oneVillage Foundation

As painful as it may be for some in the mainstream to see the loss of American bread and butter jobs the implications of curtailing globalization through increased protectionism may be quite devastating. There is a reluctance to accept that world urgent ecological issues like global warming are a reality because there is a deep-seated that such an acknowledgement would be disruptive to the "American way of life."

It is much easier to take actions against terrorists, criminals, drug users and outsourcing... For politicians such hot button issues are like low hanging fruit, and they cannot resist taking advantage of the public’s intense and growing fear about losing more American jobs to overseas emerging economies. Yet the fact is that prosperity that most Americans take for granted today is built abound neoliberal globalization/outsourcing.

A few months ago Joy, Bill Daul and several others met at the commonwealth club in SF to see one of the Next Now people speak on at panel about outsourcing. Jeffrey Saperstein who just published a book about globalization and outsourcing, titled The Innovation Economy: How to Create Regional Wealth. had provided some interesting insights particularly in relation to the erosion of the nation state and the rise of regionalism. While many Americans continue to cling to a strong sense of being an American, the world is moving away at least on a practical level from the relevance of national borders.

Death Knell of the Nation State?
Saperstein noted that the most advanced American fighter jet can no longer be considered American, and even many cars assembled in America are 40-60 percent made from foreign parts. He also spoke of a larger trend, that the nation-state itself was on a downward trend and that regional identities would take up the slack. However, it is not just globalization and the rise of corporate power that is breaking apart the nation-state, ecological and social trends are fraying the edges of nation-state identity.

Robert Kaplan in an article in the Atlantic titled: The Coming Anarchy asserts that social cohesiveness is vital to maintaining national identity (Atlantic no longer allows free access to articles but here is a great summary of the article). States will high levels of immigration and increasing social diversity will find it more difficult to maintain a cohesive national identity. In the article, he also draws attention to the rising signs of ecological degradation and how the mainstream media foreign policy establishment is ignoring the connections between increasing ecological degradation and the rise of rogue states. Thomas Homer Fraser Dixon, an expert on how ecological issues impact human societies is cited. We look at history and see that humans usually do not react to subtle events (for more on this go to Jay Hansen's Dieoff website) but only to crisis events and by then it is usually too late to reverse course on say a problem like for example global warming.

Saperstein though seemed reluctant to accept the importance of considering sustainability in relation to outsourcing. Globalization is providing affluence fo a small minority (15%) of the world's population on the backs of the other 85%, by unsustainably using the resources of the world's poorest countries. The term outsourcing has been seized by populist politicians as something very bad for America. It is ironic that America's wealth is based on the undervaluing of natural capital - the value of nature's services to our economy - and also of the vast majority of the world's workforce. The real issue is not loss of jobs, for those jobs are very much needed in a global economy to create jobs in marginalized regions but the fact that those jobs are industries that are not using natural resources in a sustainable way.

More later…