottom” in terms of rights and standards. These global firms simply say to governments and workers: lower your wages and standards or we will move our operations elsewhere. They either get what they want or they move.
And, just as Wall Street speculators rewarded elected officials in the United States who passed local and national laws to remove regulations, so too did the global manufacturing firms reward members of Congress who passed trade and investment rules that gave corporations protections. Case in point: the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement which granted corporations powerful rights and protections while offering only weak social and environmental “clauses.”
The 1990s era of globalization accelerated the proliferation of global assembly lines with sweatshop conditions. United Students Against Sweatshops and others have exposed the horrors of garment assembly lines for decades. Today the exposès continue, most recently of Apple’s global assembly lines. As a January 2012 New York Times investigation revealed, hundreds of thousands of workers assembling Apple iPhones in China are denied basic rights, exposed to dangerous toxic chemicals, and live in squalor.
With this lens, one can better assess President Obama’s recent tour of industrial states where he proclaimed that manufacturing jobs are returning to the United States in part because wages and working conditions here are now “competitive.” “Competitive” masks the grim reality that real U.S. manufacturing wages have been stagnating or falling over this period and workers have accepted lower wages to prevent the real threat of corporations moving their jobs to China. This is hardly something we should applaud; we want good jobs – good for workers, good for the environment, good for community.
Adding this global component also reveals more about what needs to be part of our agenda for change. Until now, most of the 99 percent agenda has focused on reducing inequality by reining in Wall Street and cutting its influence on our corrupted politics. Many groups have advocated for fairer taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street, and various measures to prevent the one percent from purchasing elections and elected officials. These are critical starting points.
But to these important proposals, let us also add new mechanisms to enforce internationally recognized worker rights and environmental standards everywhere, including workers’ rights to organize independent unions, an end to child labor, and the right for communities to know of potential environmental dangers. Another way to support this “race to the top” is by ending trade agreements that provide corporations with investor rights to sue governments but do not provide workers or communities or the environment with stronger protections.
Likewise, let us also push proposals to shift the incentives away from global trade and investment and back toward revitalizing “Main Street” by encouraging more production and investment locally. Much of what is traded across borders, from food to clothing to electronic gadgets, can be produced—with less stress on the environment—much closer to home. Worker-owned co-ops in Cleveland, for example, are now producing food and linen for local hospitals and universities that used to come from far away.
This expansion of the Occupy story to address to challenges of corporate globalization is one logical next step in the Occupy trajectory. Indeed, many in the Occupy movements have already embraced Occupy protests and movements in other countries, from England to Nigeria to dozens of other countries around the world. Let us embrace the 99 percent everywhere with a global analysis and a global agenda.
John Cavanagh and Robin Broad wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.
They are co-authors of three books and numerous articles on the global economy, and have been traveling the country and the world for their project Local Dreams: Finding Rootedness in the Age of Vulnerability.
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14 Comments so far
Show AllAnd even with all this information at our fingertips, which proves that Capitalism is just as disastrously failed as Communism, we are still not permitted to do anything more constructive than stand in the street and howl our discontent, while the Police thugs move in to break our heads.
If this is 'sane, normal behavior', then obviously I am am batshit insane.
A drop of water falling continuously onto a rock will eventually cut it. Or one can take a sledge-hammer to it. The difference is patience added to persistence. The global corporate capitalist circus tent is being held up with the thin air of money being printed by surreptitious agencies like The Fed. The house of cards is scheduled for collapse. My point is that you under-estimate the role of all those drip, drip,drips because your masculine sense of identity relies upon the macho use of a sledge hammer. (Then there are the agent provocateurs who earn their daily bread in constant attempts to stir the unwise use of violent force.)
There have been HEATED debates in this forum on the relative efficacy of violence, in contrast with the wisdom of masters (added to history's voice). And never have the weapons held by the dark lords of power been stronger and more efficient in their capacity to kill or do harm on a grand scale.
How would you feel, in coming to use the sledge-hammer that led to violent retaliation, to learn that a few more drips and the rocky edifice would come apart naturally?
Something to consider.
An eloquent, thought-provoking post!
Or maybe,, we want results, IN THIS LIFETIME! even Gandi lost patencence with the 1%er goons! >^^<
Now THAT is worth a hug :)
Well said.
The wind that is seemingly mere wisps of empty air, is similarly inclined to turn adamantine mountain megaliths, into loose piles of sand.
Out of the seemingly empty space of pure vacuum between distant galaxies, the zero-point energy of space itself, springs forth in blazing atomic frenzy, and in a fraction of a moment later, becomes nothinglessness, once again.
Shall we not learn from the great and wise Sequoia, that takes only the nutrients that it needs from the soil ?
Shall we not learn from the best of the martial arts, that takes wanton violence of the aggressor and miraculously transforms and directs that as a self-defensive force against themselves ?
Given the acceleration of catastrophic climate chaos and the resistance of most "developed" nations to do anything significant to slow and reverse it, how much time do we now have to wait for the drops to wear down the rock?
@Siouxrose - Look what an industrial water-cutter can do. To steel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9hAM68K9OU
Why should we use a hammer to 'bring down the masters house'?
The international banking cartels are establishing the Corporate State through debt and control of the money supply. The takeover will be complete when everyone and every Nation State is in debt at a level that can never be paid back, and every person will spend their lives in debt peonage to the Corporate State. There is no stopping this, short of a global peoples revolt. The race to the bottom is being resisted by taking on debt, which is exactly what the bankers want. We are being lead to the abyss and we are going right along blinded by massive cognitive dissonance, magical thinking, and unrealistic expectations based on voluntary ignorance.
"Much of what is traded across borders, from food to clothing to electronic gadgets, can be produced—with less stress on the environment—much closer to home. Worker-owned co-ops in Cleveland, for example, are now producing food and linen for local hospitals and universities that used to come from far away."
Great example of localism in practice. There's a lot of it going on but much much more is needed, to make localism the dominant culture. Localism MUST dominate or it will die. It's not a case where alternative paradigms can coexist, as we see our systems naturally move toward monopoly. Better a monopoly by/for the people than by/for elites. The people are learning this now. The confusion is clearing away. We allow the people's agenda to monopolize because the evidence about human nature makes its dominance necessary.
"This expansion of the Occupy story to address to challenges of corporate globalization is one logical next step in the Occupy trajectory"
Definitely. The people's security and fulfillment must be achieved and it can only be achieved by the people's ownership/control of production.
I agree that we need to address global capitalism; however, until the United States has a government not paid for by corporations, for corporations, the global challenge cannot be met. So focusing on the US is just the start of a larger agenda.
My Take: http://texshelters.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/if-youre-reading-this-youre-part-of-the-99/
PTxS
At the bottom is political slavery for the 99%. In a purely free market system we would all have to sell our children into slavery in order to compete with each other.
However, we need not be called into a race to the bottom. We don't believe that we live in a "free" market. We create market economies only so far as they help our society's common wealth, and then at that point we the owners of our government stop creating market economies.
The purpose of a market economy is to set a fair wage for each worker. If that "fair wage" is a dollar a day and if the worker is starving, as happens to billions of human beings now, then the market economy has failed its job, and so the market economy will quickly be cashiered away.
We could have instead a community economy, where only members of each community can provide goods and services to other members of that community. All of a sudden, all of the foreign currencies in the world, including dollars from the far-off land of "beltway", are pretty much worthless if you want food, heat or other local goods and services. We would have close to a sustainable local economy in every individual community. The technological state of our society is not that far from the point where we can have local robotics building our cars and dishwashers.
Now, if you were a billionaire before, you will grouse that nobody wants to serve you hand and foot for a dollar a day anymore, unless you want to move to some place like Vietnam. However, the 99% will have a living wage. The community will find a way to take care of the seniors, of the disabled, of the schoolkids.
Who made giant corporations "King" for multiple years? Our government did by giving corporations too much power through tax cuts, subsidies, tax loopholes, outsourcing, deregulation, abolishing Glass Steagall (the wall separating investment banks from commercial banks) endless, unauthorized wars and by succumbing to corporate bribes. The function of our democratic form of government is not to fight for giant corporations, but rather to fight for "we the people" by "subordinating corporate power to the sovereignty of the people." (Ralph Nader) Our government is supposed to fight for the U.S. Constitution and our civil rights, civil liberties, freedoms, justice (equal justice under the law) fairness (i.e. fair share taxes) openness, reason and civil discourse. If the government doesn't fight for these rights & liberties, the giant corporations will extinguish them through their politician friends. Also, why does the government continually give tax cuts to giant corporations to create jobs when instead of creating jobs, they sit on $2 trillion, outsource jobs overseas, and bribe politicians and others to get what they want, which further corrupts the system? One way to lessen the corruption could be to raise taxes on one of the main sources of corruption - giant corporations' profits. Global occupiers could push for a 50% tax rate for multi-national corporations in all industrialized nations; therefore, less money to buy politicians, buy elections, privatize all systems and usurp democracy. Prior to President Reagan's Administration, the corporate tax rate was 70%. U.S. occupiers could push for a moratorium on outsourcing & global occupiers could push for local cooperatives or co-ops. (See Jim Hightower's article on "Cooperatives Over Corporations." (Common Dreams, 2/22/2012.)
OK, we can give Obama a D- for the mid-terms (his first year). But, we don't need to wait until the election for his final grade: F- As, in total failure to be anything other than a lackey for the 1%.