Monday, June 09, 2008

FRESH FROM BILDERBERG, MANDY PRAISES GLOBALIZATION

Is it just coincidence that The Guardian failed to report on Bilderberg 2008, like most mainstream newspapers, but today publishes an article by attendee Peter Mandelson in which he praises globalization?

Globalization actually means easy movement of fast capital, looking to make a fast buck, without consideration of long term investment, leading to the destruction of local environments and society.

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From http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/09/globalisation.eu

Globalisation is goodBrown knows it, and the US must learn it too: our stability and economic welfare depend upon it

Peter Mandelson

The Guardian, Monday June 9 2008

And then there were two. We now know that either Barack Obama or John McCain will be the first US president of the next phase of globalisation. One of them will be the first US president whose foreign economic policy will be dominated from day one by a fundamental transfer of economic power from west to east and south. The Atlantic world is no longer the centre of the economic world, because the economic world no longer has a centre. How McCain and Obama interpret that fact matters to all of us.

The protectionist and anti-trade rhetoric evident in the presidential primaries suggests that many Americans see global economic change in zero-sum terms. Asia rises, we decline. Economic inequality is reduced between countries, but widens within our own societies. Globalisation is no longer something we do, it is something that others do to us. An increasing number of Europeans feel the same way.

Nobody would disagree that globalisation has its dark side. But the open markets and economic integration that drive it are still by far the best tool we have for increasing global economic welfare. That is an essential contribution to global stability. Only stable, cooperating states can manage the coming squeeze on resources. For 60 years, the US has underwritten economic internationalism with openness of its own. A crisis of American confidence in globalisation could knock it off course.

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