Globalisation?

[Guest]

Ah, Americans are taking over.. Yankees go home?

 

[This message has been edited by MJ (edited January 30, 2001).]

[Guest]

No, it was more like "American food su.ks".

[Guest]

No argument there

[Berj]

AZG

 

GLOBALIZATION AND ARMENIA

 

A Round Table entitled 'Globalization and Armenia - Options and Approaches' was held on Friday at the Armenian National Academy of Sciences under the motto 'Towards Civilizations Dialogue with participation of representatives of virtually all embassies accredited in Armenia, except US, France and Ukraine.

 

The Round Table was sponsored and organized by Iran's embassy in Yerevan and Nerdashnak Ashkhar (World of Harmony) public organization. The Round Table goal was to exchange opinions on Armenia's national security and globalization, what kind of development prospects and threats it may bring to Armenia, its culture and economy. It is also to find an answer whether the government has cultural systems and mechanisms to withstand globalization's threats.

[Berj]

LEVON TER-PETROSSIAN: TO GET BACK ON HER FEET, ARMENIA MUST QUIT THE STATE OF AN INTERMEDIATE TERRITORY AND ISOLATION

 

YEREVAN, March 2 (Noyan Tapan). The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan must find a solution to the Artsax conflict: their meetings create certain ingenuousness, however, they may depreciate the process by failing to achieve result. This opinion was expressed by the first president of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrossian in an interview with correspondent of the Paris-based "Express" newspaper Silvain Pasqier. The translation of the interview was recently published in the Armenian press. In Ter-Petrossian's opinion, one should not restrict himself by summit meetings only: "The foreign ministers of both countries might meet more frequently, it is important today that result should be achieved as soon as possible." He thinks that it is not important who is Azerbaijan's leader - Heidar Aliyev or somebody else, since "long-term solutions are not based on personalities". According to the first president of Armenia, only establishment of peace and liquidation of blockade will allow Armenia to get back on her feet joining regional cooperation with neighbors, including with Turkey. In Ter-Petrossian's opinion, the three countries of the South Caucasus taken separately are of no interest to investors at all, while taken together, with a population of 15 million, "they will ensure influx of foreign investments". As concerns the influence of the military in Armenia, Ter-Petrossian said that in the countries involved in conflicts their influence is normally higher than in other countries, especially in a winning country like Armenia. However, there are no reasons to get worried, since, knowing Armenia's army and its commanders, Ter-Petrossian gives assurances that they are people of reason and "in fact more peace-loving than the authorities themselves." He expressed the opinion that "a real danger comes from the current leaders and their political maximalism. I don't know whether they will ever realize the price of pragmatism or not? In the meantime, the country is losing human resources". According to him, the later compromise is reached, the more unfavorable it is going to be: "In 1998 Armenia could have got better conditions than today. In another year they will be worse." In answer to the question: "Is Robert Kocharian a big realist today?", the former president pointed out: "I don't see any change in him in this aspect." "Earlier we could have convinced the public that our goal was building a "normal" state, when the challenges of the past did not become instruments of our policy. Maybe, it was too early for that. People must learn themselves. It happens so that they forget their own history and repeat old mistakes." Now, according to Levon Ter-Petrossian, political parties are compromised, it is no use searching for well-known people possessing moral properties who could deliver their word to the people. Armenians, who are more prudent than their leaders today, have too many everyday concerns, they cannot create an equivalent public opinion, while mass media "in reality are not independent and they are too weak to oppose government propaganda." In his interview the former president assessed the internal political situation in the country as very dangerous - constant changes are taking place, they "fit subjective rather than objective criteria". "One may change the prime minister four or ten times, but it will not lead Armenia out of the crisis," Ter-Petrossian stressed. Saying that like all former Soviet republics, Armenia also has its difficulties, and the South Caucasus apart from all has its specific problems (such as the Artsax conflict for example), Ter-Petrossian stated that besides victims and mass deportation of refugees, these difficulties caused huge damage to economy, retarded reforms, increased military spending. "In the island called the Transcaucasus, unlike Azerbaijan and Georgia, Armenia has no other gateway to the sea. It has no oil resources. The blockade imposed by Turkey adds to the difficulties. To get back on its feet, the country must quit the state of an intermediate territory and isolation," said Ter-Petrossian. "Express" published the interview during the visit of Armenia's President Robert Kocharian to France (February 12-16). The office of the former president specified that "Silvain Pasqier in reality presented as an interview the thoughts expressed by Levon Ter-Petrossoan during a meeting with the latter that was held in Yerevan in September 2000." *01/-2e c26 $e17 02/03/2001

[Berj]

MJ,

After reading the headline I got an impression that he had a discussion with you over the globalisation issues (kiddin').

[MJ]

Yeas. He had been receiving consultations from my soul, which travels over Armenia when I am asleep.

[Berj]

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg28440.html

 

The Prague Post

March 14, 2001

 

The year the world shrank

 

Tom Engelhardt

 

The year the world shrank Wills' view of world history reminds us

that we've been a globalizing planet for more than 300 years THE

WASHINGTON POST In 1688, more than 2,000 oil-burning lamps made the

streets of Amsterdam among the safest in the world, but not as safe

as those of Japan's well-organized and -patroled Kanazawa. According

to John E. Wills Jr., Kanazawa had another claim to fame. It may have

been "the biggest city in the world of 1688 with no foreigners." For

those who imagine our global past as a matter of isolation and

separation, Wills might say, think again. Few places in that year

were free of "foreigners." A Greek adventurer, Constantine Phaulkon,

was running the finances of Siam; a Scot, Gen. Patrick Ivanovich

Gordon, commanded some of the Russian czar's troops; and the merchant

Hovannes Joughayetsi was settling into a small community of Armenians

in Tibet's Lhasa. For his masters in Isfahan, Persia, he conducted a

trade in Bengali textiles on one side of the Himalayas while

exchanging silver for gold in China's Qinghai Basin on the other.

That we remember any of these lives is striking; that they were

hardly unique is even more so. Something was already quickening in

the world of 1688 as Europe's wooden ships, the global "ligaments" of

the time, increasingly plied the oceans, transporting wonders, riches

and bodies. By that year, a stream of those often unwilling bodies

was already flowing westward to the New World, while a flood tide of

silver, laboriously dug from South America's Potosi mines by enslaved

Indian laborers, was leaving it. "Silver pesos from the American

mints," Wills writes, "circulated all over Europe and in many ports

and coastal districts of Asia." Admittedly, the world of 1688 is

still far removed from today's global information order, where a

flick of a finger sends millions of dollars winging through

cyberspace around the planet. After all, near the end of the 17th

century, it took William Dampier, the first Westerner to write about

the Australian Aborigines, 12 hapless years to circle the Earth with

marauding British buccaneers. Still, in his book, Wills offers us a

vision of a recognizably globalizing world. Any history can't help

but have the imprint of its own moment on it. In this sense, 1688,

too, shows its age. Just as few people then could imagine the

planet's geographical and human fullness, likewise, not many decades

ago, few historians could imagine the fullness of history or would

have considered the year 1688 significant for anything but England's

"Glorious Revolution" (stirringly presented in this book, by the

way). Wills presents a wider-angled vision of a more crowded planet

that catches the essence of history-writing since the 1960s, when the

"new social history" made its debut. In the best of his conjuring

acts, Wills begins by following the rising sun westward as the first

bells echo from the great churches of Manila and muezzins call the

faithful to prayer on Mindanao in the Philippines. It's a tiny,

two-page global tour de force, a testament to the ways historians

have reframed the world that frames us. Wills' book is a product of

its era in another way as well: It reflects the deep inroads camera

and screen have made in our lives. The snapshot, the quick cut, the

long pan and - sadly - the sound bite are essential to Wills' method.

The results, at their worst, can be snippets of lives so paltry as to

be empty and - because so much wasn't written down in 1688, so many

"voices" had yet to speak - less than illuminating. The book is

strongest in settings that poised literacy and power hand in hand;

when, for example, a burgeoning merchant economy was changing the

idea of an individual life or a bureaucracy was eager to exert

political control via its recording powers. Then, the precision of

what we do know is astonishing: The number of nutmeg trees on the

Banda Islands - 660,000; the number of scholars who passed Beijing's

prestigious metropolitan examination - 176; the number of haikai

poems Ihara Saikaku wrote in a single day - 23,500 (and still a

record). Given that most of the world was, in historical terms, a

great silence, "hearing" the voices Wills highlights - the English

writer Aphra Behn denouncing slavery in her melodramas, the Ottoman

Turk Osman Agha's memories of his years in Christian captivity - can

be stirring. And whatever the disappointments of Wills' quick cuts

across a thin layer of time, he introduces us to a world in which a

global imagination was already at work: Here is the Italian Jesuit

missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino dreaming of an assignment in

Imperial China, only to find himself among the Pima Indians of the

Sonoran Desert; here is the sultan of Ternate naming his sons

Amsterdam and Rotterdam after two cities he would never see. Wills

has pulled from the raging silence of history a modest but roiling

mass of transnational humanity, and so reminded us that we've been a

globalizing planet for more than 300 years. The world of 1688 was

already an economic, political, cultural and sexual entrepot, and

it's been stewing away ever since. - Tom Englehardt is the author of

The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning

of a Generation (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War). Look for the

books listed on these pages at The Globe, Big Ben and Anagram

Bookshop, or online at www.amazon.com or www.bn.com.

[MosJan]

Globalization

Q: What does globalization stands for?

A: When a British princess (Princess Diana) with an Egyptian boyfriend, uses a Swedish mobile telephone, crashes in French tunnel in a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian driver, who was high on Scotch, followed closely by Italian Papparazi on Japanese motorcycles, treated by an Armenian doctor, assisted by Filipino para-medical staff, using Brazilian medicines, dies!

This is what is called GLOBALIZATION.

[MJ]

Another one...

__________________________________________________

 

Globalization, Alive and Well

NY Times

September 22, 2002

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

 

If one were having a contest for the most wrongheaded prediction about the world after 9/11, the winner would be the declaration by the noted London School of Economics professor John Gray that 9/11 heralded the end of the era of globalization. Not only will Sept. 11 not be remembered for ending the process of global financial, trade and technological integration, but it may well be remembered for bringing some sobriety to the antiglobalization movement.

If one thing stands out from 9/11, it’s the fact that the terrorists originated from the least globalized, least open, least integrated corners of the world: namely, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. Countries that don’t trade in goods and services also tend not to trade in ideas, pluralism or tolerance.

But maybe the most important reason why globalization is alive and well post-9/11 is that while pampered college students and academics in the West continue to debate about whether countries should globalize, the two biggest countries in the world, India and China - who represent one-third of humanity - have long moved beyond that question. They have decided that opening their economies to trade in goods and services is the best way to lift their people out of abject poverty and are now focused simply on how to globalize in the most stable manner. Some prefer to go faster, and some prefer to phase out currency controls and subsidies gradually, but the debate about the direction they need to go is over.

“Globalization fatigue is still very much in evidence in

Europe and America, while in places like China and India,

you find a great desire for participation in the economic

expansion processes,” said Jairam Ramesh, the Indian

Congress Party’s top economic adviser. “. . . Even those

who are suspicious now want to find a way to participate,

but in a way that manages the risks and the pace. So we’re

finding ways to ‘glocalize,’ to do it our own way. It may

mean a little slower growth to manage the social stability,

but so be it. . . . I just spent a week in Germany and had

to listen to all these people there telling me how

globalization is destroying India and adding to poverty,

and I just said to them, ‘Look, if you want to argue about

ideology, we can do that, but on the level of facts, you’re

just wrong.’ “

That truth is most striking in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, where hundreds of thousands of young Indians, most from lower-middle-class families, suddenly have social mobility, motor scooters and apartments after going to technical colleges and joining the Indian software and engineering firms providing back-room support and research for the world’s biggest firms - thanks to globalization. Bangalore officials say each tech job produces 6.5 support jobs, in construction and services.

“Information technology has made millionaires out of ordinary people [in India] because of their brainpower alone - not caste, not land, not heredity,”said Sanjay Baru, editor of India’s Financial Express. “India is just beginning to realize that this process of globalization is one where we have an inherent advantage.”

Taking advantage of globalization to develop the Indian I.T. industry has been “a huge win in terms of foreign exchange [and in] self-confidence,” added Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, the Indian software giant. “So many Indians come and say to me that ‘when I walk through immigration at J.F.K. or Heathrow, the immigration guys look at me with respect now.’ The image of India changed from a third-world country of snake charmers and rope tricks to the software brainy guys.”

Do a majority of Indians still live in poor villages? Of course. Do we still need to make globalization more fair by compelling the rich Western countries to open their markets more to those things that the poor countries are best able to sell: food and textiles? You bet.

But the point is this: The debate about globalization before 9/11 got really stupid. Two simple truths got lost: One, globalization has its upsides and downsides, but countries that come at it with the right institutions and governance can get the best out of it and cushion the worst. Two, countries that are globalizing sensibly but steadily are also the ones that are becoming politically more open, with more opportunities for their people, and with a young generation more interested in joining the world system than blowing it up.

[MJ]

Yet another testimony on globalization and "American Imperialism" - yeah, yeah...

__________________________________________________

 

The Costs of Bursting Bubbles

NY Times

September 22, 2002

By STEPHEN S. ROACH

 

 

LONDON - A year after terrorism dealt a seemingly lethal blow to America, talk of resilience and economic recovery is in the air. The nation’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has risen for four consecutive quarters following a mild downturn in the first nine months of 2001. While the estimated 3.2 percent growth rate over the past year is subdued when compared with the more vigorous rebounds of the past, the hope is that it’s a down payment on bigger and better things to come.

But while Sept. 11 was a defining event for America, it was not a defining event for the economy or the financial markets. That role belongs to the stock market bubble of the late 1990’s that finally popped in March 2000. There was far more to the excesses of the 1990’s, however, than an asset bubble. The bubble expanded high enough, and for long enough, to have infected the behavior of consumers and businesses alike.

The equity bubble helped to create other bubbles - most notably in the housing market and in consumer spending. Their continued existence poses a serious threat to lasting expansion - and yet, puncturing them raises the grave risk of deflation. This suggests the economy will prove as challenging to America’s political leadership as any other issue in the year ahead.

There is good reason to believe that both the property and consumer bubbles will burst in the not-so-distant future. If they do, there is a realistic possibility that the United States, like Japan in the 1990’s, will suffer a series of recessionary relapses over the next several years. Yet denial remains deep, just as it was when the Nasdaq composite index was lurching toward 5,000. Few want to believe that this economic expansion may be built on such a shaky foundation.

The evidence in support of a housing bubble is compelling. The 27 percent increase in inflation-adjusted American house prices since 1997 represents the sharpest five-year increase since 1945. This surge is about three times the increase in real housing rents over this period. (The divergence of home prices and rents, which usually move in tandem, is one measure of the speculative element of the housing market.) As their property values rise, hard-pressed consumers have been quick to extract purchasing power from their homes, taking advantage of low interest rates to refinance their property and use the savings to buy cars, furniture, appliances and other luxury goods. Thus the ever-expanding property bubble has become central to the culture of excess that is now driving the United States economy.

The consumer-spending bubble will undoubtedly be the last to pop. Short of savings and long on debt, an aging American population must begin to come to grips with the looming realities of retirement. Yet it must now do so in an era of defined contribution pension plans whose performance has been battered by a devastating bear market in equities. We all know that Americans are addicted to shopping. Yet we also know that, if they want to retire with any kind of financial security, they must increase their savings and rein in their spending.

What might cause the consumer-spending bubble to burst? It’s hard to say, although several realistic possibilities come to mind - a spike in oil prices, a surge of white-collar layoffs or a collapse of the property bubble. Any one of those developments could send a wake-up call to the American consumer, thereby denying the United States and the broader global economy its main source of support.

But it gets worse. The saga of the post-bubble United States economy doesn’t stop with the bursting of the housing and consumer bubbles. Since these events are likely to occur when inflation is already running at a very low rate, they could push the United States into a period of outright deflation - a decline in the nation’s overall level of prices for goods and services.

This is a rare and worrisome condition for most economies. The impact of deflation would be most acute for wage earners and debtors. To stay profitable, companies would have to cut jobs or wages, eventually inhibiting consumer purchasing power. And the fixed obligations of indebtedness would have to be paid back in deflated dollars, squeezing overextended borrowers all the more.

America is already on the brink of deflation. Our broadest price gauge, the G.D.P. price index, recorded just a 1 percent annualized increase in the second quarter of 2002. That’s the lowest inflation rate in 48 years. Prices of goods and structures - covering nearly half the economy - are already contracting at an annual rate of 0.6 percent. Only in services, where price statistics are notoriously unreliable, are prices still rising.

The hows and whys of America’s deflationary perils will long be debated. Two sources seem most likely. First, the bubble-induced boom of business capital spending led to an overhang of new information technologies and other forms of capital equipment in the late 1990’s. The result was excess supply, a textbook recipe for lower prices.

Also at work are the unmistakable effects of globalization. The modern-day American economy now has a record exposure to global competition. In the second quarter of 2002, America imported a third as many goods as it produced, well in excess of the 20 percent ratio prevailing at the onset of the last recovery in the early 1990’s. Significantly, more and more of these goods are coming from highly competitive Asian producers who have much lower cost structures than their American counterparts.

Moreover, with the exception of Korea, every major Asian economy is now in the throes of its own deflation. Consequently, courtesy of ever-expanding trade relations with Asia, America is now buying more and more from countries like China and Japan that are already in deflation. The growing share of these increasingly cheap foreign goods helps drive down prices of products made at home, thereby deepening deflationary pressures.

History tells us that when major asset bubbles burst, deflation is often the result. That was true of the United States in the 1930’s and Japan in the 1990’s. Most are quick to claim that America is not Japan - that its more flexible, dynamic economy stands in sharp contrast to Japan’s economic inertia. But the United States is already a lot closer to the deflationary edge than most concede - and it could go further.

 

Deflationary risks can never be taken lightly in a post-bubble economy. Yet that’s precisely what American investors and policy makers now seem to be doing. If the housing and consumer bubbles pop, then the risk of outright deflation will only increase. It’s time to stop pretending this can’t happen in the United States.

 

Stephen S. Roach is chief economist and director of global economics at Morgan Stanley.

[bellthecat]

To return, at last, to the original question!

 

The order to build the Tower of Babel was given by king Nimrod, grandson of Noah and ruler of the post-flood world.

 

At the western edge of lake Van is a mountain that bares his name: Mt. Nemrut. When I was there this summer a Kurdish man told me that America should learn the story of this mountain's namesake, and stop trying to be the ruler of the world.