The Grim Realities of Globalisation In The New Millennium - TruePublica
The Grim Realities of Globalisation In The New Millennium
By Graham Vanbergen
– first published by The European Financial Review . In 2001, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
stated that “Globalization offered extensive opportunities for truly
worldwide development” and concluded its report with “As globalization
has progressed, living conditions (particularly when measured by broader
indicators of well being) have improved significantly in virtually all
countries.”
The Financial Times (FT) described globalisation as: “a
process by which national and regional economies, societies, and
cultures have become integrated through the global network of trade,
communication, immigration and transportation.” And The Washington Post famously once wrote, “Globalization was pitched as a strategy that would raise all boats in poor and rich countries alike.”
Globalisation has been sold as a panacea to the world’s ills but in
reality it was not much more than a spurious and fraudulent deception.
Martin Wolf, arguably the most influential economics writer in Britain
today, confirms this in a piece published in the FT entitled “Capitalism and Democracy: The Strain is Showing”. Wolf says “fixing
the economic norms most English-speaking refer to as capitalism will be
difficult. But a first step requires rethinking what elites have
referred to for three decades as ‘free trade’ or globalisation.”¹
Far from raising boats, the result of this deception is that today
one quarter of humanity lives without electricity and 80% of the world
population lives on less than $10 a day. Nearly half of the world’s
population, more than 3 billion people, lives on less than $2.50 a day
where poverty is a crisis of everyday life. Even then, 1.3 billion live
on the brink of life itself, existing in extreme poverty earning half
that again. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children succumb to death each
day from poverty around the world.²
