„1. Globalization makes us unhappy. More stuff and more wealth has meant less contact with community, rising levels of depression, jobs with longer hours, more time spent working at home and longer commutes. "Lonely people have never been happy people and globalization is creating a very lonely planet," says author and activist Vandana Shiva.
2. Globalization breeds insecurity. Corporations are raising our children and driving what they eat, buy, wear and what they care about. Identity that was once shaped by one's culture and language, molded by community leaders and family, is now filled by marketers. Across the world, sales of blue contact lenses are on the rise, along with products to lighten skin and hair as people try to fulfill a Western ideal and an emulation of American life.
3. Globalization wastes natural resources. Consumerism is threatening the planet, natural resources are stretched to the breaking point and yet we have an economic system that encourages us to consume more and more, says Norberg-Hodge. Consumer culture is increasingly urban and when rural people move to the city the food they used to grow themselves is now grown on industrial-sized chemical-intensive farms. Food must be trucked to cities, waste must be trucked out. Large dams are needed to provide water and huge centralized power plants must be fueled by coal and uranium mines.
4. Globalization accelerates climate change. Globalization's "success" is often attributed to efficiencies of scale, but mostly it is fueled by deregulation and hidden subsidies that make food from around the globe cost less than food from down the street. With efficiencies of scale, it's really the opposite, says British MP Zac Goldsmith, "Tuna caught off the east coast of America is flown to Japan, processed and flown back to America to be sold to consumers; English apples are flown to South Africa to be waxed, flown back to England to be sold."
Treaties like NAFTA promote international growth through economic trade, which sounds good on paper, except that you end up with countries importing and exporting nearly identical amounts of the same products -- which means we're needlessly shipping goods across the world that we are already producing at home.
5. Globalization destroys livelihoods. Pension funds are now at the mercy of speculation. In the Global South, small farmers are being displaced from their land and forced to move to urban areas where they become cheap labor for factories producing more goods.
6. Globalization increases conflict. In Ladakh, Buddhists and Muslims who lived side by side for 500 years without conflict turned on each other after globalization caused unemployment and stiff competition for new commodities. Around the world, competition for scarce resources and jobs has resulted in the demonization of differences that were once accepted.
7. Globalization is built on handouts to big business. "If there is one thing that political parties from the left to the right seem to agree on today, it is the power and value of the free market," says Goldberg. "But the irony is that the majority of really polluting things that happen today wouldn't exist in a genuinely free market -- nuclear power, for example, wouldn't exist without massive state support ... We're about as far away from a free market as it's possible to be."
Globalization has resulted in subsidies for some of the wealthiest multinationals as well as the deregulation of trade and finance. "It is basically a system that criminalizes the small producer and processor and deregulates the giant business," says Shiva.
8. Globalization is based on false accounting. Our current economic model is based on infinite growth on a finite planet, which is a recipe for disaster. Political leaders believe that more economic growth is the answer to all our problems -- bailouts to big banks, stimulus to make us spend more, carbon trading schemes -- but all these do is reinforce a system that is inherently broken.
Our way of measuring our worth is so twisted says Helena Norberg-Hodge, that when there is "an oil spill, the GDP goes up; when drinking water is so polluted we have to buy it in bottles, GDP goes up. War, cancer, epidemic illnesses -- all of these involve an exchange of money, so they end up on the positive side of the balance sheet." ”
http://www.alternet.org/environment/149552/vision:_8_reasons_global_capitalism_makes_our_lives_worse_--_and_how_we_can_create_a_new_kind_of_economy_/
A cikk alapvetően az Economics of Happiness ( http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/) dokumentumfilmről szól. Álljon itt még egy részlet, aztán a továbbiak a linken olvashatók.
„The things we measure and count -- quite literally -- tell us what we value as a society and determine the policy agendas of governments. The Genuine Progress Index (GPI) presents a better way to measure our societal progress and well being. The GPI assigns explicit value to environmental quality, population health, livelihood security, equity, free time, and educational attainment. It values unpaid voluntary and household work as well as paid work. It counts sickness, crime and pollution as costs not gains.”
Le a GDP-vel! :)
