eco316essayfourhorsemen
TRANSCRIPT
Neal Young ECO 316 10/20/2014
The Four Horsemen of Globalization
Globalization, and the inability of countries to fend it off, has brought incredible
wealth to a few and unimaginable poverty to hundreds of millions. A handful of people
have paid for their opulent “off-worlds” with profits gained from having others live in shit.
One in seven people around the world now live in slums. These include renters in
dilapidated buildings, squatters in tin-roofed shacks, “floaters” sleeping on roof tops, and
“caged-men” with barely enough room to lay down. These people have population densities
of hundreds of thousands per square kilometer, defecate in the open, and often starve to
death. Their children, like them, will likely not have access to education, healthcare,
employment or any government benefits. This while corporations make ever higher profits.
Slums expanded as rural communities emptied out into the city centers (and then
the periphery) after extreme “market” forces drove them to do so. A primary culprit for this
is one of the four horsemen of globalization: mechanized agriculture. Capital intensive
farming by western-subsidized corporations reduced the need for labor while lowering
prices to a point where local farmers could not make a profit. These groups became
economic refugees after they were forced off their property and had to seek shelter of any
kind within the cities. Like other aspects of globalization, the benefits of mechanized
agriculture never came to fruition. The loss of subsistence farming, cuts in food subsidies,
lower incomes, and export of much of the food to foreign markets have left these people
hungrier than before.
Newly created economic refugees arrived to find the destruction wrought by the
second horsemen of globalization: premature capital market liberalization. Instead of
protecting infant industry through tariffs and other protections, local producers were
forced to compete with fully developed multi-national corporations. Instead of reinvesting
in the local economy and creating jobs, these corporations exported their natural resources
to high paying customers while personally pocketing much of the profits. This left millions
of workers competing for a handful of poorly paid positions.
People can work, or they can starve. The formal economy cannot provide for the
needs of the poor so many have turned to the informal economy. All work, however, is not
created equal. This shadow economy is rife with abuse, discrimination, and dangerous
working conditions. The meager wages workers receive do not provide them with
economic stability or help them rise above their current state. While not ideal, I would
argue that it is the ‘worst option except for all the rest.’ Increased competitiveness,
fragmentation of existing work, and domination by a few thugs is far from ideal, but it is the
best option they have.
Privatization and Austerity, the last of the four, road in alongside the others to
ensure that little of the profit generated could be used to enrich the poor. National
companies provide subsidized goods, jobs, and revenue for state projects while safety nets
and public spending gave citizens a certain standard of living. Without these, corporate-led
export markets sucked out profits while states were given the greenlight to make debt
payments but not to provide residents with education, healthcare, public housing,
infrastructure, etc.
While millionaires pop up around the world, 30,000 people die every day because of
causes related to sanitation. The picture of poverty becomes real when you look at the
ecology of these slums. In Dharpa (India’s gigantic “garbage dump slum”) toxic industries
converge on a place that lacks even a basic sewage system. These industries are not built in
the city because only the poor are seen fit to suffer from high infant mortality rates and a
life that entails shitting outside, digging through trash laden with aborted fetuses and
watching your children grow up deformed from malnutrition. The high walls of the
“off-worlds” block out the site of this, but their infatuation with the service of the poor
leaves them vulnerable to disease. AIDS, for instance, can be caught by a “patriot of wealth”
as he forces himself upon a young, impoverished servant girl.
Those that don’t live in places like Dharpa end up facing other hazards. Beyond the
dangers and instability associated with living in a pirate subdivision, there is also the very
real danger and instability posed by the environment. Squatters usually find themselves in
land that is not desirable for any number of reasons. These reasons include being located in
areas prone to flooding, landslides, and erosion. If one is fortunate enough to avoid the
natural disasters along with everything else, they are still at risk of being burned alive by
those wishing to clears slums through arson.
With all of this said, one may rightly wonder why a state would unleash
globalization upon itself. The answer is that most of the time the terms of globalization are
imposed as conditionalities in exchange for sorely needed international loans from the
Bretton Woods Institutions. The IMF’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs) promise
massive economic growth through liberalization, “modernization”, and infrastructure
projects. These promises, unfortunately, are little more than the bait used to lure
developing countries (e.g. Bolivia, Panama, Ivory Coast) into enriching their western
creditors (e.g. United States, United Kingdom, Germany). Once on the hook, countries are
essentially owned by the IMF and its members.
Many have pointed to India and China as examples of success stories and, ironically,
they are two countries that have not been “helped” by the IMF. Even so, they have similar
stories of slum development. GDP for both countries has grown incredibly, millionaires
(and billionaires) have been created, and shining skyscrapers in major cities now pierce the
sky. Shining cities such as Bangalore and Shanghai, however, are but “islands of cyber
modernity” in a sea of abject poverty. There are still some 100 million “floaters” in China,
700 million people in India don’t have access to toilets, and resources generated for
poverty alleviation are as likely to be siphoned off as they are to be put to use. If ‘a rising
tide’ was really raising everyone's income there would be much less to complain about, but
the fact is that poverty has increased alongside inequality.
We, the inhabitants of “off-worlds” and the West, are already being touched by the
hell we’ve imposed. With increasing speed American wages are being eviscerated as
globalization, offshoring and work permits force us into competition with massive “reserve
armies.” We are similarly undergoing de-industrialization, we just have farther to fall. Our
debt will allow us to state afloat for a time, but soon the bottom will fall out and we will find
ourselves leveled with our competition overseas.
Our future, needless to say, is rather bleak. As resources are depleted, we will all
find ourselves scavenging for what we can in the garbage of past excesses. Our children will
die in droves, our rights will be taken away and we will be forced to live in shit. If things do
not change, in a short amount of time we will add our own chapter to Planet of Slums. Our
only hope is to cut back on our consumption, advocate for the Asian Model and assert our
own rights in this country. It will be a long, hard fight but complacency will lead to our own
apocalypse.