Globalization – The Economic Sphere

Richard Widick – THIS PAGE IS NO LONGER BEING MAINTAINED – Archived 11/1/2018

Introduction

In general terms, globalization refers to the ongoing integration of previously disparate elements of the world’s peoples and their ideas and social systems, a process coterminous with advances in communication and transportation technologies.

At IICAT, we are specifically interested in a definite subset of these processes—those accounting for the dominant tendency within globalization toward planetary expansion of the greco-euro-anglo-american world economic (culture) system—the latest “long phase,” in other words, of a trajectory that might be too easily summarized as follows: European slave, feudal, mercantile, and capitalist accumulation in its spatially and temporally uneven, interwoven but still somehow successive processes of industrialization, modernization, colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, and finally globalization—in which the capitalist world economic (culture) system imposes itself unto the ends of the earth.

It will be understood that the system of which we speak has constituted itself as such over and against myriad (O)thers—other cultures through which contact, to whatever end (good and evil), do more than just indelibly mark that system, but enter into its form, inhabit its ideas, enter into the structures of its material and media archives of social history, and therefore preside over its future possibilities, in the same way that the lexicon, the grammar and the archive of utterances in any language preside over the possibility to speak in that tongue. In other words, we speak of a planetary legacy in the process of being determined, and we ask ourselves—what is that legacy going to be? How big is modernity’s industrial climate change catastrophe going to be?

Over the last three and a half decades (approximately 1980 to the present), the definite trend has been towards what we call neoliberal transformation of the dominant tendency within globalization, by which phrase we indicate the philosophies calling for-, the policies enacting-, and the material orchestration of-, inter alia, 1) the opening of markets; 2) the corporate privatization of public industries, lands, and goods; 3) the deregulation of corporations, markets and every form of human activity, and 4) the general retreat of democratic political oversight of private corporate accumulation (see Timmons 2017 in this regard).

In the 1990s, it was a matter of understanding the so-called Washington Consensus (John Williamson 2002, pdf).  Today the Washington Consensus is simply is understood to be “the orthodoxy on which the current international order is based.”

Today, it has become a matter of understanding the Koch brothers political influence, for example their advertising campaign promoting ‘public understanding’ of Trump’s 2018 Tax Reform law, which itself cannot be understood outside of the light shed by OXFAM’s January 2018 Report Reward Work, Not Wealth (cited and quoted below).

Recent transformation of the World Bank into “a creature of Wall Street” (Thomas 2018) indicates that this trend might be deepening and strengthening in the latter 20-teens.  See also the International Finance Corporation—the World Bank’s private sector lending arm.  It will be important to remember that the current president, Jim Yong Kim, was a long time critic of the bank before taking the reigns (see his 2002 co-edited book, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor)

To the extent that we are correct in finding such neoliberal transformation to be ascendant within the broader trend of globalization, we think we are watching a particularly worrisome denigration of what are in fact the original coordinates of liberal political theory, which since the European Enlightenment has always indicated the championship of individual human (as opposed to corporate) liberty and equality, as well as their institutionalization in actually existing systems of social democratic republican polity.

Where corporate liberty trumps human equality in the transformations of globalization, and the expansion of private corporate freedoms trend toward socially and ecologically devastating accumulation, we discover the production and accumulation of human grievances around which the great contemporary social movements are coalescing.

See this January 2018 Oxfam report documenting how, quote:

Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by $762bn in 12 months. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. 82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% saw no increase at all. Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men. Governments must create a more equal society by prioritizing ordinary workers and small-scale food producers instead of the rich and powerful.

The question of LABOR

We understand that power is never operational or present in anyway without resistance—the two concepts are mutually constitutive.

Thus we speak of globalization and resistance dialectically.

We cannot speak of capital without speaking of labor.

Thus, when we talk about capitalist colonization of the lifeworld (or simply [neoliberal] development), we are always already talking about formation of labor movements and/or their emergent conditions of possibility.

By extension, when we talk about privatization, consolidation, and accumulation on one side, we are by this dialectical necessity already talking about socialization, unionization, and network formation on the other side.

We find it easy to see the linkage, in UNFCCC policy struggles and discourses, between globalization as economic expansion, privatization of social wealth and public goods, consolidation of wealth into class structures that cement political power in their own interests, and a resulting upward spiral of accumulation and power.

But the dialectical other side of this equation, the various resistances, can be more difficult to see.

Therefore my research, and my work here at IICAT, proceeds by way of committed, conflict-seeking participatory action, in which I respectfully learn by working to elevate the voices of civil society and help build exchanges between labor and indigenous and environmental movements.

With intent to provide much more comprehensive treatment of this subject in the future, here and now we dedicate this section of the page to providing some links through which to start exploring what has variously been called THE BLUE-GREEN ALLIANCE (by those occupying the center left) and THE RED GREEN ALLIANCE (by those on the left).

Blue-Green Alliance

Trade Unions for Energy Democracy

It will be important to keep fleshing out the concept of Just Transition and the varying uses of the term red-green alliance.

• Transcript of a dialog:
• call to action:

The Indigenous Environmental Network.

More will be found on our social movements page.

As we continue to pursue this line of thought, we must be aware of a new thread: I call it the Zizek Correction:  he has for some years now been pointing to a de-coupling of capitalism and liberalism (modern liberal democratic polity). The idea is now appearing in the mainstream with regularity. See for example this report from the World Economic Forum on January of 2018, claiming that, “more than ever, state-led capitalism works, and it is here to stay.” See the data in this report on China [see China Harbor Project, Sri Lanka][the China Belt and Road Initiative], Russia, Persian Gulf Nations, Norway, and the 24 new sovereign wealth funds created in the last decade that wield $7+ Trillion in wealth to advance political agendas.  Hypothesis:  Trumpism emerges at the end of this development as a sort of unconscious collective reactionary outburst of the same social forces.

Structural Adjustment Programs were the game in town back then, in the 1990s–now the same logic is asserting itself insight second contradiction policy domains, the Paris Agreement, etc.

                                                                              

TO BE FILED:

Raphael Correa, President of Ecuador, on Charlie Rose, explaining “Modern Socialism” as embracing markets but as servants, not as masters; pushing back against free trade (as a policy of convenience after US established hegemony using protectionism invented by Alexander Hamilton); explaining the Mexican example of NAFTA as evidence of the false promise of free trade; and precisely defining Modern Socialism as the value of justice over against profit and markets for control of society, which produce wealth but not justice; :

                                                                              

In time this page will reflect my best understanding and analyses of globalization, with links to my research into and my sources on this increasingly consequential institutional transformation of modernity.

At present I am pursuing research into globalization and climate change along several tracks: 1) the international climate wars, which I treat as an emergent compromise formation of opposing social forces originating within the neoliberal institutional transformation of globalization; the manifest conflict is taken as an expression of historical changes in the deep social and juridical structures driving modern everyday life 2) an investigation into the global cities that I see as integral to the symbolic economy that increasingly drives the institutional transformation of modernity, and 3) an historical Timeline of Globalization and Resistance (below) with which I ground my historical perspective on that same institutional transformation.

The timeline below represents my work in progress identifying key events and social forces that I see organizing globalization and thus the contemporary convergence of peoples, labor, and environmental movements (resistance to globalization) in the anti-globalization movements and now the global climate justice movements (we could say here the international climate wars, our way of describing more broadly the growing confrontation of and compromise formation between economic [market], public [civil society], and political social forces [governance] in the struggle to better understand and collectively respond to the planetary ecological transformation of global warming).

                                                                                                     

TIMELINE of GLOBALIZATION and RESISTANCE

– Summary – 1492 to the 1870s: The first wave/era of globalization? [Stay tuned]

– Summary – late 1870s to the 199os: Two structural crises (economic depressions in 1870s; 1890s) can be considered the first wave of globalization (Furgeson 2005) and financialization (monopoly capitalism) (Duménil 2001).

Later came the New Deal compromise, signaling a certain dis-empowerment of finance capital.

After WWII we note the Bretton Woods Conference of the victors, which set up GATT, the IMF and the World Bank.

Parallel runs the UN ECOSOC process in February from 1946 on: agreements on Free Trade setting up the ITO/GATT institutions, which in time were sculpted into the World Trade Organization through the long series of the ministerial conferences, including the Kennedy Round, The Nixon Round, and finally the Uruguay Round, in which the WTO framework was set up.

Ultimately the WTO Agreement was signed in 1994, and the WTO itself became active in 1995.

Seattle 1999 became the primary signifier of global self-conscious opposition when the combined labor and environmental forces intervened and scrambled the so-called Millennial Round before it could even get off the ground.

The WTO carries on, but the DOHA Round that began in 2001 in the wake of Seattle 1999 and September 2011 has not been completed.][i]

1914-17.  WWI.    It ends with very harsh reparations on Germany, and the nation is crippled by the agreement and then gets caught up in the world wide economic depression, a period during which Nazism emerged.

1919.  International Labor Organization (ILO) created (Stiglitz 2002:10).  Slogan: “decent work.”

1930.  Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.  This US Act of Congress act established tariffs that damaged the flow of trade.[ii]  Other nations then move toward protectionism.  People began to speak about creating institutions to manage trade.

1934.  Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act.  Initially a response to Smoot-Hawley Act. This US Act of Congress delegated authority to the US President to enter into agreements with nations to lower tariffs; this began a series of agreements by the US with other nations; by 1945 there were 32 bi-lateral agreements to reduce tariffs; the clauses of these agreements were included in GATT.  According to Kenneth W. Dam, “The significance of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 for the present GATT/WTO system lies in a very few central ideas,” which Dam described in his 2004 paper” Cordell Hull, The Reciprocal Trade Act, and the WTO.”

Here the timeline divides into two lines:

1)  The UN United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire leads to IMF and WB.

2)  The UN through ECOSOC begins the institutionalization of the International Trade Organization (ITO) and the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT). The ITO never materializes but GATT did and developed into the WTO; the ITO had been conceived to function with the WB and IMF.

I.    The Bretton Wood Conference (United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference) and the birth of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB):

SEE ALSO:  Video talk – The Battle of Bretton Woods, by Brenn Steil, author of the 2013 book by that title.

1944.  Average tariff rate is 40%. [compare: The Uruguay Round seeks reduction from 6.3% to 3.9%.[iii]]

1944.  July.  Bretton Woods conference on monetary and banking issues: the New Hampshire agreement  establishes the charters of IMF and the World Bank: it did not deal with trade; it was held under the jurisdiction of the nations’ ministries of finance (Jackson 1998:15-6):

Personalities and Nations make their mark at the origins of the institutions:  Harry Dexter White, US Treasury official chaired the work on the IMF and Lord John Maynard Keynes chaired the work on the World Bank (officially named International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), whose mission was “to fill the gap in private-lending markets for higher-risk projects in countries needing investment capital.”[iv].

Mission of the conference:  to prevent economic depressions: to prevent future depressions by maintaining aggregate global demand; countries that allow their in economies to slump threaten global economy; British economist John Maynard Keynes was participant at Bretton Woods; his major point was, quoting Stilglitz, “lack of sufficient aggregate demand explained economic downturns; government policies could help stimulate aggregate demand”[v]; his solution was the programmatic use of:

a)  monetary policy (i.e., the interest rate and the money supply can be manipulated to change the value of money and thus direct its flows; low interest rates increase borrowing and can thus promote business investment; raising interest rates can be used to slow down investment; printing money makes its value go down and thus can make the dollar cheaper, which make American goods cheaper to buy over seas, and this helps the manufacturing business) and….

b)  fiscal policy (i.e., manipulating government expenditures and cutting taxes).

These “basic lessons are still valid,” according to Stiglitz[vi]; IMF and World Bank take these missions to a GLOBAL LEVEL.

—International Monetary Fund (IMF):

Mission: the IMF is designed to bring pressure on countries to increase demand; the problem is that markets always fail—which means that the profit on investment of capital cannot be realized through the selling process; they rarely fail because too little can be produced, rather it is because what has been produced can’t be sold—and thus markets need continuous intervention; the IMF is an institution designed to carry out global intervention in the global financial market [vii]

—IMF is a public institution;  it uses public money, taxpayer financed; but it does not report to citizens who pay for it or those who are effected by it; it reports to the ministries of finance and central banks of member governments; there are complicated voting arrangements based on WWII era economic power, with some adjustments, but US alone has VETO POWER;

—When it was founded, it was because markets fail and need to be regulated; but today it is the champion of free market ideology.[viii]  In other words: when it was founded its logic was expansionary policy (Keynesian demand side economics designed to produce consumption); but in the 1990s it began to enforce a contractionary policy; namely it uses ‘structural adjustment’ programs that uses the carrot of large loans, with large conditions attached, to force indebted and borrowing countries to cut their spending budget deficits, raise taxes, raise interest rates—precisely the opposite of the kind of policy that built the U.S. into a powerful market—which was a borrow and spend approach under closed markets; this policy tends to devalue the currency of the developing country and subsequently opens them up for a shopping spree by the global capital, which moves in to buy them on the cheap.[x]  Compar this decription to the new 21st century austerity  policies (see the case of Greece, UK under the conservatives, etc.)

—  1952.  Principle of Conditionalities is adopted; burden of proof shifted to recipients to show “whether the policies the member will pursue will be adequate to overcome the problem.”[xi]  Thus is the concept of entitlements eroded.

—World Bank (WB) (Stiglitz 2002:11).

II.  General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs  (GATT). Read the original 1947 GATT Agreement.

1945.  WWII is over.  Harman and Honneth suggest that “state-regulated capitalism emerged in the developed countries of the west” during the twenty year period beginning at this point (Martin Hartmann and Axel Honneth 2006 Paradoxes of Capitalism Constellations 13: 1 41 – 58 Oxford: Blackwell).  Counter cyclical social and economic policy (Keynsianism) “was able to create a welfare-state arrangement” (p. 41).  “[I]n all key areas the normative integration of capitalist societies showed moral progress far beyond what had previously been taken to be compatible with the basic requirements of capitalism” (41).[xii]

1945.  United Nations formed.

1946. February: New York; formation of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a subordinate body of the U.N., at its first meeting adopts a resolution to call for a conference to draft a charter for the ITO (International Trade Organization) and end up drafting the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs:

—GATT Drafting Conferences:

—1947, Geneva (April to November); to write ITO charter:

—1948, Havana, Cuba; meeting to complete the ITO charter:

—This procedure created the charter for the International Trade Organization (ITO), designed “to be an institutional framework to which GATT (an agreement among ‘contracting parties’ to liberalize trade restrictions) would be attached.”[xiii]

—1948:  GATT comes into provisional force, terms dictated by the Protocol Provisional Application, a provisional step before the treaty is ratified and enforced—but that never happened, it was never ratified; it was never really a treaty until 1995, until which it operated under this provisional status.

—US Congress refused to approve the charter for the ITO and it was declared dead in 1951.[xiv]  Thus, with the ITO dead in the water, GATT became the focus.

—General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs: definition: this is an international treaty setting up the framework for ongoing negotiations to rationalize and liberalize economic exchange between participating nations; the objective is to subject economic exchange between countries to rule oriented discipline; thus, the agreements made within the GATT process creates rules for:

tariffs

subsidies

agricultural

textiles

standards

safeguards

access to markets

integration of markets

 1955.  GATT REVIEW SESSION:   Attempt to form a mini-organization, the Organization for Trade Cooperation, which would replace the failed ITO, itself fails to win US congressional; negotiations continue under GATT and achieve a great deal of liberalization of trade.

1962-1967.  The Kennedy Round of GATT negotiations.

1965.  Formal Amendment to GATT.  The 1965 protocol added Part IV, dealing with problems of developing countries.[xv]

1972.  UN Environment Summit in Stockholm.[xvi]  Beginning of the MEA process—Multilateral Environmental Agreements.  1992 Rio Earth Summit is trajectory.  Framework Convention on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity are accomplishments.  10 year Review conference after Rio in Johannesburg, SA seen as a failure. Read the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.

 1973.  Beginning of the G8.[xvii]

1973-1975.  The Tokyo Round of GATT negotiations.

1986-1994.  The Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations; 120 nations participate in the negotiation for a new, rule-based international economy.

1986—1993.  The Uruguay Round of GATT began in Punta del Este, Uruguay; ending in Marrakesh on Dec 15, 1993; agreement signed on April 15, 1994 in Marrakesh; 117 countries joined the agreement on trade liberalization; US Congressional Approval in November, 1994; signed by Clinton Dec. 8, 1994.  Thus was the WTO made into a formal organization, instituted on January 1, 1995:  By July 1995 100+ nations had signed on.  One provision converts the GATT into the WTO.[xviii]

—The agreement was 26,000 pages long; it extended GATT type ‘rule oriented’ discipline to three new areas (the first two of which are truly new to the agreement)[xix]:

1)  Trade in services (GATS: General Agreement on Trade in Services); there are more than 150 distinct service sectors; services are becoming more important as they grow in proportion of the Gross Domestic Product of some countries.

2)  Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS = Trade Related Intellectual Property); i.e. the protection of patents, copyrights, trade secrets (intellectual property);

3)    Agricultural product trade.

[other elements of the agreement]

4)  Subsidies/countervailing duties

5)  Textiles

6)  standards

7)  Safeguards

8)  Market access

9)  Integration of developing countries and economies in transition;

10) Preshipment and rules of Origin;

11)  Regional Trade Agreements:

12)  GATT Grandfather Rights;  The new WTO in this agreement scales down the old Grandfather rights of GATT;

13)  Dispute Settlement Procedures:  For four decades GATT had a complex dispute settlement process that worked, somewhat; but there were flaws; the new agreement “for the first time, established an overall unified dispute settlement system for all portions of the UR Agreements, and a legal text (rather than just a customary practice) to carry out those procedures.  These new procedures include measure to avoid ‘blocking’, which occurred under previous consensus decision-making rules, and for the first time a new ‘appellate procedue’, which will replace some of the procedures that were vulnerable to blocking.”[xx]

14)  WTO Charter (explained) & the WTO agreements that serve as the Charter:  these agreements function as a CONSTITUTION for the World Trade Organization—which is itself the governing body of GATT—which is itself the framework for ongoing negotiations to rationalize and liberalize economic exchange between participating nations.

—Uruguay Round strengthened the protection of intellectual property rights, allowing enforcement of drug patents, disallowing life-saving generics. “[T]housands were effectively condemned to death” (Stiglitz 8).[xxi]

—The Uruguay Round’s Ministerial Declaration:  Part 1-Negotiations on Trade in Goods:  The contracting Parties meeting at Ministerial level: Determined to halt and reverse protectionism and to remove distortions to trade; Determined also to preserve the basic principles and to further the objectives of GATT;  Determined also to develop a more open, viable and durable multilateral trading system; Convinced that such action would promote growth and development; Mindful of the negative effects of prolonged financial and monetary instability in the world economy, the indebtedness of a large number of less developed contracting parties, and considering the linkage between trade, money, finance and development; [HEREBY] Decide to enter into Multilateral Trade Negotiations in goods within the framework and under the aegis of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade.”[xxii]

QUOTE: “The trade policy regimes that existed before and after the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations were strikingly different.  Before 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was the primary institution of international trade.  Though the GATT pillars of non-discrimination and reciprocity established text-based parameters on its Member’s industrial policies, in practice the institution was relatively disengaged with its developing country members and tended to overlook their policy violations.  In 1994, the World Trade Organization (WTO) subsumed the GATT through the Single Undertaking.  This event ushered in a new policy regime that expanded both the scope and the enforcement of new regulations.  This article seeks to measure the extent to which policy implementation in the developing countries has embodied “The Single Undertaking”” (HOW BIG IS THE BITE?”, by Alisa DiCaprio, M.I.T., Department of Urban Studies).

1992.  The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). [xxiii]

1994. NAFTA implementation; Zapatista (EZLN) Mobilization on Jan. 1.

NAFTA’s infamous chapter 11 “gives corporations the right to sue governments when their regulations interfere with the corporations’ right to make money.”—this restrutures democracy, sovereignty, constitutional law.  It “broadens the concept of protecting private property from ‘takings’, stating that no government may “directly or indirectly nationalize or expropriate an investment…or take a measure tantamount to nationalization or expropriation.”[xxiv]

—Case of Metalclad, Ch. 11 suit by the US company against Mexico (Dawkins 81)

—1998, Ethyl Company of California vs Canada over neurotoxic MMT gas additive.  (Dawkins 81)

—Canada’s ethanex vs. US MTBE suit (Dawkins 82)

—SD Myers vs. Canada on PCB exports

—SunBelt Waters of US vs Canada on bulk freshwater exports

—etc.  Dawkins 81-3.

1995.  Jan. 1.  WTO formally comes into operation. Thus:  GATT is formally converted into the WTO process.

—The dispute settlement process:

POINT: See Schapiro Liberalism:  his account of the failure of German Liberalism is instructive:  The constitution prepared under Bismarck did not include a liberal bill of rights, in which the state would submit to the will of the people.  Hypothesis: this type of failure repeated itself in the 1944 Bretton Woods process, which failed to submit the Bretton Woods institutions to the actual UN, which set it up:  thus it and they became tools for global capital and the rights of corporations, not the rights of peoples, places, and communities who are represented in the United Nations.

Jubilee 2000 movement.  (Stiglitz 1002:9-10). Njehu in Mertes 2004.

1996.  Speech of WTO President Renato Ruggiero to the UN Conference on Trade and Development: “We are writing the Constitution of a single global economy.”[xxv]

1996-1997.  The Korean General Strike. [xxvi]

1997-1998.  The Asian Crisis (Stiglitz 12002:6)

1999.  Battle of Seattle. Anti-WTO Protests. Anti-Globalization Movement erupts with massive historical significance.

2000, April 16, Washington, DC, IMF protests.

2000, May 1,– Global, May Day protests.

2000, July 29, – Philadelphia, Republican National Convention protests.

2000, August 11, – Los Angeles, USA, Democratic National Convention protests.

2000, September 11, Melbourne, World Economic Forum  protests.

2000, September 26, – Prague, Czech Republic, World Bank/IMF/G8 meeting protests.

2000, November 20, – Montreal, Quebec, G20 meeting protests.

2001, January 20,– Washington, DC, Bush inauguration protests.

2001, January 27, – Davos, Switzerland, World Economic Forum.

2001.  World Social Forum.  + 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.

2001, April 20, – Quebec City, Canada, Summit of the Americas (FTAA) protests.

2001, June 15, – Gothenburg, Sweden EU Summit protests.

2001, July 20, – Genoa, Italy G8 Summit  protests.;  July 18 – 22.Genoa.  Death of a protestor at the Anti-Globalization protest. (Stiglitz 2002:3)  [see here Starhawk’s narrative]

September 29, 2001 – Washington, DC, WB/IMF Anti-capitalist anti-war protests.

February 1, 2002 – New York City, USA / Porto Alegre, Brazil World Economic Forum / World Social Forum.

2002.  Forbes Magazine reports that there are 497 billionaires on planet earth. [xxviii]

2002 – Barcelona, Spain EU Summit, March 15,  protests.

2002 – Calgary, Alberta, and Ottawa, Ontario, G8 summit at Kananaskis, Alberta J26 G8 Protests, June 26,  protests

September 27, 2002 – Washington, DC, IMF/World Bank protests.

2003, weekend of February 15, Global protests against war on Iraq mobilize 12 million antiwar protesters.

2003, March – – US Invasion of Iraq.

2003, July 28 – Montreal, Quebec protests.

2003, September 14 – Cancún, Mexico – Fifth Ministerial of the WTO  protests. The conference is on the verge of collapse.

2003, October – regional WEF meeting in Dublin, European Competitiveness Summit, cancelled in the face of protests.

2003, November 20 – Miami Mobilzation against the Free Trade Area of the Americas FTAA.

2008 — WTO Doha “Development Round” increasingly viewed as failed:  follow these sources 1) Deborah James, “Globalization: Leaving the WTO Behind,” 2) RIS Policy Brief #36, April 2008, “Back to the Drawing Board:  No Basis for Concluding the Doha Round of Negotiations.”

2009. Al Gore’s TED Talk, which we recommend viewing for the concise sociological connections as well as the slick nature and commercial photography, which for us represent the potential use of the corporate spectacle against itself:

2009 lecture by Kevin Anderson (Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research), “Reframing Climate Change”:

2010.  Partnership for Market Readiness, launched by

2011. Durban Platform for Enhanced Action adopted at UNFCCC COP 17, Durban, South Africa.

2012. Renowned climate scientist James Hansen describes his personal reasoning for becoming a climate change activist:

The Sustainable Alternative is emerging across the horizon of globalization and resistance, economic, ecological, and social sustainability are increasingly linked in public and political discourse.

2013. Loss & Damage Mechanism added to the Durban Platform, a third pillar of climate change governance (joining Mitigation and Adaptation).

2014.  Ban Ki Moon’s Big Idea climate summit, NY, NY, September 24, 2014.

2014.  UNFCCC COP 20, Lima, Peru.  The last working COP before the adoption of the next universal climate treaty in Paris, 2015.

2015.  Draft text of Paris Climate Accord Released in February, after the Geneva talks.

2015.  UN-brokered TPP trade deal heating up in coincidence with the UN Climate Talks.

DEADLINE, PARIS 2015 – The nations will adopt the next universal climate treaty.

On the horizon: The Global Climate Justice Movement

2017.  January.  The National Global Change Research Plan: Triennial Update (PDF). United States government (NASA, etc.) elevating climate politics to the geo-imperial level … QUOTE: “USGCRP coordinates and integrates scientific research across 13 Federal agencies whose missions include understanding changes in the global environment and their implications for society.”

See also the US National Climate Assessment.

2018.  The changing mission of the world bank under WB President Jim Yong Kim: Landon Thomas, Jr., “The World Bank is Remaking Itself as a Creature of Wall Street,” New York Times, January 27, 2018.

2018.  January.  OXFAM Publishes new report on global inequality, Reward Work, Not Wealth.  QUOTE:  “Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by $762bn in 12 months. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. 82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% saw no increase at all. Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men. Governments must create a more equal society by prioritizing ordinary workers and small-scale food producers instead of the rich and powerful.”

FOOTNOTES