"On editorial pages, television news, and public television, pundits, bankers, politicians, and professors often describe globalization as a train - inevitable, demanding, churning violently, but ultimately necessary for civilization. If you're lucky enough to have a seat on the train, then it seams all in all a rather good idea. But if you are on the tracks, with the train bearing down on you, then the locomotive, from where you stand, is not all it's cracked up to be. If you own stock in the publicly traded company, then you cheer the stock market like the home team. But if you work for a publicly traded company and the stock price just jumped because you didn't get a raise, or a thousand of your coworkers just lost their jobs, or your retirement plan was eliminated, then your view of the world in that moment is much less sanguine than Wall Street's. If your home is in foreclosure because you can't afford the usurious interest on your mortgage, then you can think of better uses for $700 billion than bailing out a bunch of supposedly super smart rich guys who conspired to swindle you and your neighbors out of your hard earned cash in the first place." (From Flat Broke in the Free Market)
"When John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, one of his top priorities was prodding Congress to create more factory jobs by rewarding corporate investment in plant improvemnents and new equipment with greater tax benefits. Thirty-two years later, Bill Clinton walked into the White House practically inviting factory owners to set up shop elsewhere by pressuring Capital Hill lawmakers to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, which demolished tarriffs for products manuactured on the other side of American borders..."Yet globalization's indiscriminate opening of markets has robbed undeveloped countries of what they most need for economic growth - an industrial strategy - and kicked the ladder out from under the world's poorest people just as they are beginning their ascent. Sub-Saharan Africa's 800 million people represent more than 10 percent of the world's population, but account for only 2 percent of global trade, a share that is smaller than it was even fifty years ago." (From Flat Broke in the Free Market)
