The devastating impact of globalization upon poor, minority communities

No sensible person can say globalization has helped poor minorities in America. In fact it has made their situation worse.

One thing you'll never get out of a fan of globalism is what they think happens to one of these communities when a factory closes and moves overseas. It's a whole lot different than moving out of state. Hint: moving to a job outside the country requires a passport and immigrating or getting a work visa, either of which is a long, expensive and horrific process in addition to the cost of moving, that is assuming the other country will even let you in. Nope, you won't hear about that, because then globalism isn't looking so great, is it? Especially if you're a poor minority.

But hey, as long as we aren't "protectionist" it's okay to throw the poor minorities under the bus, right? Right?



http://global-ejournal.org/2009/05/15/globalization-the-global-trope-and-poor-black-communities-the-recent-american-experience/

Globalization, the Global Trope, and Poor Black Communities: The Recent American Experience

Today, in the shadows of shiny gentrified blocks and gleaming downtown skyscrapers, many poor African American neighborhoods in America continue to suffer. Globalization continues to afflict these already punished terrains in ways that are now well chronicled. Most conspicuously, globalization engulfs these terrains and eradicates decent paying jobs and lowers pay rates. Hyper-frenetic, globally coordinated businesses and corporations, increasingly dominating urban economies, potently order and re-order locations of jobs, investment, and physical infrastructure (notably plant and store locations). In a process described by David Harvey (2000, 2005), capital’s continuous search for profitability takes the form of a restless and relentless re-making of the spaces of production. In its wake, these communities experience intensified poverty, underemployment, and unemployment.

But the impact of globalization on these communities has another dimension. Less recognized is that globalization, as a kind of cultivated imagining that is aggressively spoken, is widely put in the service of neoliberal urban politics (via diverse kinds of communicating) that deepens the production of these disadvantaged communities. Here, what globalization is thought to be by people is seized and wielded like a cudgel to punish and discipline planning measures, social welfare programs, and urban policy. Planning, political expediency, and opportunistic pronouncements of a new ominous reality meld into one potent political force. In the process, the public often comes to casually accept an “entrepreneurializing” of cities that afflicts these racialized communities. Let me provide specifics about this profoundly influential but only dimly recognized process (see also Wilson, 2007).

These poor African American communities today continue to suffer with a strengthened functional logic assigned to them: to warehouse “contaminants” in the new competitive, global reality. These communities across Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and the like have, for decades, warehoused the racial poor as the real-estate sectors in these cities have used planning and policy to keep key housing markets healthy and profitable. But in the latest twist on this, ghetto maintenance has increasingly involved wielding the recent fear and obsession within a supposed new era: globalization. This elaborate rhetoric, now served up heavily in newspapers, planning documents, and politician oratory, has been a key trigger to mobilize and put into play crucial ghetto-afflicting forces (targeting of government resources to cultivate a robust entrepreneurial city, retrenching the local welfare state, rhetorically attacking these populations and spaces). This rhetoric, which I term “the global trope,” typically extends neoliberal principles and designs into common thought and city planning measures (particularly the notion of the private-market as best determinant of social and land-use outcomes). The global trope, in this frame, is served up as a frank and blunt package of truths about city realities and needs that can no longer be suppressed. In assertion, its pleas correspond to core truths; deft interpreters read and respond to clear truths as a policy prescriptive, progressive human intervention onto a turbulent and fragile city.

The rhetoric of the global trope has thus been a perceptual apparatus with profound material effects. It has served up a digestible reality that, following Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1994), guides construction of programs and policies by making certain actions thinkable and rational and others not. Imposed webs of meanings, like symbolic cages, build bars around senses of reality that place gazes within discrete and confining visions. One reality is ultimately advanced while alternatives are purged. Here is Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) implicit dialogue with other points of view, the simultaneity of asserting one vision and annihilating others. This strategic affirmation and rebuke, forwarding what exists and what does not, continues to make this rhetorical formation a fundamental instrument of power. As this apparatus has resisted and beaten back competitive visions of city and societal realities, even as it is contested and struggled against, it grows stronger in many U.S. cities.

Colin Powell endorses Obama for 4 more years! n/t

Check in if you think we shouldn't get tough with China!

Check in if you believe China didn't get where they are now by manipulating their currency.
Check in if you believe China didn't get where they are now by stealing foreign intellectual property.
Check in if you believe China didn't get where they are now by putting up big tariffs against American products in the past.
Check in if you believe Americans should buy goods from undemocratic nations.
Check in if you believe we should buy goods from heavy polluters overseas while claiming to reduce industrial pollution here.
Check in if you believe that big trade deficits don't devalue a nation's currency and drive up its debt.
Check in if you agree that Americans should continue to lose their jobs as people like Mitt Romney close factories here and set them up in China.
Check in if you think it's xenophobic to want to keep your American factory job rather than be unemployed.


Check in if you believe American workers should continue to be the pariahs in the global economy.

Full stop. It's rare that you see stupidity of THIS magnitude.

How many pro-lifers did you personally see taking issue with what Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock?

None, where I hail from.

Yellowface strikes again. Ben Kingsley plays the Mandarin in the next Iron Man movie

Check out the weak ass excuse they gave:

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=35567

What did I tell you? Mitt Romney boldly made comments about companies shipping jobs to China

and everyone in the WORLD knows he's behind Sensata.

The media - at least the stations I watch - has been going nuts over Sensata.

Yet Romney BOLDLY stood there talking shit about China and talking shit about companies who move factories to China. HE DOES IT HIMSELF IN THE OPEN and yet he trash talks it.

That tells you right there that he knows the public doesn't give a shit. No matter how much the media talks about his Sensata behavior, his naked hypocrisy right on NATIONAL TV won't mean a damned thing. That level of hypocrisy won't move the polls more than a few points, 5 tops.

ARGH. We've got to work harder and make a stink as a Party. We need to do the shouting so people won't just go -

er, HEY, WAIT HONEY BOO BOO IS ON!!!!!!

CBS sidelines actress because they don't believe she's sick. Fuck CBS.

The whole network is banned from this household permanently until they make this right.

http://news.yahoo.com/ailing-blue-bloods-actress-calls-cbs-shameful-170254869.html

NEW YORK (AP) — "Blue Bloods" cast member Jennifer Esposito is blasting CBS for sidelining her from the show.

In Twitter postings, the actress has accused CBS of "absolutely shameful behavior" in putting her on unpaid leave from the Tom Selleck-starring police drama.

Esposito tweeted that she's been diagnosed with celiac disease and requires a reduced work schedule. She said CBS believes she is angling to win a pay raise.

CBS has responded that because Esposito can't fulfill the full-time demands of her role, it has "regretfully" put her character, Detective Jackie Curatola, on a leave of absence. Her last appearance for now airs Nov. 2. The network says it hopes Esposito will be able to return.

More proof that China can't survive by stealing American jobs.

Like I keep saying, our vein is running dry. We've got nothing left for them to take.

An economy that depends on huge exports is inevitably a doomed one. Other nations that depend on exports, especially to the USA, are also going to find themselves in deep shit.

The great and mighty Globalism will collapse because production will be forced to go more local and less global. Oops.

Ouroboros.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-leaders-face-tough-economic-055603673.html

BEIJING (AP) -- China's economic model that delivered three decades of double-digit growth is running out of steam and the country's next leaders face tough choices to keep incomes rising. But they don't seem to have ambitious solutions. Even if they do, they will need to tackle entrenched interests with backing high in the Communist Party.

The cost of inaction could be high. The World Bank says without change, annual growth could sink to 5 percent by 2015 — dangerously low by Chinese standards. Some private sector analysts give even gloomier warnings.

The government's own advisers say it needs to promote service industries and consumer spending, shifting away from reliance on exports and investment. That will require opening more industries to entrepreneurs and forcing cosseted state companies to compete. State banks would have to lend more to private business that is starved for credit.

When do we declare the KKK a terrorist group?

And when do the drones get sent in?











(Note: just kidding about the drones.)