World Trade Organization Director Pascal Lamy, one of globalization's shrewdest observers, rehabilitates the Marxist criticism of capitalism. A man of the Left and director general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy is at the heart of globalization. His sense of things? Marxism remains pertinent as a tool for analysis of modern capitalism. His conviction? We must look for alternatives to this same capitalism.
Challenges: Does Marx, as a certain number of recent authors have written, remain the best thinker about contemporary capitalism? Pascal Lamy: Not the best, because history has shown us that he was not the prophet some vaunted. But from the perspective of nonpredictive explanatory power nothing comparable exists. If one wants to analyze the globalized market capitalism of today, the essential tools reside in the intellectual toolkit Marx and some of those who inspired him created. Of course, everything is not perfect. There are stacks of criticisms to level against Marx, and he was probably a better philosopher and economic theoretician than he was a political thinker....
What do you retain from Marx? Before everything else, the idea that market capitalism is a system based on a certain theory of value and the dynamic and the dysfunctions it may generate. A system where there are owners of capital who buy labor and holders of their own labor power who sell that. That relationship implies a theory of profit which ensues from alienation: the system has the tendency for the rich to become richer as they accumulate capital and for the poor to become poorer when they own nothing but their labor. All that remains largely true. No one since Marx has invented an analysis of the same significance. Even globalization is only a historical stage of market capitalism as Marx imagined it.
http://www.truthout.org/article/pascal-lamy-capitalism-cannot-satisfy-us Here is the latest "Insult to Injury" from the WTO
U.S. should pay for carbon content of imported goods: Locke
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - To address the serious threat of global warming, Americans should be required to "pay" for the carbon content of goods they consume from countries around the world, a top U.S. official said on Friday.
"It's important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America -- and it's our own consumption activity that's causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
Locke spoke to the business group after meetings this week with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and other officials on how the two countries could work together to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.
Unless China, the United States and other countries begin to reduce output of the heat-trapping gases, the world faces a "catastrophe" in the form of more frequent floods, droughts and rising sea levels, Locke said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE56G1A320090717Let me see if I have this correct.....
China joins the WTO - then refuses to negotiate on lowering the 25-45% tariffs they place on USA made goods - China then produces more pollutants then the entire western hemisphere put together - China places export quotas (in violation of WTO rules and regulations) on steel and various other metals in a predatory trade practices against USA industries
AND THEY WANT THE USA TO PAY FOR IT
ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-BullShit!!!!
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