NewsTrust - Globalization - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

America's Pacific Century

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Hillary Clinton - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - We cannot and do not aspire to impose our system on other countries, but we do believe that certain values are universal -- that people in every nation in the world, including in Asia, cherish them -- and that they are intrinsic to stable, peaceful, and prosperous countries.

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Defending Obama's pragmatism

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Fareed Zakaria - Aug. 15 (Opinion) - Over the last week, liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to criticize the debt deal that Congress reached. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama, who they concluded had failed as a President because of his persistent tendency to compromise. This has been a running theme ever since Obama took office. I think that liberals need to grow up. As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, there is a recurring liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, "Every known impediment to the legislative process - special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion-are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech."

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Globalization Has Role In This Double Whammy

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Simon Nixon - Aug. 10 (Opinion) - On the face of it, there's not much to link the London riots and the latest gyrations in global markets. The wave of violence and looting that has spread across the U.K. over the past few days has been mass criminality not a protest movement. And the global stock market rout was triggered by concerns over the euro zone, U.S. government debt and the global recovery rather than anything specific to the U.K. Indeed, the markets have singled out the U.K. as a haven, its debt now cheaper to insure than that of Germany. Even so, there's a link between the two phenomena—and it is an unsettling one. Both reflect the challenges of globalization. The creation of a rules-based multi-lateral trading system has been one of the greatest triumphs of the past 65 years. But the crash and the riots are evidence of the pressure this system is coming under from above and below.

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The case against globaloney

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - By Schumpeter, Pankaj Ghemawat - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - Mr Ghemawat points out that many indicators of global integration are surprisingly low. Only 2% of students are at universities outside their home countries; and only 3% of people live outside their country of birth. Only 7% of rice is traded across borders. Only 7% of directors of S&P 500 companies are foreigners—and, according to a study a few years ago, less than 1% of all American companies have any foreign operations. Exports are equivalent to only 20% of global GDP. Some of the most vital arteries of globalisation are badly clogged: air travel is restricted by bilateral treaties and ocean shipping is dominated by cartels.

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Key to job growth, equality is boosting tradable sector of economy

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Steven Pearlstein, Michael Spence, Sandile Hlatshwayo - Mar. 13 (Opinion) - What ails the U.S. economy is primarily a structural problem, not a cyclical one that can be effectively dealt with through the magic of short-term Keynesian stimulus. Unless we find a way to dramatically increase the size and scope of the tradable sector, Spence says, we're in for an extended period of slow job growth and rising inequality. And make no mistake: at the heart of this problem is globalization.

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How's That New World Order Working Out?

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Foreign Policy - By Parag Khanna - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - What a difference a couple of decades makes. A little over 20 years ago, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush -- who had just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and saw the Soviet Union disintegrating before his very eyes -- stood at the granite podium of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and proclaimed a "new world order," a U.S.-dominated international system "where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle." Two decades later, the "new new world order" we are in fact living looks almost nothing like what Bush -- and most Americans -- imagined or hoped.

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Obama's Big Sellout

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Dec. 12 (Opinion) - Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

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A Gloomy Forecast for Australian Economy in 2009

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - Jan. 20 - Once considered a relatively save haven, Australia’s mining-led economy “will unwind scarily fast” in part because of slower-than-expected growth in China.

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Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? (Extended version): Scientific American

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Robert Nadeau - Dec. 19 (Opinion) - The causes of the environmental crisis may be hugely complex, but the most effective way to deal with it in economic terms seems rather obvious. We must use our best scientific understanding of how environmental problems can be resolved as the basis for implementing scientifically viable economic policies and solutions. If this could be accomplished within the framework of the economic theory that we now use to coordinate economic activities in the global market system—neoclassical economics—there would be no cause for concern. But as this discussion will demonstrate, there is a large problem here that should be cause for great concern: Neoclassical economic theory is predicated on unscientific assumptions that massively frustrate or effectively undermine efforts to implement scientifically viable economic policies and solutions.

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Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? (Extended version)

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Robert Nadeau - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - The causes of the environmental crisis may be hugely complex, but the most effective way to deal with it in economic terms seems rather obvious. We must use our best scientific understanding of how environmental problems can be resolved as the basis for implementing scientifically viable economic policies and solutions. If this could be accomplished within the framework of the economic theory that we now use to coordinate economic activities in the global market system—neoclassical economics—there would be no cause for concern. But as this discussion will demonstrate, there is a large problem here that should be cause for great concern: Neoclassical economic theory is predicated on unscientific assumptions that massively frustrate or effectively undermine efforts to implement scientifically viable economic policies and solutions. These assumptions were first articulated by 18th-century moral philosophers (Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo) who embraced a new understanding of God known as deism that resulted from attempts to understand the metaphysical implications of Newtonian physics. Because this physics assumes that the laws of gravity completely determine the future state of physical systems, the deists concluded that the universe does not require, or even permit, active intervention by God after the first moment of creation. They then imaged God as a clock maker and the universe as a clockwork regulated and maintained after its creation by physical laws.

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