All over the world, economic protests against globalism

[Waiting For Everyman]

People everywhere are done with it. They realize it does nothing for anyone except the corporatists.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, just the most recent protests, from a quick search. I know there are more, but you get the picture...

Russia 1/31
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFZgUp-VXBM

France 1/30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLTOrgHvO7Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi3Q5e7-eh8

Latvia 2/1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKeWBO3_uCc

Lithuania 1/16
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWMxj03mOV4

Iceland 1/26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK0d0Nno4zw

Bulgaria 1/14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMR1zu2G5hw

Colombia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxfKNIHa48M

Mexico 1/31
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRbaq5PcJ48

Switzerland 1/31
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZHHXPRrAAo

China 1/2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEfrjNrs3oc

Greece, of course - as we already know

UK 1/31
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EabWX3_mdA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaD7GlBegG0


It isn't working anywhere. And everybody knows it. In fact it's making people poorer everywhere, they know that too. Everybody is fed up with their jobs being taken by cheap labor, or their wages reduced, which is happening all over. So there is no reason to think that we have to go along with this. It isn't some inevitable wave that everybody else is for. Quite the contrary. It's inevitable that it will end soon. The corporatists can't keep it going by force everywhere in the world, with everywhere rising up against it. It's over. The world is looking for economic nationalism, and "the people" are right on this.

[Skittles]

1. I know I am fucking sick of it

I see who is losing their jobs and have to work with the peopl who are taking them - there is simply no comparision, they're cheap and they SUCK

[whistle]

2. ...and World Economic Forum attendees head back to their comfortable positions

...convinced that globalization and the New World Order only needs fine tuning but is working just fine

[Waiting For Everyman]

5. Gordon Brown, for one, may be out of a job himself soon.

Britain's protest looks like it may be turning into a movement rapidly. It almost reminds me of the Obama campaign in a way - but I don't know if it has a leader as good as him.

[fasttense]

3. The world got conned ...again.

The fascists did it in the 1920s and then again when Raygun got voted into office. Bush was just the culmination of 30 years of deregulation and neoliberal or "free" market economic fantasy.

The lie is that if you let businessmen, financiers, venture capitalists and bankers alone, take all the rules off of them, they will NOT lie, cheat and steal from the middle class. Somehow these uber wealthy folks are so much more saintly than the rest of society. It's the same as deregulating criminals.

[malaise]

4. You ain't see 'nuthin' yet

It will get worse

[HillbillyBob]

7. I suspect and have had the feeling since partner got

outsourced in 2001 2x and he had to train replacement at the first place he was let go from.
In reference to "The fascists did it in the 1920s and then again when Raygun got voted into office. Bush was just the culmination of 30 years of deregulation and neoliberal or "free" market economic fantasy?.
The Rs are fascists, they have been since Herbert Hoover (at least a good size portion of the corporate supporters have) and more have become so since.
We must be always aware of this and guard against it.
I have heard this from various sources from Holocaust survivors to former federal employees. For years I thought it was just talk, exaggerations, or maybe feverish imaginings. Now I am pretty sure, no very sure it is true from reading rare writings to bits I have found in the Library of Congress, which after amBushco have all disappeared or no longer available on line or 'classified in the name of national security. Which I find seriously suspicious, if there was nothing to it, why delete or hide references to any number of well known corporatists being Nazi supporters? Henry Ford, Prescott Bush, Andrew Mellon (alcoa. later Mellon bank),Averill Harriman, Father Conghlin friend and likely mentor ot Billy Graham.
It is early and I have not had enough coffee to be fully awake yet.
The corporate agenda has a lot to do with the anti communist anti labor and making labor unions appear to be communists. Look into the Red Scare of 1919 for instance.

[Waiting For Everyman]

8. Oh, you're definitely right. I have some sources I could give you

which haven't disappeared. Plus I remember for myself, watching the McCarthy hearings when I was just a kid on our first TV (black and white). Looking back, I'm surprised it was televised, except I guess that the "powers that be" didn't know any better. Everything about TV was an experiment then.

You might look up Anton Chaitkin and Webster Tarpley's biography of the Bush family, for a lot of information such as you referred to. It's readable online. Also Treason In America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman by Chaitkin (it won't be in stores, it's a 1980's book but Amazon has it) for the early, early, roots of it. It's one continuous thread going back that far (actually much farther).

[The2ndWheel]

6. I don't think it has much to do with what people want

If the energy required to do it is cheap enough, it will continue. If it isn't, then it won't.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

9. That's a gross oversimplification.

The protests in Iceland, for one, were against the current government's heinous mismanagement of the crisis there, not globalization. And in Iceland, as in the US, the problems were primarily due to poor regulation of financial markets.

[Waiting For Everyman]

12. Well that's rather weird.

I see, then foreign investments had nothing to do with it. Iceland is the only economy on earth which isn't entangled with the others, and therefore, its downfall was all an internal matter. Ok then.

I suppose I could've written a paragraph for the subject line, instead of summarizing the thought as succinctly as possible.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

16. It wasn't "foreign investments."

It was foreign investments backed almost solely by debt as a specific result of poor regulation of Icelandic banks by the government of that country.

[Iggo]

10. So did the New World Order...

...last longer than the Thousand Year Reich? Or the Permanent Republican Majority?

[Cerridwen]

11. That's great...as far as it goes.

But protesting against an ideology is about as effective as fighting a war on a strategy.

Perhaps it's time we start putting faces and names to the perpetrators of predatory and exploitive globalization and start holding them accountable for their actions.

[Waiting For Everyman]

13. An excellent idea.

[Cerridwen]

14. Thank you.

Now to put action to the idea, it's time to start finding names and getting them out there in front of people's faces.

One place to start is in this book review.

Only a couple of names are listed. Perhaps others can help dig up a few more.

[pilsner]

15. Where we were before 9-11

The Seattle protest happened just months before 9-11.

A huge protest was planned in D.C. in October 2001 but got canceled.

8 additional years of corporate hegemony/globalization allowed us to see the outcome of world-wide Friedmanomics---the shit can for 98% of earth's citizens.

[Waiting For Everyman]

21. The Seattle protest getting "lost in the shuffle" then was a real tragedy

looking back on it. I live on the East Coast and we really didn't get much press about it at the time (at least in my media market). Then as you say, 9/11 broke loose. Dire consequences for the whole world - economically and militarily.

I have no doubt that if the D.C. protest had happened (and 9/11 had not), it would've gained momentum and things would've been very different.

By these demonstrations, it does look like we're back at the same point - only lots of additional damage later. But the actions are so widespread now though, so that's good.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

17. Every country has people who don't understand economics.

Every country has a lot of people who want the government to pass laws whose stated intent is to boost that country's economy at the expense of other countries' economies.

It's always tempting to say "save ourselves, and screw Johnny Foreigner". And, if protectionist policies actually helped save ourselves, even though they make things worse for people in other countries, whether or not to do so would be a genuine moral dilemma.

The problem is that governments can't encourage you to buy/employ domestic, they can just discourage you from buying/employing foreign.

And if one country passes such laws, its trade partners do too.

So:

Workers gain by having less competition for jobs from local employers, but lose by finding it harder to get jobs from foreign employers

Employers lose by having a more restricted labour market

Consumers lose by having less access to products for sale

Producers gain by having less competition for the domestic market, but lose by finding it harder to compete in foreign markets.


Invariably, there are many more net losers than net winners.

Protectionism was one of the things that made the last great depression a lot worse than it might have been.

With any luck, international trade is here to stay.

[Waiting For Everyman]

19. And all that is what has obviously failed. You may as well admit it.

The U.S. is not like Europe. It doesn't matter a whole lot if our workers can't get jobs in other countries - that isn't big on our concern list. The cheaper products are only cheap in quality because every corner is cut. Meanwhile jobs are outsourced and never come back - only to increase the corporatists' profit margin.

This is all bull, and workers all over the world know it by now. It's rather obvious, with the economy in ruins from it all around us. And if this is "economics" that we "don't understand", then it's voo-doo economics. The kind taught by University of Chicago followers. I think it's pretty clear to most thinking people that Keynes has won the argument over Friedman.

I don't intend to be explaining this to each and every free trader every time I post, so any who are likeminded please take note. After this, I'll probably just say, "whatever".

Btw, we had a pretty good economy here before free trade. And that concept also btw, was rejected here 200 years ago. It was promoted by the opium and tea predators for the same reason - to rape the world. Some things don't change - the globalists' spots, are one of them.

Oh, and... your sig line says it all "mathematician first, human being second". (This is why beancounters shouldn't be making policy.)

[Donald Ian Rankin]

20. Unfortunately for the US, it doesn't get to dictate trade terms so unilaterally anymore.

America - and Europe, for that matter - had economies before free trade that functioned because they were able to dictate trade terms with the third world entirely one-sidedly, and exploited it ruthlessly.

Clearly, the ideal situation for any given country is for it to be protectionist and everywhere else to be free trade, and in the past that was sort of possible for the first world.

Now, that exploitation still happens to a considerable extent, but it's no longer nearly as easy, which means that the terms will need to be fairer.

[Waiting For Everyman]

22. Well, tell it to the protesters in the OP.

The Third World is being exploited a lot more than before. And so is the First World, and Second World. As I asserted, it's working for no one - except the corporatists.

Well unfortunately for them, they are few and the workers of the world are many. And just as agreements are made, they can be unmade. Looks to me like there's an emerging simultaneous consensus on doing that. But time will tell.

[blindpig]

18. Globalization is a misnomer.

It's Global Capitalism.

[hologram]

23. China?

Protesting globalization in China? :wtf: I thought China was the grand beneficiary of globalization, sucking up jobs and wages from everyplace else. Are they protesting slave labor conditions or something?

[newtothegame]

24. Well no shit. We've been pushing this "We are the world" hand-holding shit for decades...

[leftstreet]

26. The Global Predator Class is doing all the hand-holding

Us peons? Not so much

[SergeyDovlatov]

25. Moscow protest video is half fake

Some of the pictures are from Ukraine. Some of them from Chechnya.
The current protests were done by nazbols, who deny their neo-nazi connections, but still use symbolics eary similar to nazis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevik_Party

[readmoreoften]

27. And in the United States?

Nah, we're too busy defending the bastards with posts about how the rich aren't "all bad." :crazy:

[DemReadingDU]

28. and where are the protests in America?

Why aren't hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the bailouts to the corrupted banksters?

Why aren't hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the prosecution of Bush and his cronies who led us into an unjust war that has killed over 4000 of our men and women?

Why aren't hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting torture?

Maybe there will be hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting when people have lost their jobs and they have no money to by food or have a place to stay to keep warm. Maybe they will protest when they are personally affected.


:shrug:

[KoKo]

29. In Years to Come...we will REMEMBER...this was just "THE BEGINNING of CHANGE"

Because it will be..wait and see.