February 19, 2004
Dear Concerned Citizen,

Criticism of the globalization of technological capitalism usually takes two forms; loss of jobs or economic injustice.

Proponents of economic justice believe huge multi-national corporations imprison the world’s most vulnerable people into cruel sweat-shops to exploit their labor and natural resources. In short, globalization is simply a rich nation exploiting the labor of a poor nation.

60,000 protestors poured out of Birmingham churches in 1998 to call on the G7 (the leadership of the seven most powerful economic nations in the world) to take Leviticus seriously and proclaim a Jubilee year, forgiving all debts to underdeveloped countries.

At the G7 in Seattle, and again in Genoa, the protestors turned both violent and counter-capitalist. Windows of banks were smashed in and ATMs were set on fire. One protestor was killed by Italian police. The total amount of property damage was estimated at over $100 million.

What started out in England as deep concern by Christians for the welfare of the world’s poorest citizens has now degenerated into violence, ultimately discrediting the movement.

Proponents of protectionism denounce the loss of domestic jobs to laborers in developing countries, many emerging from abject poverty. When consumers bargain shop Mexican or Chinese or Indian products at Costco and Wal-Mart they are, in fact, undercutting the American labor market. They put their own jobs at risk. Protectionists would like to restrict such trade. For protectionists, globalization is simply a poor nation exploiting a rich nation’s market.

So which is it? Are the justice seeking protestors right that the desperately poor are victims of capitalism? Does speculative capital undermine the economic and financial stability of countries and peoples the world over, and worsen poverty and underdevelopment?

Or are the job protectionists like Pat Buchanan right? Is ‘cheap international labor’ the greatest threat to American jobs? Should we halt the use of cheap labor in Asia or Latin America in place of unionized workers in the United States?

Last week at the G7 in Boca Raton no protestors showed up. Maybe this issue has gotten so confusing and contentious the protestors themselves are having a difficult time sorting it all out.

totheosurce asked Dinesh D’Souza to give us some insight into this complicated and controversial issue. Born in colonialized India and now an American immigrant and citizen, D’Souza is uniquely qualified to shed some light on this important debate.

The Fuss Over Globalization
By Dinesh D'Souza

To hear the anti-globalists tell it, their angry demonstrations and disruptions are justified because they are speaking out for poor workers in the Third World, such as my native country India. In their view, poor people in places like Thailand, China, and Nigeria are being exploited by free trade and global capitalism. How cruel, they say, that a multinational company that would have to pay an American worker $15 an hour can get away with paying a Third World worker a meager $5 a day. Moral indignation suffuses the breast of the anti-globalist.

But this moral indignation is a bit of a pose. To see why this is so, let us begin with the charge that companies are exploiting foreign workers by paying them appallingly low wages. Five dollars a day seems like an outrage by American standards, but is it unjust for Coca Cola, Levi Strauss, or General Electric to pay that much to workers in a country where the going rate is $3 a day, and where things cost much less than they do in America?

Anyone who has lived in a Third World country, as I have, knows that when multinational corporations advertise for jobs, there are long lines of applicants. The reason is simple: as Edward Graham of the Institute for International Economics documents, multinational companies offer the best-paying jobs around. Some anti-globalists are skeptical about this, but why would Third World workers work for multinationals unless they were being offered a better deal than they could get elsewhere?

Not only do free trade policies help foreign workers at Coca Cola and General Electric, they also help other families in Third World countries, because the increased demand for labor pushes up wages even for workers who are not employed by multinational corporations. Thus countries that have embraced globalization, like China and India, have seen growth rates of 5 percent or more per year, compared with 2 percent in Western countries, and 1 percent or less in countries outside the free-trade loop. Free trade and globalization have helped millions of Third World people to enjoy the amenities of a middle-class lifestyle.

But perhaps the anti-globalists think that the multinationals could do better. Why not mandate higher wages for Third World workers? Even better, why not require that they be paid the same rate as American workers? The obvious reason is that under such laws Coca Cola, Nike, and General Electric would prefer not to use Third World labor at all. Multinationals hire Third World workers because they are much cheaper to employ than their First World counterparts.

Admittedly a Thai worker making shoes for $5 a day is likely to pose a competitive threat to an American worker doing the same job for $15 an hour. Alarmed at this prospect, American unions are fighting desperately to protect their members from foreign competition. UNITE, the textile workers union, even opposes measures to open American markets to Asian and African textiles. In supporting restrictive tariffs and trade barriers, the unions realize full well that they are in direct opposition to the aspirations of Third World peoples seeking to raise their living standard through trade with the West.

In this fight American unions have found a strange ally: columnist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. To permit foreign workers to compete with Americans, Buchanan writes in The Death of the West, “is to betray our own workers and their families. We should put America first.” Buchanan’s argument is basically tribal: we should uphold the interests of our steel, shoe, and textile workers at the expense of the rest of the world, whose economic welfare is not our concern.

Much as I disagree with Buchanan, let’s at least credit the man with being honest. He doesn’t really care about the Third World, and he is willing to say so. Such candor is woefully absent from the anti-globalists, who may believe they are fighting on behalf of the Third World but are in fact undermining the interests of Third World people. This is what many of us with Third World backgrounds find really disturbing. No wonder that ordinary people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are conspicuously absent from demonstrations against globalization. Poor people from the Third World increasingly realize: with friends like the anti-globalists, who needs enemies?

Missionaries and Microfinance: If You Teach A Man To Fish...

Violent opposition to President Jean-Betrand Aristide is spreading across Haiti. Over 50 people have been killed recently as rebels close roads and attempt to seize control of cities. The Dominican Republic has closed its borders concerned that a mass exodus might be triggered as Haitians seek refuge from the growing unrest.

Once a tropical paradise, Haiti is now the poorest country in the western hemisphere. While the conflict escalates in the cities, thousands of rural villagers cope with tremendous poverty without the help of a functional government

In the rugged mountains southwest of Port-au-Prince, a visionary and passionate Episcopal priest, Pere Jean-Wilfred Albert, has worked for 14 years to improve the lives of thousands. Help comes not from the government, but through partnerships with American Christian organizations such as Floresta and the Haiti Education Foundation.

Floresta empowers the poor farming family. It invites Haitian farmers to join faith-based agricultural credit-cooperatives that teach sustainable farming methods using practical technologies. An important benefit of Floresta’s strategy is the slow reversal of “slash and burn” farming that has left 95% of Haiti’s land deforested leading to drought, famine and further poverty.

Revolving microcredit, managed by the cooperatives, helps farmers develop microenterprises, diversify their agriculture, and purchase their own land. As sharecroppers change to landowners, they plant trees and invest in the long-term health of their land. To date, payback on loans is 100%.

What sustains Pere Albert and those in partnership with him to continue their work in this poor and dangerous nation? “That’s simple. God’s love sustains us” explains Floresta’s Executive Director, Scott Sabin.

Judging by the 750 families participating in Floresta cooperatives and the thousands of students in Pere Albert's parish, this commitment is indeed making a difference.

“From ancient times to the present, eyes and ears have longed for the most beautiful forms and sounds, bodies delighted in pleasure and luxury, and hearts swelled with pride at the glory of power and ability.

So long have these habits been allowed to permeate the lives of the people, that even if one were to go from door to door preaching the doctrines of the Taoists, he could never succeed in changing them.

'The best government accepts that this is the nature of the people; the next best leads them to what is beneficial; the next gives instruction and orders. Only the very worst compels them to act against their nature.”

Sima Qian
145-85 BC
Grand Historian to the Emperor
Han Dynasty

It is tempting to tie globalization solely to the emerging success of technological capitalism after Communism’s demise. But this definition is much too narrow. From ancient times, when Alexander conquered his ‘known world’, through Constantine’s and again Charlemagne’s Christendom, to the emergence of colonialization and the British Empire, the industrial revolution, secularism, Nazism and Communism, peoples have sought to impose their world-view on others for political gain and power. When done by force and oppression this is reprehensible.

Yet there is a place for sharing cultural goods such as human dignity, economic progress, advances in health care, and new technologies with those who wish to embrace them across national borders. Even anti-globalists want to globalize human rights, democracy, and environmental concerns. They should be applauded for doing so.

Pat Buchanan preaches protectionism

"Behind a tariff wall built by Washington, Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and the Republican presidents who followed, the United States had gone from an agrarian coastal republic to become the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen -- in a single century. Such was the success of the policy called protectionism that is so disparaged today."
"Americans no longer make their own cameras, shoes, radios, TVs, toys. A fifth of our steel, a third of our autos, half our machine tools, and two-thirds of our textiles and clothes are made abroad."

Maybe Pat liked the Chinese more when they were hopelessly helpless, waiting for deliveries of humanitarian aid, rather than an emerging economic power that threatens American world dominance.

Missionaries and globalization

The goal of the nineteenth- century missionary movement was to spread Christianity throughout the world. The British firmly believed that "in due time the earth would be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea" (Walls). So, they were to travel the world, spreading their religion to other countries. Andrew F. Walls, author of The Missionary Movement in Christian History, says that it was believed that clergyman should be the first generation of missionaries, because:

"The man who has accepted the call to the Christian ministry must be ready to receive it to the mission field also: A Christian minister is a person who in peculiar sense is not in his own; he is the servant of God....He engages to go where God pleases, and to do, or endure what he sees fit to command, or call him to in the exercise of function. He virtually bids farewell to friends, pleasures and comforts."

Do you want that McWorld with fries?

"The truth about McDonald's and Coke is that each company realizes it needs to take steps to become a full part of the communities it wants to serve, if for no other reason than self-interest.

Peruse the official Web sites of McDonald's franchises around the world and you’ll find that nearly all of them are locally owned, and most buy at least half their supplies from local growers.

In Egypt, for example, you can order a McFelafel. In Japan, a burger made of seaweed. In Taiwan, kids meals are served in reusable metal containers, keeping with local custom. In India, you won’t find beef anywhere on the menu (but you can order a “Maharaja Mac”). In France, you might find rabbit. In Germany, the menu includes beer.
That’s not to say McDonald’s hasn’t brought some Western customs to the far corners of the globe.

In the book Golden Arches East, edited by James L. Watson, McDonald's stores are credited with introducing the concept of queued lines (as opposed to rushing the counter) in Korea. In Hong Kong, public bathrooms were notoriously dirty and unsanitary. McDonald's clean, sterile facilities forced competing restaurants in the city to clean up their acts. The company also introduced new management, distribution and labor deployment techniques that allowed existing restaurant chains in Hong Kong to flourish.

Despite what you might deduce from anti-globalization protests, these efforts have largely ingratiated McDonald's into their communities. "