It’s not surprising that right wing extremists seek to use the Coronavirus to advance their goals. It’s what they do. One need only look at the outrageous politicization of the outbreak by the Trump regime. They are using it to further close the U.S. borders to trade and immigration. By selectively hiding the full extent of the advance of the virus here, the Trump regime also pretends it’s effectively not expanding.
The problem with this approach is the states are telling the truth. So, too, are the few remaining legitimate public health experts working for the federal government (when they aren’t prevented from speaking).
In the end, the truth is leaking out, and the public has further reason to disbelieve the Trump regime, since their lying has destroyed their credibility.
One can hope the incompetence and mendacity of the current U.S. government is revealing a lot to more Americans about the need for replacing them in November.
It certainly does with me.
92
@Demosthenes
Exactly correct. The right wing never misses an opportunity to use a situation to advance their perpetual goals of consolidating power and upwardly transferring wealth.
Viral pandemic? Cut taxes and interest rates!
26
@Demosthenes
Just because the Right has finally figured out that unfeterred free trade is bad, after demanding it for fifty years, doesn't mean that it is now good.
They hired Trump to blame you for their mistake, so if Democrats protect their mistake, it plays into their hands.
The Left was always against unfetterred free trade and history has proven the Left correct yet again.
No, you can't turn back time, but you can change course and start trying to create fair trade, so all businesses, consumers, and workers see a level playing field.
Article I of the Constitution says "regulate trade."
"Free trade" is a scam designed to neuter democracy so that it cannot regulate trade.
When centrist Democrats compromise with the Right (who are mostly wrong) instead if with the Left base of their own party, they end up taking positions that are unpopular on the Right and the Left.
Biden may being winning Democratic Centrists, but Democratic Centrists are opposed by both bases.
What if most of the independents that aren't committed Trump voters are on the Left, not in the center? Wouldn't Bernie, who has always been on the correct side of Free Trade, get more votes.
Wouldn't the guy who had always been against free trade do better with an electoate that opposes free trade?
There are more Independents than Democrats, and the Democratic Primaries tell you nothing about how they will vote in the general.
Bernie would do better with Independents (40% of voters).
9
It's not just a practical matter of having wide, amorphous supply chains. There are actual differences in culture and values which are commonly dismissed by the "everyone is the same" mantra and accusations of xenophobia. No, we're not all the same. China suppressed information about the virus for a month, strong-armed those who wanted to reveal the frightening information (which wouldn't be that easy anyway because their internet is so tightly controlled), lied about what was happening, refused WHO and CDC access to the hot zone, and allowed flights in and out for a month before admitting there was a problem. It's possible that the deaths around the world could have been prevented as well as the financial and social dislocations, which will apparently be huge. And this is after they have stolen intellectual property for decades only to be rewarded with entry to the WTO and access to global markets. They are not like us, and neither are refugees and economic migrants from the Third World. Syrians are nothing like Nebraskans. These differences are real, absolute, and not relative. I don't want to rely upon a mendacious, brutal regime like China, welcome sharia advocates to my neighborhood, or import mass poverty in the form of illiterate migrants with five kids. This is what "inclusion" actually means as they shove it down my throat and shame me for wanting to preserve the culture and prosperity my ancestors fought to create and protect.
78
@Grunt Do you promise to buy American? Where have you been all these years? Give some examples of what you have done to help U.S. companies keep employees in the U.S. If one company gets cheap labor, others have to do the same to remain competitive. The U.S. has been promoting cheap labor since slavery. And continued with immigration and then globalization. Most people complain about Globalization but buy based on the cheapest price,
28
@Grunt, I met an Iraqi who invited me to his company party and discovered that many of his fellow employees are displaced Middle Easterners who appear to be educated and upper middle class until our elected Bush/Cheney regime decided to go over to their countries and destabilize them for their profit. Now they are under-employed here. Our ancestors stole from the native Americans to have their prosperity and replaced the natives' culture. What our corporations have done in other third world countries is what they are now doing here.
26
@Grunt -
Worse than strong-armed. Arrested. The party turned the full power of their legal system on a trained doctor, who later died of the disease contracted from his patients. Foreign journalists who write unflattering articles about the lack of cleanliness in Chinese cities are summarily expelled from the country.
They are both secretive and misinformed about the virus outbreak. Their internet stories are censored.
27
Alternate Headline: "A Global Outbreak Is Giving Racists Another Excuse to Be Racists."
19
Faisal, if whites were to come to the country of your origin, they would be called invaders and aliens. But when the flow is the opposite, whites are accused of being insufficiently accommodating.
3
@Eugene If by my "country of origin" you mean Manhattan, NY. Then yea, we do have a lot of whites "invading" our coffee shops and bars.
3
@Eugene
As a 'white' person with an awareness of history, I would point out that your implication of a double-standard is facetious.
Imperial colonists from European countries tended to arrive well-armed with the intent of dominating 'primitive' cultures - not joining them; they were called what they chose to be. (That's how we took 'our' country from the prior owners to begin with, no?)
The 'flow' of non-'white' people into 'our' country is, on the other hand, mostly immigrants and refugees looking to join and enrich our community -- they are typically 'armed' only with melanin.
'White Supremacy' is a stain on humanity.
8
I think it makes a better sense for countries to be less reliance on US than China. From the trade war we can see, US will do whatever it takes to keep its position on top, no matter how unethical, unmarket-capitalistic it is, how immoral it is, it will do whatever it takes WILLINGLY to harm other countries and make them loss job, if you are one of their competitor, whether the virus is really out of China's control, China is willing to do whatever it takes to shield other countries from the impact of the virus, even shut down cities of 11 million people.
Rest of the world become realize you reliant too much on Google, Microsoft, Apple, Boeing... They will cut you of at the time you need, or threaten to cut you off to gain leverage on you. We can see from the case of Huawei, in order to stop the increase the popularity of Huawei, they are willing to cut off the supply of Google in order to decrease the competition of Apple, ban Huawei from some hypocritical excuses with zero evidence to support. The "Chief of Justice" suggest US government to control private European companies, and unite them to compete with Huawei. The "Economic minister" jump in to say, the ban will harm US national security as it will decrease US competitiveness if Huawei chooses to use other suppliers.
The show goes on, no matter how bizarre, how unmarket-capitalistic, how unethical it is.
6
COVID-19 shows that we need to be more globalized. The US government not wanting to adopt the WHO and Germany’s working diagnosis kit because of egocentric nationalistic views have prevented the testings of millions in the US. We are as much at fault as China. With world standards and global policies we can progress prevent the extinction of the human race and preserve the earth. With xenophobia and nationalism, we will kill everything good in humanity.
6
The NYTs reporting and videos are revealing a world trying to cope with a new danger. The NYTs is the ultimate globalization project. Don’t forget that nationalism brought us to the brink of nuclear holocaust. Seventy percent of viruses come from Asia. We need to help the Chinese regulate the wildlife trade. The international community has the right to protect the citizens of China, and citizens everywhere, from weak water, air, and health regulations. China needs an independent legal system that acts according to principal not political interests. We need the rule of law in China. China’s human rights lawyers should be leading China not the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP is an old authoritarian regime. President Xi Jinping himself predicted that the demise of the Party would be due to corruption. Without a functioning legal system, the Chinese people, and everyone, will be vulnerable to the viruses that incubate in bats.
2
Perhaps concerns are quite valid. Hindsight of course, but what has been the consequent result of globalization? Perhaps the destruction of socio/economic structures of North America and Europe, and now perhaps the health of North America and Europe. As your colleague on the NYT editorial board, Mr Tom Freidman, used to say " The World Is Flat" as his slogan for his advocacy of a hyper globalized world. In retrospect, things haven't worked out all that well.
4
People and parties are uniformly wrong to blame globalization and cross border trade as a culprit, these characters will latch on to whatever nipple nourishes their hatred or aids their cause.
If their ridiculous arguments had merit, they'd be equally active demanding closure of "borders" between city-county lines, between counties, between states within a country, etc.
Border closing and isolationist arguments are patently facetious and are only viable, temporarily, in the case of pandemics.
We live in a global community where movement of people and goods are the proper order of everyday life.
4
You are so right on! I know a guy who immigrated from Maine to New York City for a better life and when he got there he said get all these immigrants out of the US. They are destroying our way of life!!! Oh and by the way, he says this while he is standing on the street gorging on a falafel made by the immigrant. What an idiot!
1
So it was OK for Ivanka to have all her factories in China and make her millions!?! I've never understood why nobody brings this up when Trump goes off on other companies that are doing business in China. Also, sure bring back all the factory jobs to the US but really, who is going to do the work? You got it, we are going to need an influx of immigrants to pick up all those low-paying jobs.
6
Globalization equals trashing the planet and plundering finite resources as if there were no tomorrow. Economists and politicians will tell you that this will pass, but this is a wake up call that the human race is headed toward self annihilation in a hurry.
5
It’s actually quite predictable that the whole global economic system could be suddenly thrown into shambles by what comes down to abuse and disregard of the planet and other living species. The global economy is not sustainable and not compatable with a functioning, healthy planet. Those who believe it is are either dreaming, lying, or ignorant. Human beings cannot take care of this planet and we have only begun to see the results of our reckless disregard of the planet.
40
In the 90s, China said we will conquer American by feeding their greed. Oh how right they were. We dropped everything we stood for, from human rights to ensuring the well being of Americans, including job opportunities. We sold America lock stock and barrel and the 1%, who don’t care what flag is flying, won.
Now people want Biden, more the Wall Street bought soft centrists who make a lot of Americans feel good with big smiles and empty promises. At best we have Obama 2.0 corporatocracy, with no limits on globalization and at worst the Trump autocracy. Software isn't eating the world, VCs, hedge funds, and especially private equity are.
6
Many of our one word ideas are more destructive to our well-being and the clarity of our minds:
Globalization was driven by corporations freed to ignore the needs of their home nations.
Liberalism was fundamentally an economic principle before it became associated with humanism, politics, and democracies.
So, let's try to be clear what is driving globalization: It is not the liberalism of humanist politics. Obviously our American liberalism is little concerned with our paying the highest prices for health care.
So, please, journalists, lets try to free us from the misuse of one word ideas which defeat any progress in our fundamental human needs.
2
I think it's time for Trump to visit that cruise ship quarantined off San Francisco and prove his "hunch" that the World Health Organization does not know nearly as much as he does about coronavirus fatalities.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/898838/new-yorker-wordlessly-sums-trumps-coronavirus-problem
4
"Globalization is terrible! It's ruining America!" says the guy who had his Make America Great Again hats made in China, and his daughter's clothing line made in China, and his daughter's patents for voting machines given to Chinese companies to make... at least until the "fake news" busted him on it with the truth. So, folks, ignore the clown-show in the white house. This Coronavirus threat, too, shall pass. Globalization is good for us in the long run.
4
Democrats can seize the moment. California can announce that they have set up medical facilities to treat for free and house for free, immigrants who enter the US illegally. When thousands flee Mexico from the Coronavirus, and rush through our leaky border, those living in California can have the satisfaction that their state’s tax dollars are providing help and shelter for the huddled masses coming from the south. This should help Democrats set an example of how to handle issues caused by open borders.
3
Then send them on a Greyhound to Peoria.
1
I just love the GOP ranting. Close all the borders, stop the people from coming in. That will stop the virus! Germs leap borders!
It isn't impossible to bring manufacturing back to the USA. In fact, it isn't even difficult.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a fool or has an agenda.
7
Just a tip to double check the caption for the picture of demonstrators marching in Dresden - they sure don’t look like or display any of the imagery of neo-nazis. Perhaps they are participating in a PEGIDA march. Although relatively far right on the political spectrum PEGIDA supporters should certainly not be classified as neo-nazis.
3
I would like to point out that the picture cited as having been taken in Dresden was a march against neo-nazis and not a neo-nazi march as described under the caption. At the very least I‘m sure the people in this picture would appreciate it if the New York Times corrected this error, since they are being labeled as supportive of something they presumably feel very strongly against.
4
Misleading statement here:
“The Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in the neo-Nazi movement.”
There is truth in it, but the SD have renounced any form of Nazism for decades. Its like saying that the Democratic Party had a long history of supporting slavery in America. True, but irrelevant and therefore misleading.
2
Is it possible to quarantine illegal immigrants for 14 days or even test them for the virus?
1
I like Professor Goldin’s take on it. As it has been practiced, globalization is “an under-regulated, complacent form of interconnection that has left communities vulnerable to a potent array of threats.” I’m not an economist or a diplomat but I call this approach “Gung-Ho Globalization.” It appears, to my untrained eyes, to consist mostly of a rush to offshore jobs and manufacturing to wherever it’s cheapest - all else be damned. It doesn’t matter if the countries allow terrible pollution, unsafe work conditions, slave-wages, and child labor. And it also makes a point of destroying anything that slows or inhibits the free flow of goods and wealth. That means tearing down important health and safety measures in the name of market efficiencies.
.
So I am not against globalization per se. But I do think we owe it to the World to slow it down and be much more careful about it. Granted as I said before, I’m an architect; not an economist.
2
Globalization is not going away despite it's wrinkles and anyone that wants it to needs a serious reality check. The world has become extremely prosperous due to our global interconnectedness and nobody really wants to go back to a time when we had fewer choices and higher costs for goods, travel, jobs and labor. The west needs to get back in the right to prevent refugees and China needs to outlaw the trade and ingestion of wild animals. That's all.
11
@NowCHare I (and I suspect many others) would happily go back to a time with higher costs for goods, but I can't find clothing, furniture, appliances, drugs made in America and am forced to buy just about everything made in China.
24
@Sue
I'm with you, Sue!
12
@NowCHare What do you mean by "prevent refugees"? Help prevent wars and famines or put up walls?
4
Nationalism won't prevent another pandemic; the Covid virus is mostly being spread by tourism, not by workers, migrants or products crossing international boundaries. Yes there is a disruption in the supply chain but a chain is only as strong as it weakest link and right now some of those links that are breaking are here in the US. Retracting a supply chain to be solely within US borders is still vulnerable in a pandemic.
30
@Scott Werden
The tourism industry has run amok, and the local governments, from NYC to Florida to Rome, pander to tourism money instead of the wishes of the electorate.
Plus, the huge dependency by Western universities on the full tuition paid by foreign students.
Money is the root of all evil....? Including pandemics.
16
@KR
Today, semi-official Xinhua news in China published a demand that the US apologize for the travel ban with a thinly veiled threat to retaliate with a ban on exports.
2
The electorate, i.e. the working stiffs and the capitalist too wants the tourism, why wouldn’t it ? Tourists create jobs when buying airline tickets, by filling hotels and eating in restaurants, by shopping and paying sales taxes on all the services mentioned.
1
The annoying thing is many people believe we can go back to a time where we can isolate ourselves and don't have to worry about the outside the world. The fact the Spanish Flu spread around the world when travel was restricted to ships across the oceans shows you can't successfully isolate yourself from the world. Maybe if you're on a small self-sustained island, but not for the majority of countries.
Sadly more and more people blame globalization as the root of many problems when that isn't the case. Lets look at lost manufacturing jobs as an example. Yes, some have been lost on trade, but automation was already eradicating jobs. In fact, automation is eradicating jobs overseas now, so it was inevitable.
Yet people blame globalization. Sadly the world is buying into right wing populism how it's immigrants and trade's fault for their issues and how their ideal culture of 40 years ago is gone despite how time will always change things. People need to realize it's an interconnected world, and trade and agreements have stopped another world war.
80
You are right -- but I think I am too. See below.
5
@Patrick
The Spanish flu epidemic was caused by troops coming home from WW1.
15
@Lily But it proves my point how easily even back then something could spread. The sad thing is many root of the flu to Kansas, but it was from a US Soldier. Yet it spread to every continent and to places where you didn't expect a large number of soldiers who were in the war. It proves my point that even in an era where we didn't have modern travel it spread like wild fire.
11
Let's all stop buying useless stuff from China for starters!
9
@cathy
Or start buying useless stuff from America?
1
Okay, understood.
Here are a couple more fundamental Front-Lashes re globalization (not off topic, at a different scale, i.e., survival per pattern recognition in an evolutionary time scale.)
Code Fail
“The rule of thumb is that the complexity of the organism has to match the complexity of the environment at all scales in order to increase the likelihood of survival.” Yaneer Bar-Yam, physicist, complexity scientist — Making Things Work
Due to exponentially accelerating complexity, our coding, our relationship infrastructure now violates the rule of thumb — at both the biological & cultural scales.
We're not coded — biologically or culturally — to process complex global relationship information with exponential dynamics.
We're coded for relationship interface with local environs, primarily in a short-term manner with incremental dynamics.
Our bio & cultural coding structures do not match, nor can they support, the unprecedented environs we've generated.
In addition, there's this — from Dr. Robert Trivers book, "The Folly of Fools."
Dr. Trivers is citing work by Randy Thornhill & C. L. Fincher.
“Regarding the evidence, there can be little doubt. Across the entire globe, religious and linguistic diversity map directly on parasite load, as does ethnic diversity — the higher the parasite pressure, the more religions, languages, and ethnic groups per unit area.”
Organic boundaries, & mistrust of "the other" carrying pathogens or weapons, is, in part, an immune response.
3
It's ironic those on the left criticize opposition to open borders while the very liberal governor of California just prohibited a cruise ship from docking in SF bay.
3
Many of these comments are not based in science or fact, and are alarming.
Immigrants don't cause viruses.
Walls wont prevent their spread.
Building American factories is not a cure.
Ecoystem destruction and exploitatin allows novel viruses, previosly locked down in niches,to emerge, mutate and spread.
That is simply a fact.
My god we are so profoundly ignorant of the interdependent and inextricable relationship betwen our planet and ourselved.
We remain so at our increasing and obvious peril
5
"People will always want to travel. They will always want to trade. The answer is not to again build walls. You need more cooperation and clear information.”
And how do you get cooperation and clear information from China? The Chinese play by their own rules and do not release information, this is a perfect example of why globalization will fail, because at the end of the day some cultures and values are just not compatible.
And if you read the article below it's obvious that the Chinese in China do not support globalization either
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3065235/backlash-china-over-draft-rule-permanent-residency-foreigners
2
This is not mainly a “right wing” issue. Globalization has made it possible to circumvent environmental and labor laws. How can it be in line with reducing the carbon footprint when every little item is shipped from China? It has lead to enormous increases in air travel. Good for this folly to end, no matter what your political persuasion.
7
Globalization has greatly facilitated global population growth by reducing dependencies on local resource bases. It has also made the livelihoods of billions of people dependent on the global trade of materials and services, far removed from providing for the mere essential needs.
This global system evolved under relatively benign global climatic conditions favoring the rapid evolution of industrialized agricultural production. And it developed and continues to grow out on an energy base of cheap fossil fuels. These basics propping up the global economy are now seriously threatened by climate change. Which leads to a very inconvenient question of just how resilient a global economy can be, particularly in chaotic situations. Are we, as Loren Eiseley proposed, becoming one giant maladaptive organism, totally dominating the organic future of life on earth?
And would the future of life on earth be better served by diversification and localization of economies that would better protect and sustain their local resource bases of support? And not living in ignorance (or living with willful spite) of the devastating environmental, ecological and climatic impacts of their resource procurement half way around the world?
Globalization is based upon the promise of growing prosperity for all. So, how does this jive with a dying planet (climate and biodiversity at great peril) and growing threats to food security?
3
Opinionated elsewise? towards W.H.O., state-to-state health and emergency personnel responders, hospitals and clinics, informing the public that wearing a recommended N95 mask is nonessential to provide safety against COVID airborne particulates. Advice to those of whom who would choose to wear a N95 mask though are disallowed to purchase because of demands, nonsustainable market stockpiles, and or other vender restrictions to the general public. Beware blackmarket sellers. In the meantime inhaving well intentioned advice. Invent a mask w/or without a respirator. Consider judgement in using HEPA filters, "in existing residential HVAC systems." A standard 1" throwaway furnace filter traps an estimate 5-15 percent of airborne particulates. Choose a MERV of 20, micro fiber media filter, and for carbon, charcoal refrigerator air filtration filter. Design mask, combining layered filters and attach strapping. Invent a exhalation valve, too. Nevertheless a homemade method to try. At least until manufacturers and venders, reputable businesses, allow availability of the N95 masks for general public use.
2
You'd think the world has ended due to this outbreak. The same fearmongering means closing our borders and restricting all immigration. Risks of disease are as old as humanity, and we are better prepared today than ever before. Enough with the hysteria as businesses will adjust their supply chains to deal with issues like this. Learning something new doesn't mean you have to abandon all you learned before.
1
When will we see some analysis of the vast sums being made (and by whom) by the day-trading, algorithm driven, program-trading financial behemoths who are in and out of this market dancing to the daily tune of its 2 - 4 % plus or minus swings.
4
What's wrong with Americans having well-paid factory jobs? Better than homelessness or the gig economy.
9
Wall Street makes more money when profits are higher.
2
@Zejee You mean profits are higher when prices are low enough to increase demand from regular people who buy stuff.
I mean, they make more money when profits are higher isn't even a statement of interest, as if would make less with higher profits.
1
It's only common sense that open borders promote and create the dangers of highly transmittable diseases, especially when the immigrants are arriving from countries where decent sanitation and public health practices are rare or non-existent. Build the wall.
6
Maybe we should build a national health plan so that everyone can afford to see a doctor.
4
Enough of the Trump fearmongering .You want a safe space to crawl into ? A wall will never stop a pandemic Globalization is not the cause just another excuse to feed the fearful .People travel regardless of globalization and so does disease Obama set up 47 anti pandemic programs throughout the world only to have the anti science Trump close 37 .Trump and Pences problem solving skills is you can pray it away This comes from an idiots who think windmills cause cancer Dropping a nuclear bomb into hurricane nevermind the radioactive fallout to stop a storm ,water bomb a cathedral thats 800 plus years old or rake a forest..to fix problems ? The problem is we have incompetent dolts who haven't a clue and because of this it will get a lot worse for the rest of us .Trump is the problem
There is no question that globalization has speeded up the spread of the COVID=19. The movement of people has put the spread of the virus on speed.
Lets face it. One person can spread the virus to a whole lot of people - family, neighbors, friends etc. until hundreds of people have the virus which spreads from one person.
Immigration speeds the spread and thus it is better if all forms of immigration are put on hold till this pandemic ends -- if not more people will be sick and dying. Look at what is happening at the Greek Border - Turkey, which wants more money from the EU, has opened its borders so that people can stampeded for the borders of Europe. Greece was right to use its army at the borders. The rest of the EU needs to get on board as does the US and UK
6
Globalization brings risks and yes, always has. The black death came via ships from the east, the Spanish Flu originated in Europe and spread elsewhere. The problem with the globalization we see today is that it wasn't well thought out, there wasn't anyone looking at the risks and rewards and figuring out how to balance them. Free trade people in the US, both conservative and more liberal, sold the idea that globalization was going to float all boats, that jobs lost to cheap labor markets would be replaced by better paying ones for goods those countries will buy. The problem was that was nonsense, that companies sent jobs to cheap labor markets that in turn, bought very little outside natural resources from industrial countries. Economists and people like Hillary Clinton were "shocked" at the impact China had, but they shouldn't be, they were assuming China would grow the way other countries did, but it didn't, it remained a capitalist autocracy, where labor has no voice, where the government and business are pretty much the same thing. Too, the assumption was that China for example is a modern country now, when it is modernity grafted on a very shaky, still third world infrastructure. The real problem was companies putting all their eggs in one basket, to please Wall Street, Wall Street analysts are some of the most narrow focused, willfully ignorant people you can meet, they know one thing and one thing only, things like risk and the like are unknown to them.
4
@music observer And now we get to see the impact of the conservative response to what is in actuality a natural human inclination to travel and trade, and I might add: to share. The conservative approach is to focus on a narrowly defined self-interest, the GOP and now Trump et al have played that card effectively for some years but have played down any evidence of the impacts of such policies, including historical evidence. The best we can hope for is that they- and I mean conservatives including the GOP, Trump et al and even Johnson of Brexit fame- will have to wear the blame for what happens because of their policies. Hopefully the media will be up to the task of making sure they do not get to deflect the blame- again.
1
@music observer So, not every business put their eggs in a globalization basket, and so they must be doing well. The idea that nobody can make a wrong decision, or a decision that has unintended consequences, is nonsense. How many people were talking about the risks of trade being high because those you trade with may get sick. What is the sickness started in the USA, then would you say all those who manufacture here were the dumb ones?
1
@music observer
First of all, its well documented Spanish Flu originated in Midwest somewhere in Kansas and traveled to Europe via a soldier who was infected when US entered WWI. Secondly nobody is "shocked" as you say that China is not some full blown Democratic country holding hand in hand with US over marshmallows. Perhaps you're shocked and been duped by the politicans selling such idea in behalf of corporations..? China infrastructure is pretty modern and advance today compared to US...have you ever been to China? Have you ever landed in La Gurardia and took NYC subways outside of toniest stations outside of Manhattan? I am a New Yorker, I know.
Can't wait for that $10,000 iPhone 12 manufactured domestically.
2
@Teller
I think Apple can produce in US for North American markets and still sell iphone for less than $1000 and make decent money which I think may become more more of possibility now from political pressure. However Wall st. may not like it due to less margin/profitability and company valuation will take a beating which will impact 401K of every Americans since Apple stock is probably the most widely held stock today. So yeah perhaps you will end up paying 10K for the American made iPhone after all..
3
wouldn't it be wonderful if the Covid-19 outbreak forces us to discuss predatory capitalism and see it for what it is and how horribly the masses of people are treated.
And if there is no move twds Medicare 4 all on the part of old Joe Biden, I don't care if we have four more years of nonsense-- at least we are not in any new war-- (yet?)
This was hardly globalization when everything get made in one country - China. Globalization implies that goods come from all over. Surprisingly the blueberries from Peru or Chile this winter (carbon foot print) taste better than those rom Canada, Michigan or Jersey in the summer. (All sad.) And we don't grow avocados here with well paid American labor but the price remains the same
Sick of greed.. sick of supporting the rich.. Bring back the luxury tax of 10% so at least they pay some of the time. My 354$ plane ticket - main cabin had 225$ worth of taxes and fees... ( unrelated to my income -- and are the taxes for business class seats higher or the same?) .
5
@Anna
No we don't get everything from one country- China. You iPhone though imported from China consist of many parts/components from many countries outside of China incl South Korea, Japan, US, Israel, Europe etc. China is mainly assembling plant/factory prior to shipping to markets all around the world. So lets say Apple pays $200 per iPhone to China, China takes that same $200 pays off the various suppliers/countries- $30 Qualcomm (US), $20 Samsung (Korea), $15 Arm (Japan) etc etc...perhaps China overall take on that $200 maybe less than $40. This same principle applies to shoes, apparels etc..
1
@Anna If you get sick from covid, it will come from an American. Does that mean relying on Americans is a bad idea? Those who use any trouble as proof that the world is a bad place fail to see the forest for the trees.
1
I smell corporate bail outs. As the people die we must rally around our fearless and wonderful corporations and make them sound. Otherwise who will enslave us after the virus is all gone.
I am going to guess that the airlines are already in talks with the government to get some tax payer money. The democrats and Trump will agree on taxing the poor to pay the rich, as usual.
4
@Chris Sadly, this is true, as government can't stop meddling and making us all bit worse off. Equal protection means that bad choices need bad consequences so they get better in time. Government lets viruses spread, bad ideas linger, and steals money from all to benefit special interests over the constitutional mandate of equal protection. Oh well...
1
Was China's coverup of this outbreak an attempt to save face or an experiment to see how far and how fast they could spread a germ around the globe?
4
@Patrick
So this is Chinese's version to cutting off nose to spite the face? I don't understand...what can they gain from such experiment?
@Patrick Was the slow US response, with "broken" test kits and limited testing facilities, delaying testing by over a month a failure of central planning or were they seeing how fast this germ could spread around the country?
1
Chinese wake up every day thinking how to save face. It is a cultural obsession which leads to bad outcomes because root problems cannot be tackled when burying facts and deflecting responsibility reigns.
2
So based on these arguments in Europe, the US should not have sent troop during WWI as it was an outbreak of that deadly flue that was a true pandemic. Maybe we should have just staid home and taken care of our own sick and allowed WWI to end the British Empire and allow the Austrian Empire to control Europe.
Isolationism is always bad. It does not protect anyone, it only deepens tribalism.
5
To take an ancillary positive view of a potentially horrendous situation with supply chains seriously interrupted:
Perhaps people will figure out that they don't actually need a lot of the STUFF they feel they can't possibly live without, such as ahi steaks, the latest gadget, or a new car.
Perhaps people will figure out that the globalized economic model that brings them all their can't-do-without STUFF, also means they are dependent on foreign sources for stuff they actually do need, such as many medicines and medical supplies, a supply chain out of our control.
Perhaps people will figure out that if they lessened their consumption of all the latest STUFF, it would do much to lessen anthropogenic global warming, more than the feel-good banning of plastic straws for instance. ["Dramatic fall in China pollution levels ‘partly related’ to coronavirus"; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/01/dramatic-fall-in-china-pollution-levels-partly-related-to-coronavirus]
Perhaps I'm just doing you-know-what into the wind.
No, make that likely.
5
Douglas Preston, in his book, "The Lost City of the Monkey God," writes: "Pathogens have no boundaries; they are the ultimate travelers; they go wherever there's a human fuel. We First Worlders have become far too complacent in the idea that disease...can be quarantined to the Third World, and that we can live safely in our communities supposedly gated against pathogens, ignoring the poor and sick in faraway lands." He adds, "This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth." In truth, the entire world is a cruise ship and we are all passengers.
3
@CABOT And despite the alarmism nonsense, people are living longer, with less threat of disease than ever before in history. I'll take progress over cowering, and free market progress will respond faster and better than those who play on fears and increase authority over our lives.
@CABOT
So true and scary at the same time
The Black Death, also thought to be an export of East Asia traveled the along the Silk Road and on the back of rats on merchant ships. This plague whether it's origins were in the East and traveled West or vice-versus was a by-product of the global trade of that time. Economically no country should have all of it's eggs in one basket. The United States should not be entirely dependent on any one country for the medicines and material needed for survival.
5
@Patrick Yes, but having all eggs in one basket is what the anti-trade people want, to put all back in the USA as isolationism has ever worked out for any country that's tried it. The reality is we're safer and better off today than ever in history, and that's with billions more people than prior economies needed to support.
1
@Patrick You're absolutely right we are far to dependent on China, but this coronavirus hit companies where it hurts, their stock prices and their prices. The only good thing that will come out of this is that companies will diversify their supply chain and pull some factories out of China, because quite frankly the chances of another outbreak coming from China are very high. They'll keep doing the same thing so we should expect similar results
1
Peter, thanks for article and Ian's "Butterfly" book, but there's variance:
Xi already has a ‘Great Wall’ — so it’s predictable that our own Emperor Trump will misuse this well researched article to argue (on Twitter of course) for not just a ‘Greater Great Wall’ but for the ‘Greatest Great Wall’ in this entire World — which ‘His Greaterness’ already thinks he is not just Emperor of America, but Emperor of the whole World.
However, Xi’s “acting like an Emperor” is already causing some of the progressive and True Men out of his administration to speak-out against the whole concept of Empire (and Emperors) — which maybe, just maybe, will start a peaceful people’s global “Political/economic & social(ist) Revolution Against Empire” either here, there, or everywhere, which is what ‘we people of the world’ really need now in this Globalized World for people to vote for ‘global democracy’ over Global Empire!
As Xu Zhiyong recently and bravely said in China and which Bernie is similarly shouting-out here:
“True Men” had come forward to defend it. Now, Xu Zhiyong was pointing out caustically to Mr. Xi:
“How can you expect there to be a ‘True Man’ when you, The Revered One, sit at the pinnacle with millions fawning at the foot of your throne? Autocracy encourages sycophants to crowd around the Emperor, but this particular Emperor’s new clothes are on full display for all to see. Yet, even now, the people of China dare not ‘comment inappropriately’ about what is in front of them."
3
@Alan MacDonald Given what we've seen happening in the US with Trump et al, the US in not exempt or far behind on this trajectory either.
2
so, we are going to try to unring a bell?
2
Trump wins again! A media induced fear based virtual wall. He literally built the wall.
1
Those jobs ARE coming back!
1
@skyfiber That would be for all the young folks who feel strongly they are being denied their birthright of a job that pays $30 an hour on days when they are kind of inclined to show up?
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
3
@CNNNNC
Okay so what did Obama do when markets were in meltdown...bailout the rich and made them whole.
1
The big take-away here should be the classic "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Relying on a single source of product leaves you vulnerable in any disruption of that source.
Preppers have recognized this weakness for a very long time, smiling knowingly through all those put-downs and jokes.
4
@B Dawson
I doubt it...greedy shareholders will always push corporations source to cheapest locations if not in good times but definitely when markets turn. Its a nice idea though.
2
What is most concerning to me in regards to globalization that has been brought to light about this outbreak is that our production base has been so gutted that we do not have the capacity to produce needed supplies (ie face masks) ourselves, and china is hoarding them out of necessity.
There is something to be said for domestic production beyond just jobs.
13
As if we need more evidence - check out today's piece on NPR.org
"Not Enough Face Masks Are Made In America To Deal With Coronavirus" - which details how vulnerable we are when our medical supplies are produced outside of this country.
6
@Nothing To Report Here
Even if face masks were being made in America prior to this virus, I would bet we would still face the same shortage because to ramp up production you need time, people, parts, infrastructure/distribution etc...just look at Toyota plant in Tokyo, they're halting car production because they couldn't get key parts from China.
1
Globalization is the bogeyman today and tomorrow it will be nationalization and domestic sourcing. The pendulum swings to-and-fro. We’ve always understood the risks associated with outsourcing and single-sourcing but were too blinded by the economic payout to choose a more robust course.
6
@Peabody
Agreed- very good perspective. Everybody wants to paint this "us vs them" or "win/lose" narrative but its really about short-term/long term mindset pertaining to governance. Our Fed government continues to fail the American people by outsourcing country governance to multi-corporations.
2
@Peabody -
The crashing stock market has been discounting something. It could be this.
1
At the very least, our medicine should be made in the US, you would think it’s a national security risk.
11
But but but Profit! Why was this ever allowed? American workers are decimated and only the chattering classes live well, working stupid hours at their useless jobs that devastate the planet and do nothing but profiteer.
Who asked us if we wanted NAFTA or open borders or suppressed wages or gutted public schools, while anyone with a bit of cash angles to send “their” kids to the “best” schools, if they get sick the “best” doctors.
What happened to the United States of America’s where schools were all great and so was healthcare? Uniformly, for all citizens?
2
You can see the results of globalization, outsourcing, and mass immigration in almost every city across America, particularly on the west coast...and it ain’t pretty.
Overpopulation and its accompanying environmental degradation, impoverishment, joblessness, homelessness, violence, social upheaval, pandemics...our society is strained to the limit and our coping strategies are failing.
Even from a not-so-subtle psychological perspective, globalization and mass immigration threaten our sense of community and belonging, which in turn threatens our collective mental health. This backlash is long overdue.
14
@Susanna
Europe/Western countries been globalizing since Columbus sailed out to the sea and that's how you and your kind landed in North America as emigrants/immigrants.
1
@CK
That was then and this is now. Failure to adjust to shifting circumstances has been the downfall of many a civilization and species.
2
Do right-wing nationalists realize the virus is likely spreading more by well-off travelers, including businessmen, than by an asylum seeker walking across a border?
Good grief, a doctor with respiratory symptoms went to a school gathering with kids against the advice of his own doctors. He’s tested positive. Those are the people we should fear!
19
@Jane
You mean the tens of thousands of economic migrants streaming en masse across our borders to join the over 20 million economic migrants that are already here.
5
@Susanna I'm talking about the assumption that they're automatically carriers of the virus. It's all part of the "infestation" dehumanizing narrative. Where was a largest outbreak outside of Wuhan? A cruise ship. We don't dehumanize cruise ship goers is my point.
1
@Jane
The mass influx of impoverished foreign nationals illegally streaming across our borders without end is ruinous to the well-being of our country and our citizenry....health-wise, economically, socially, politically, and environmentally calamitous...no matter how you try to spin it.
1
The national identities of large European countries have historically been defined by common language and religion which led to common history and customs. Wars have been fought for centuries over these identities. Why do we think this will change in the historically brief period since WW2? It certainly didn't in the serbo-croatian realm.
Trying to apply an American (itself a pipe dream) paradigm of "melting pot" has denied this fact. This leads to the polarization that results in "extreme" right wing populism, in Europe and here. Many other parts of the world don't even lose sleep over it.
We have to get to a point where we can have these conversations without vilifying the individual who is afraid of losing his/her "frenchness, italianity, americanism" etc.
While highly simplified, denigrating them as deplorable resulted in Trump here....
11
I am 51 years old- and I can tell you from decades of experience of American life that the melting pot was working.
We used to all just be American.
This reignitement of division into groups was purposefully engineered. We even stopped designating color first when talking about others- it was awkward but the whole nation was doing this.
Everyone wants to be on tv with a “platform”, discussing the grievances of their “group”.
Most of us just want to be Americans again.
4
This land has always been multi cultural. Always.
Washing hands thoroughly and disinfecting surfaces are included in the widespread guidance on ridding covid19 from environments. I heard this advice reiterated on Amanpour & Co by Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, an infectious disease expert at Columbia University who is fresh out of quarantine after traveling to China, where he was studying the coronavirus outbreak.
My question therefore is what about the surfaces of millions of products being unpacked by consumers who buy them from retailers, who in turn source them from factories overseas? Surely a small but deadly proportion of these may have passed through infected environments overseas. Doesn’t covid19, which as a virus is not a living organism, survive inside packaging and surfaces being shipped around the world?
4
“People will always want to travel. They will always want to trade. The answer is not to again build walls. You need more cooperation and clear information.”
Yes, fine. But, under the circumstances, a little discipline would seem in order. Here, within our own borders, we may not want to impose regional quarantines, as China and Italy have done. But shouldn't we have some consideration for people in other countries? Can't we postpone unnecessary international travel until the coronavirus has run its course? Can't that overseas vacation wait a while?
14
When it comes to mission critical commodities such as drugs, the US should be entirely self-sufficient with regard to those commodities and the raw materials required for their manufacture. It should be apparent at this point that any other path is perilous. We should no longer allow Corporate America to endanger our nation by obtaining critical commodities and raw materials from other countries, other than reliable partner nations such as Canada, just to increase corporate revenue.
13
Quality comment. Bit didn’t trump designate Canada as some sort of security threat vis a vis steel or dairy?
2
@American Do you actually pay attention to what Trump says? Besides which, he'll change his mind next week.
3
@Mike F. Agree 100% that the US needs to be self-sufficient for life-and-death items such as drugs
1
"stock markets plunge, annihilating trillions of dollars in wealth"
Theoretical wealth based on the last/highest sale of the stock in question. A mathematical fiction.
21
@josh
No need to qualify it as only a mathematical fiction. It's a pure fiction that assumes every share is worth as much as the most recent sale.
10
@josh
Something is only worth what another person is willing to pay for it. You see this in all areas of life. The stock market is a casino and we all know the "House" wins far more than they pay out.
3
Once again business has shown how short sighted they are and why stockholder management leads them off cliffs. They didn't count on the anger of those left behind in the industrialized world when jobs flew to third world countries and CEO and executive pay soared hundreds of fold. They didn't quite grasp the idea that someone needed to buy the products they were producing, and while consumer goods became cheaper, the working and middle classes were having trouble even affording cheap tvs and the like, not to mention that bankrupting the working and middle classes killed off stores and other busineses in those communities. They crow about globalization has taken a lot of people out of grinding poverty, but they also leave out it didn't put them in the middle class either, it made impoverished people merely poor.
The real problem is redundancy, companies have all kinds of contingency plans for data centers and workers working from home, the internet is redundant, but with supply chains they pretend it will do fine, is insulated, from disruptions. There is something also not being said, the same companies denying climate change and their role in it, with all this long distance shipping, are setting the seeds of their own destruction, because climate change is likely to cause more and more pandemics (the corona virus cannot be traced to climate change directs, any more than one weather even can, but data is showing that the risk is soaring as the climate changes)
6
There is no alternative to globalization and those manufacturing jobs are never coming back to the US. Moreover, as the article indicates, all of the biggest and unavoidable problems of the world actually require extensive government intervention and coordination. Globalization is here to stay and what we need is more extensive multilateralism. Of course, what that requires is more activist and engaged government and here is where reality runs head-on into the fanaticism of right wing ideology. The mantra of deregulation has created and/or exacerbated most of the problems related to globalization. In the US, globalization has been incredibly successful; what has not been successful is the abject failure of the US govt to regulate and mitigate its effects by adopting better social welfare policies and redistributing wealth. In the end, I'm not worried about the long-term prospects of globalization. I am worried about the right wing hysteria that has stymied so much of the progress and change that the world desperately needs.
6
@Shaun Narine
Oh there are may alternatives to globalization and it would be better for every country, almost all the people AND the planet if we stepped back from globalization. Think of the environmental damage of shipping corn to China to have them process it into food that gets shipped back to the US. Then let's look at countries where the IMF and World Bank put countries into so much debt that they will never pay off. These countries are forced to export food resources that used to go The People. So not only are these countries far worse off now, the people are poorer and hungry.
Our ancestors recognized how dangerous globalization was and stepped back. Colonization has been cut back by every country except for the US who keeps trying to colonize more countries.
Progress does not need globalization at all. It just needs people who can work with each other and information is freed from the chains that currently bind it.
There are certain problems that, like it or not, can only be solved with international cooperation. Threats of terrorism and climate change top that list. The coronovirus is a hard charging third.
7
@RNS
Climate is local and so is climate change. To fix the climate, it takes individual efforts, not global ones. This is why every "global" effort has failed to gain traction.
The first step is to stop shipping raw materials and goods around the globe and back. Buy locally produced foods that are sustainably grown. We can all do this without much pain or effort. Then minimize our electrical use by retrofitting our homes to Net Zero energy designs. Lastly, we need to restore historical land cover and land use and break up these metropolis areas. History shows over and over that large populations in one area are not sustainable.
2
Globalization and Amazon/Alibaba, which has greatly facilitated its growth, have contributed very little that can be considered positive.
Whether its the excessive packaging materials which are tripled with every "micro impulse" order, or the carbon from the ship-plane-truck that delivered it, or the unrecycable nature of the plastic that comes with each one. What is gained?
Now take into account the lack of EPA regulations in the countries where these goods are produced. These countries lead the world in coal and oil usage.
A typical US Tesla driver may feel they are making a difference, but they don't understand the Lithium triangle was destroyed to get the necessary element for their batteries or that the graphite (which makes up 90% of the battery) was processed in China and destroys ground water and coats everything in an oily sheen.
There are global ramifications to every innovation, every product that is sent to a country that is undergoing its "industrial revolution" without any regulation.
Will driving the electric car undo all of the emissions on the other side of the world? All that coal and oil running those factories?
probably not.
9
Anti-immigrant sentiment due to a pandemic is just irrational. It's not as if the virus is not spread by tourists, business travelers, or pretty much anyone moving around anywhere. The evidence shows up every day.
4
@N Yorker knee jerk "all our borders must be open no matter what" sentiment is also irrational. We must come up with a sane policy that protects our borders while at the same time maintaining our status as a beacon of hope. This is not easy.
What is easy is right wing hysteria about the borders being open and left wing hysteria about the borders being patrolled.
2
@N Yorker - The lawyer that had recently returned from a business trip to Italy and is now quarantined with his family in New Rochelle, New York supports your statement.
"I don’t think any wall can be high enough to keep out a pandemic, or climate change, or any of the other big threats that face humanity in the future, so I think it’s counterproductive,” Mr. Goldin said.
So ironic that this deadly global pandemic arrived in the U.S. via a luxury cruise ship.
Meanwhile Trump's great big beautiful open-air wall which has already proven to be easily penetrable and is costing the American people (not Mexico as Trump promised) $20 million per mile.
Up to January, 2019 Trump has spent 11 Billion on his wall.
This is money that could have gone to continue to fund Obama's Pandemic Response Team and avoid Trump's drastic cuts to the CDC back in 2018 so that the U.S. would be actually be prepared with critical test kits, vaccines, masks, respirators and medical supplies for a proper, and an immediate response to pandemics.
19
@JM
There were no CDC cuts.
The wall is not very important but both sides keep trying to make it more than it is. It won't stop all illegal immigration and the money spent on it is a drop in the federal budget.
@JM - It arrived in New York on a jet plane returning from Italy.
1
I thought everyone, including myself, was pretty addicted to $300 tv sets and laptops... not sure everyone had thought this through
14
Conservatives have become gas lighting abusers. In relationships gas lighters always blame the other person for any wrong they have done. They also isolate them from everyone else to gain greater control. If they do anything good, right or healthy they degrade them.
Moderates need to stop hanging out on the fence and choose. This has to end. We need people in power who will hold illegal actions and corruption accountable. No more worrying about the donors who fund both sides.
6
Big business, and I mean really big business, sitting on a pile of cash will be fine. Smaller businesses may falter due to lack of capital and the inability to compete when faced with locating a new global supplier.
How did this happen? Big business and politicians. When Nixon opened up trade with China it was done so with huge lobbying by Coca-Cola and the like. So for 50 years now we’ve allowed big business to call these shots to the detriment of our wages.
Standing up to this and dismantling global supply chains is a big order. Big business may have the cash for this but they cannot know all the pitfalls. I suspect we’ll see more businesses throw in the towel before the end of this.
5
Globalization is the only thing that will save people from epidemics. By trading medical supplies and sharing information openly, it makes it much easier to combat the spread of illness.
The entity that created the coronavirus isn’t globalization, it’s authoritarianism. If China had embraced a platform of transparency and responsibility instead of paranoia and information suppression, it probably never would have spread past Wuhan.
But China was so focused on crushing the truth in order to save face, which backfired spectacularly in predictable fashion, they exposed themselves and the rest of the world to a novel virus that devastated their economy.
Globalization could have saved us from this pandemic. Authoritarians and nationalists are causing it to spread.
10
@Austin Ouellette
Globalization was never about "sharing information".
If China was as authoritarian as you claim, they would have enforced the bans on wild game markets in the first place. They would have allowed anyone to leave Wuhan, including foreigners.
The virus spread so quickly not because of China's actions, but because of the meek response of the international community.
In Dec/Jan, the first public statements from officials and the media was racism against the Asian community because sales were down at Asian markets and restaurants.
When profits and being "racist" are you first concerns, that's a problem.
3
@Viv
China isn’t authoritarian? Interesting take. Kinda gotta ignore the whole millions of Uighur Muslim people who were snatched from their homes and families and put into indoctrination and forced labor centers.
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with following laws. In an authoritarian regime, laws are completely arbitrary. They are literally meaningless. The only thing that matters in an authoritarian regime is power. Those with power can do whatever they want. Those without power are at the mercy of those with the power.
5
Gee, why don’t you just connect the dots. Adolf Hitler called “degenerate” humans a virus, to be expelled from society. Is that where this is going? A metaphor in reverse?
3
As noted: US stock markets are often criticized for their fixation on the very short run at the cost of a more inclusive long-run perspective. With regard to speed, the ease which with the coronavirus spreads creates environmental conditions that exceed even the market's short-run fixation.
Warren Buffett states that he did not heavily invest in IT firms during the tech boom, which ended in 2000, because he refused to invest in any business that he does not acutely understand. Similarly, those nations that survive the coronavirus most robustly, may be those nations whose leaders and citizens are most prescient and acutely aware of the biology underlying this exponentially expanding virus. As a result, public health programs may be more vigorously honored by these citizens.
To "bet the ranch" on the quick, short-run development of a vaccine may be the least disruptive national strategy, but it is very risky. And, in cost/benefit terms, such a bet may or may not pay off.
Perhaps a global reprioritization of industrial nations as reliable business partners, is underway.
[03/05/2020 Thurs. 10:35 am Greenville NC]
2
Check in with North America's First Nations on this question, re. early waves of globalization (1492), smallpox, etc.
8
You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle after you let her out. Globalization is here to stay.
4
Immigration policy is not about keeping them out or letting them in. It is about deciding how many and which ones to let it. Similarly with manufacturing, it is not about closing the borders and being 100% self sufficient, it is about controlling the pace, making sure that we can make what we need here if we have to. It is also about having enough for our workforce to do, and get paid to do it.
Such arguments do not lend themselves to effective sound bites, so we end up talking about whether globalism and trade protectionism are good or bad and voting for one or against the other.
They are both good and bad, necessary and disruptive. As a sovereign nation, we have the right and obligation to adjust the mix in our own best interest. As a political democracy we have the right and obligation to wrest that decision from those who simply profit by it, and make decisions that help the greatest number of Americans have a decent life.
15
@mlbex
"help the greatest number of Americans have a decent life."....
Actually, free and open markets have essentially done that. The problem arises when our "democracy" is not as democratic as one may believe and where power and decision making is indirectly apportioned to too few. We can do much better considering the extent of our enormous Federal budget and what we currently spend, as a nation, on healthcare and other programs.
5
@Charles: Those free and open markets have created the situation where "decision making is indirectly apportioned to too few". Like globalism and immigration, the argument is not whether they should exist (they will anyway) it is about who should manage them and to what ends.
Without government intervention, extreme concentration of wealth is the natural endpoint of (so called) free markets. But something controls every market; the question in my mind is "free from what?" Free from manipulation and monopoly? Free from regulation crafted by corporate lobbyists? Free from intentionally misinformed persuasion?
If the definition of "free markets" is "let us run the markets for our ends, and quit interfering", then you are simply swapping government intervention for corporate control. At least the government pretends to be democratic.
4
Rather than cowering in our enclosed basement shelters, perhaps more globalized health care is in order.
5
Let's remember that the worst pandemics in history happened long before globalization. It's a mistake to think that globalization somehow enables the pandemics--it just speeds up the spread. And let's not forget that it is also globalization that allows for an international, rapid response to it if it is well coordinated and cooperative. The great irony in the misguided promotion of reducing globalization would be that we would be reducing our ability to address global threats like the Coronavirus or climate change.
7
We should also recognize the shipping costs inherent in the global supply chain, all of which are carbon-based and contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. None of the consequential environmental and social costs are priced into the cost of the materials and goods. We need more localization and a paring back of globalization.
6
Regions will need to adapt and adopt features that allow a disconnect from globalization if only for short term. All of a sudden the old Venetian model of mooring a ship from elsewhere for a mandatory 40 days because of a 37 day plague incubation period seem sensible.
It's not just because of a likely multiplicity of future pandemics but also things like turning off the electric grid under unfavorable weather as our climate changes.
Do we need to manufacture everything in our own backyard ? Probably not but it's a simple reality that there are plenty of adversaries both internal and external who don't necessarily have the interests of the majority Paramount. We will need to assure we can bar business with adversaries incapable of respecting our needs. Is that China ?? So far the Party of Power as they now refer to themselves as have little regard for our welfare and openly propagandize our decline and their rise. Those that threaten us and are acquiring the means to pursue such a goal need to be viewed as enemies and treated accordingly.
It was my distinct recollection that Nixon's purported rationale for engaging China was to "civilize " their society via capitolism and industrial revolution. Maybe Reagan took that to rooting out the "commies" from american labor even if it meant our own deindustrialization, nevertheless the exercise kinda appears flawed.
We have a whole lot of work ahead of us.
5
Does anyone sense that our president might attempt to cancel the 2020 election because of coronavirus? Especially if the polls show him losing?
By November, all those throngs of people standing in line to vote on a chilly Autumn day would surely be an excuse to (permanently) postpone the election.
The president's extreme compassion and concern for the health of America would certainly outweigh the necessity of an archaic exercise like voting.
I am sure all true-blooded republicans would support this (even moreso if their control of the senate could be lost).
And, after his Supreme Court backs this presidential decision, then what?
7
@Immy Probably not a good idea to have all those internal flights with senators and congressmen flying from all over the country to DC. So best to shut down congress as well, Trump can rule just fine by executive order.
3
@Immy - This president ( whose name will not be said) said the Virus would dissipate with the arrival of the warm weather and Spring. We only need to be vigilant for a few more weeks.
@Patrick So I guess that means the virus will dissipate first in warm places like California and Arizona, and last where I live (Maine).
The world is interconnected now in a way it never has been in the past. This event will not change that, unless Boeing , Airbus, Microsoft, Apple, etc. all decide to completely abandon their current business models and go into new lines of business.
No, information and people criss-cross the world every second of the day, 365 days of the year. Today it is far easier to do business with people in other parts of the world than ever before. Some may wish for the days when local economies meant a village or a parish but that's long gone.
Times have a changed folks, it's the world we live in.
Globalization, including H1B Visa, educational institutions, VC, and private equity, has killed most opportunities for most Americans in the tech world. It has ONLY benefited corporations and over ambitious politicians. There is no shortage of talent.
16
I’ll start taking right wing politicians / pundits seriously when they put their money where there mouth is. Pull money out of the stock market and invest in building jobs in local communities. That isn’t going to happen, they love the big returns from globalization.
9
Globalization itself is not a choice. How it shakes out is. Bucky Fuller outlined a choice between "Utopia or Oblivion" that touched many of the issues that we are facing. He also said that we would make the choices in the 70s that would determine the outcome. Be afraid.
3
Today I read about the virus surfacing in a NYC public school, targeting both a teacher and a handful of students.
It was all anonymous.
Far from being a sensationalist, I don't understand how New Yorkers are supposed to go about their daily business with no idea where the school is located.
Suppose we are in close proximity to the school every day? Suppose we pick up kids for or from an after school program in that very building?
The policy of anonymity is harmful to the rest of the New Yorkers trying to steer clear of the virus.
6
@Studiozazu duo not argue with the great and powerful Oz.
@Studiozazu
Here's how you go about your daily business: wash your hands with soap and water 5 times a day.
Keep your hands clean and your clothes clean.
If you get a cold, or don't feel well, stay home, rest and make yourself some hot chicken broth. It's common sense behavior people should be practicing on a daily basis.
What we all need is a "Keep Calm and Carry On" t-shirt. The Coronavirus is very, very survivable, especially if you catch it early. Not to minimize the tragedy, but the people most at risk are ones who already had severe respiratory issues. Otherwise, it is very mild and can be dealt with by good care, bed rest, and self-quarantining for a couple of weeks. We'd do better reacting to this outbreak by aggressively pushing good healthcare for EVERYONE, not by panicking like this and having the knee jerk reaction of shutting everything down. C'mon Joe or Bernie, here's your opportunity to show the country how to be Presidential, unlike the current King of knee jerk reactions, our 45th President, who is just making the problem worse.
6
@Brannon Perkison
Sorry, but there are two known forms of Covid-19. One is far deadlier than the other, and explains why so many health 30-something people died.
Since Joe believes in "compromise", not sure what you expect from him in regards to healthcare. People either have access to healthcare or they don't. Being in a pandemic changes nothing. There is no middle ground there.
Why has the Pentagon not raised a warning about the U.S. having to import crucial medicines from China?
And if they have, why have our Presidents and Congress not listened, for the past two decades ?
Shouldn’t we have legislation requiring that all important medicines be made in the U.S. ?
Isn’t this a matter of national security at all times ? Not just in pandemics, but just in case there is any military crisis?
19
How would manufacturing in the United States constitute
"abandoning China " ?
Does Mr. Goodman believe that the U.S. has an obligation to support China, and the practice of paying workers slave wages, while forcing them to work under inhumane conditions ?
Mr. Goodman need not fear the return of manufacturing to the United States. Manufacturing is not going to return to the United States unless and until the playing field is leveled such that those who manufacture in the U. S. could compete with those who manufacture in China.
7
@DJS Why can't Americans envision manufacturing even if its in an "automated" way.
It might not be 10,000 jobs, maybe 2000 humans with machines working assembling things.
But to become entirely dependent on a foreign, antagonistic, country is a huge risk. At any point in time they can "shut off the tap".
They just did that with respect to ingredients for pharmaceuticals.
5
@DJS
Well to start with, rightwingers harnessing the virus for political gane by claiming it will bring back jobs to the U.S. aren't serious about the issue, there'll always be an economic issue that they'll blame on other countries and not do anything serious about it since that would get rid of a scapegoat and make their backers profits go down.
Ugh.
Our insatiable desire for “more” and “cheaper” is what’s causing many of the issues we’re facing. They were simply exposed by Covid-19. Poor planning was masked by overnight shipping and on-demand production.
And no physical wall or nativist politics will prevent a virus. That’s not how this works.
19
Well, fewer goods made in China is always a good thing.
16
@Adams7
Not if they are then to be made in sweatshops in Vietnam and Bangladesh.
It's about time we and the NYT started calling them right wing instead of conservatives.
12
@pb
Yes. Stop letting the Right change the definitions of all the words. You can't win an argument using their definitions, and letting them ignore science, facts, math, and logic.
1
How long have 'we' simply acquiesced to the choices made by men such as the late Jack Welch, privileged arrogant men immersed in the self-image of their greatness, who saw the world and still do in terms of stock prices, period. All this mess stems from their rule, their patriarchy, their egotistical ongoing dominance in industries, governments, decision making entities everywhere. Privileged men who decry such a label, minions who deny such things exist, but know enough to want to keep it all intact.
10
Current right-wing parties are molded on the fascist parties of the 1930's and 40's, and obviously don't understand that borders are now global, no world economy survives without trade or commerce with other countries. The right wing surge is due mainly to the world immigrant problem, created by long devastating wars like the Syrian, or corruption and out of control crime like in Central America.
The world does need a new path, face those who instigate the wars, corruption and crime, combat climate change, but together as a planet, the right wingers isolationism is the worst possible solution.
4
The cornavirus is an. example of what has been happening in the wild environment for decades. Decimating wild populations. If is our turn now to know what happens with a disturbed environment and overpopulation.
8
The corona virus didn't seep out of China, it leaped out. And globalization sounds so much more benign than rampant, unfettered capitalism.
Trump's trade war, wall building, immigration poisoning ,1930's German tactics toward central American and Mexican asylum seekers, the creation of an 'enforcement ICE with loaded weapons descending on sanctuary cities to remove the undocumented. All political, playing to the very fears that ultimately create a fascist state. And the only certainty , should we reach that goal, all but a precious few will be very sorry to have arrived at that state.
There are problems the Globalization, by it's very nature create.Millions of people in dozens of countries are left behind in desperate situations. Wars create great wealth and leave behind only misery. To stop migrations of undesirable people building a wall or passing a law to keep the wretched out will never work.And neither will having gated communities within gated communities within a gated country.
4
Massive public support behind right wing anti immigrant phenomena across western countries are understandable. But the cure of it is not acceptable to the same group as causes of it remain outside the awareness of this group . The immigration is a function of violence, insecurity ,fear and not of poverty . West can’t stop destroying Honduras ,El Salvador - sources of migrants .Migrants don’t pour out of Nicaragua or Belize or Costa Rica. War in ME often supported by these countries opposing immigrations have caused the social dislocation . Anti war demonstration is not a very popular activity in any of these countries opposing most aggressively
illegal immigration . Not only that, their countries have often entered into these wars , overt or covert without qualms or public resistance
As long as globalization has served the interests ,public have mostly remained receptive including even the 19 th century concept of “ opening Japan and China for business “ being applied to rest of the 3 rd world countries . But the same public is very sensitive to the changes and is opposed to any otherwise inevitable changes in the realm of social environmental economic contexts that business,contacts,travel and transfer of technologies introduce .
It is an expression of collective dishonesty and invalid claim of victimhood that have sought shelter in the right wing resurgence for acceptance and validation .
2
@KAH : there is no war in Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala. There is no famine there. There is no natural disaster there, like an earthquake. There is no religious discrimination or ethnic cleansing there.
They are purely economic migrants, and when asked....most state this very directly. THEY WANT OUR JOBS (and social services).
1
There is a vital silver lining here. Be it corona virus or climate crisis, real solutions to supply and demand will surge from local regional based exchange. Developing direct community oriented commerce independent of extensive shipping and international resources is key to sustainable business going forward.
Many creatures molt their skin to accommodate change. Our accepted mode of consumer/shareholder priorities will molt. Count on it.
8
@Que Viva! I agree. I also think prices will be going up. I've gotten quotes for goods locally that I ended up ordering from Alibaba for literally 1/20 the price, including import fees, etc. That being said, I think Americans should be willing to pay a little bit more for locally produced goods. Easier said than done with an ever-shrinking middle class in this consumer economy.
4
@Jason Yeah, its been the consumers good life for some years, but Pacha Mama is going to make corrections because all of this cheap commercial "convenience" is causing a vicious biological demise at untold cost to the livng planet who, in response, is unleashing an unholy elemental storm to rebalance the bio-sphere. This may seem to be an "out-there" perspective, but I dare say, give a few years and these words will be common ground. Really, we need to have more consideration for this beautiful energy that sustains us here. It just seems cruel to so brutally destroy such a masterpiece - this endless glorious expression of the creators love - within a few hundred years , or one quick virus-driven death in the great scheme of things. Is this dark acheivement really something to be proud of? Is the denial of raping the planet and subsequent natural disasters acceptable to make a few more bucks, or is it a heinous crime at some level? Anyone else clearly see this? Cheers!
2
Jason, right. But the high cost of things which now disables folks from living more humanistic lives is generated nationally from the now high costs of food, medicine, insurance, utililities, networks, schemes, rip-offs, taxes and credit - each one an insideous vampire for the money of working people. What's the surprise? This wild feast will reach deletion soon. Justice prevails!
This has nothing to do with globalization and everything to do with calling out cultures that eat things which are known vectors for novel viruses.
11
This virus was caused by the increase in nationalism over the last few years which destroyed international trust and cooperation and created a situation where our government substitutes border restrictions for science-based public health measures. In this sense, the coronavirus is similar to the Spanish Flu, which occurred because globalization broke down in World War I making countries more interested in fighting each other than cooperating to fight the disease. These outbreaks don’t occur when globalization is functioning well and information is shared and cooperation takes place across borders. And if current trends continue where the outbreak comes under control in China but expands elsewhere, the world will be glad that China has the capacity to produce a lot of supplies quickly and cheaply.
3
@jaco
Well, the scientists at the World Health Organization did recommend monitoring but no restrictions on travel or trade.
Our nationalist leaders decided to treat this as a yellow peril problem and restrict the borders with China (but not with Italy, even though there are more new cases spread in Italy than China now), while not engaging in any domestic monitoring thus failing to catch the first cases. While the less nationalist government in Canada has used monitoring instead of any travel restrictions and they are not experiencing community transmission than we are.
Basically our nationalist government’s response to this virus would have been like responding to a crime wave that is disproportionately caused by black people by putting a curfew on all black people instead of trying to identify targeting the actual criminals—a strategy that both violated human rights and is less effective at stopping the problem.
It’s notable that this outbreak is happening while many countries have gone in a nationalist direction, while previous outbreaks did not expand like this when the world is more globalized. It’s just like how the Spanish Flu happened in 1918, when World War I had ended the first age of globalization, and not in say 1908 when most countries were at peace and had open borders. I don’t think this is a coincidence.
1
@HO If you have ever been to the Milan, Malpensa airport, you would be aware of the large numbers of direct flights from China that land there.
Sure it has spread to Italy, but that is because they also part of the globalized world with direct links to China.
The textile and leather industries are full of illegal workers from China.
Blocking travelers from Italy is warranted, but let's not pretend the origin of cov-19 is not China.
3
We don't realize our contradictions. As capitalists we want to produce goods at the lowest price to maximize profit. The thinking is by making goods where labor is cheap we are helping those communities. We don't think about disruptions in that society, and the communities that have lost their manufacturing base. Economists, like scientists, tend to think in terms of stable uniform results. Unfortunately, social forces do not necessarily play out as planned from the top.
The increased emphasis on globalism and homogeneity while undermining values of a given society by global do-gooders often causes more disruptions.
What we need is a balance between nationalism and globalism, and the speed at which globalism is thrust down the throats of people by global elites.
6
Globalism is necessary to organizing the response to this, and nationalist responses will hurt us all.
Globalism is also being used as a scapegoat for bad planning. For example, our current shortage of masks has everything to do with the explosive increase in demand, along with no willingness to have paid for a public health reserve. It has little or nothing with whether the masks are "American-made".
4
How foolish! A corporate wall is as useless for preventing global pandemics as a physical wall is.
Global coordination is the crucial answer, not a short term moat around each nation to protect supply chains.
OK- maybe a little diversification is wise, a little less cost cutting at all costs by out sourcing to save a penny on labor costs.
But it was fracking that saved America from dependence on Middle east oil but caused earthquakes in Oklahoma and poisoned ground water...the real solution must balance profiteering, national isolation with environmental & global good.
5
@Sara, agreed. Immigrants aren't bringing diseases on cruise ships.
6
We need global solutions, not global lockdown.
13
The simplest example that people are currently freaking out about is face mask production.
Almost all fave masks and I believe all N95 masks and higher are made in China. Many of those factories have slowed production AND China has forced all current output of masks to remain in China for their use until further notice. Hence the shortage.
2
The US is odd man out. Other countries from Sweden to Germany to the Netherlands to France to Vietnam to Japan to Canada to Costa Rica all depend on foreign trade (in goods and services including tourism) to maintain employment, income levels and consumption patterns. Only the US derives a minority share of income from interactions with other countries, and that minority share would shrink to virtual insignificance if arms sales to nasty foreign states like Saudi Arabia were pulled out of the mix. The US, unlike England or Australia or Canada does not depend on foreign food production nor (any more) on foreign oil. So the US can go all nativist, roil in populists and xenophobes, build walls, etc. but no one else can (or would want to). The openness, diversity and welcoming of immigrants and refugees have actually strengthened the EU and Canada, for example. Globalization must include the movement of people as well as goods and services. In contrast, closed societies like Japan have been seriously harmed, despite being globalized in other respects. Japanese-style decline won't happen in the US because unskilled labour and skilled immigrants will continue to pour into the country, despite anti-foreign sentiment. Hollywood, American universities, much of the agricultural and service sectors, and the IT industry would dry up and blow away without them. England, if it continues recklessly to drive wedges between itself and Europe, will be a worse case than rapidly declining Japan.
5
@Cephalus Most organizations, CDC WHO, are wondering what the effects of cov-19 will be in Africa.
How receptive will the European countries be to illegal immigrants originating from the African continent if/when there is an outbreak there?
Its a real concern. This is why you have border control, checking for invasive plants, or pork contaminated with African Swine flu (NJ port authority) or people who are traveling while sick.
You have the potential to affect not just your home country but cause ramifications across the globe.
Globalization has brought nothing but misery and oligarchy to developed countries. About time it be reversed.
Production of prescription drugs in India, China and the like is simply INSANE. We do not feed our dogs anything made in those countries but we are taking drugs made there? Really? Why, because our elected officials are in the pocket of the oligarchs?
Vote for Warren or Sanders, not for someone in the pocket of the oligarchs.
11
@CacaMera There is a very interesting article about an Indian pharmaceutical company that was paid money by the Clinton Foundation to produce drugs to treat HIV to be distributed in Africa.
The drugs were nothing more than a placebo.
How criminal of an act is that? Faking the efficacy of a drug and handing sugar pills to individuals that think they are being helped?
1
Against open borders?
You got that right!!
Bring those "livable wage" jobs home.
13
@DAWGPOUND HAR, to be automated.
1
@Leonard they may be automated but someone has to:
A) Built them
B) Installed them
C) Maintain them
D Replace them.
See.
2
@Leonard
It is one thing to lose your job to a machine because the machine is more efficient than you. It is quite another to get replaced by a machine because it gets a tax cut, subsidized by your taxes.
Markets don't need Capitalism.
Capitalism is not markets. Capitalism is when government keeps doing favors for the owners of Capital at the expense of everyone else.
We don't need Capitalism, Socialsm, Authoritarianism or Anarchism.
We need fair markets carefully regulated by or democratic Constitutional Republic, so that all businesses, workers, and consumers see a level playing field. We need to protect workers, industries, and the environment.
It may be that jobs are not going to low wage countries as fast as they used to. That doesn't mean it didn't happen for decades.
2
We're all so fabulously wealthy and content. Please, please more globalization.
"Sleep with dogs you're going to get fleas," I was once told.
China out of the WTO now.
6
The plague came from Asia and killed a third, or so, of Europeans in 1348. No amount of deglobalization is going to protect us from "foreign" germs. I doubt this particular virus will kill nearly as many as opium and methamphetamine. Focus on creating a sane medical system.
18
This is about a corporate mispricing of risk.
The price of a product is fixed and known. But risk in procuring a product varies and can only be estimated.
Supply chain managers therefore tend to buy from China or similar countries based on price, without estimating the risk. They simply make assumptions about the security and stability of the supply chain.
This is changing. They must now accurately factor in a range of risks from purchasing overseas, including disruptions such as the current viral outbreak.
They will mitigate the risk by buying insurance and/or increasing inventory and/or producing in less risky locations. All of this adds cost.
We are re-learning the age old wisdom…nothing is free.
15
@John
Yes, global billionaires and their global corporations think that democracy and following the Constitution has a higher risk for them than if we let them do what ever they want, whenever they want.
They are mistaken.
2
Virus and germs do not know national borders. It's time for many of the readers of this article to study some epidemiological history. You might want to begin by reading John Barry's terrific book, "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History" about the Spanish flu of 1918. The US had a much smaller economy, most production was domestic, and still millions contracted the disease and 200,000 Americans died. If anything what epidemics teach us is that we need closer international coordination.
12
@historyprof
That disease was incubated and spread by WWI.
But that doesn't contradict your main point.
Free enterprise naturally embraces globalization as it embraced inter-city trade before that. Some disasters are mitigated by international trade. Some supply chains are more durable from globalization.
Foreign governments are often corrupt and self serving, rarely trustworthy and that is the essence of Trump's appeal in this area. I support negotiating what can be negotiated but the vision of self sufficiency is the vision of global poverty.
3
The irony of the "backlash against globalization" is that as nations (formerly known as tribal groups) turn inward and cease to cooperate across borders, infectious diseases will probably spread even more efficiently without international cooperation.
4
@Maggie
Will that stop the flu? The common cold?
@Mathias Funding scientific research into understanding infectious disease origins, biology and pharmacotherapy will eliminate these diseases as a serious problem for human health and economic well-being.
1
A resilient, well-designed system has both firewalls and redundancy. Modern ships are built with bulkheads that can be sealed so that a leak in one part of the hull does not flood and ultimately sink the entire ship; the need for redundancy and firewalls was learnt over the centuries from many painful lessons.
Globalism 1.0 undermines both firewalls and redundancy, so it it is inherently fragile. This crisis has exposed and made clear to anyone paying attention its soft underbelly.
The challenge will be to reform the system and the thinking behind it to something more sustainable, because that will mean some people not getting as rich as quickly as they are under the current system. Basically, the same reason climate policy domestically and internationally is a shambles.
So not encouraging.
18
A resilient, well-designed system has both firewalls and redundancy. Modern ships are built with bulkheads that can be sealed so that a leak in one part of the hull does not flood and ultimately sink the entire ship; the need for redundancy and firewalls was learnt over the centuries from many painful lessons.
Globalism 1.0 undermines both firewalls and redundancy, so it it is inherently fragile. This crisis has exposed and made clear to anyone paying attention its soft underbelly.
The challenge will be to reform the system and the thinking behind it to something more sustainable, because that will mean some people not getting as rich as quickly as they are under the current system. Basically, the same reason climate policy domestically and internationally is a shambles.
So not encouraging.
7
Who do you trust to provide the phamaceutical components we may need in an international emergency, Beijing, or Baltimore? Kaifeng, or Kansas? Guangdong, or Grand Rapids,? Case closed, things gotta change.
32
" Trump was ordering companies to abandon China and make their goods in American factories." ?!
I hadn't been aware that Trump had ORDERED companies to manufacture in the United States, while if that is correct, how would that have constituted "Abandoning China "?
I can't stand Donald Trump. & I agree with Trump on NOTHING other than regarding the imposition of tariffs on China, while tariffs should have been imposed on imports many decades ago. The United States failed to impose tariffs on the countries which imposed tariffs on goods that were manufactured in the United States. The imposition of tariffs and trade restrictions on countries which imposed tariffs and trade restrictions on goods that are manufactured would not have constituted fair trade practices, not nationalism.
The failure to institute fair trading policies was unfair to those who manufactured in the United States, and resulted in may manufactures moving their plants to China and to other countries where workers are paid slave wages and are forced to work under inhumane and dangerous conditions that were made illegal the U.S. following the Triangle Waistshirt Company fire, in which hundreds of factory workers were killed .
The majority of American manufactures moved their factories to China. The result was the dependency on China, which has resulted in the U.S. finding itself in the situation in which it finds itself today, in terms of Coronavirus .
I
8
@DJS, I think I do remember some hullabaloo over "ordering" companies to leave China. Probably over Twitter. Certainly as empty posturing for his supporters.
2
We have to blame somebody I suppose but events like this do not have borders. Last I looked we are all spinning around on the same ball out in the middle of space. Here now, change places with China in 12 hours. Once it gets into the air, game over. Same as a cloud of dust from a volcano or nuclear accident. Everybody everywhere is at risk.
3
The national security risk involved in having so many of our essential items made in China to take advantage of the cheap labor has always concerned me.
21
@EJS
China is turning out to be a rather *costly* trading partner. It steals our intellectual property and infects our citizens with a virus. Perhaps it should spend less time stealing and more time on protecting its own citizens.
How it treats its own citizens is indicative of how it treats everyone else in the world, including its primary trading partners.
17
Any EU country can decide to close its 'open borders' on the basis of its own assessment of public health risk - as it can on the basis of national security.
The Austria/Italy border was closed nearly one week ago for the purposes of corona containment.
It's only the haters that want you to believe that Europe struggles undeer an unfair and unacceptable tyranny of imposed open borders.
7
I knew the party was over when Portland OR could no longer ship our garbage, er, "recyclables," to China for processing. The lie, the fantasy, of endless outsourcing, is over.
45
The corona virus will eventually turn up on our border with Mexico. I hope that California is making preparations to care for and house thousands who will flee Mexico to seek free, high quality medical care in the US. Democrats have a golden opportunity to make their charity to persons in the US illegally, a campaign issue. I’m sure that Democrats won’t say “don’t let them in”.
12
@Rock Winchester Sick people in need of help? As a Humanist, I certainly wouldn't say "don't let them in."
1
@Rock Winchester
Read the op ed piece today “the trap of open borders”. The democrats will welcome any and all who show up and provide them with every benefit. It’s all going to be free now. We don’t need the Chinese to destroy the US. The left is already on the job.
6
@David Illig
With no restrictions? If you wouldn’t do this at your own home, it makes no more sense to do it nationally. 2 billion people live on <2.50$/day. Most of the extra 82 million people to be added to the worlds population every year are in those countries. Shall we let them all in because there is a humanitarian need? Sorry, but that’s nuts.
5
Corporate greed not open borders - companies exploits cheap labor - are they moving manufacturing home - no - it’s going to poor Asian countries and India. And not just clothing and electronics - pharmaceuticals, food, and toys. People want cheap - Walmart started the exodus. The coronavirus hysteria is worse than the virus. 3000 deaths compared with 10s of thousands for the flu? The panic is fueled by greedy media hungry for viewers to pay the millions in salaries. And look at all the “concerned” citizens flocking to stores by the hundreds to stock up on toilet paper! Not a sanitary wipe in sight - carts, conveyor belts, cards - and then they line up by the dozens to buy pizza and ice cream seated at unwiped tables. Ridiculous! The measles outbreak a few years ago did not elicit this response - in fact it was all about not vaccinating - the Chief proponent being Trump. And of course the ridiculous articles about jet setting celebrities in designer masks flitting off to Europe. I shake my head at the idiotic “crisis”.
5
Until recently, advocates of globalization have kept bragging about the benefits of globalization in justifying their appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party. Now we are paying for the true cost of such folly with our lives.
40
We can mitigate globalization in one of two ways.
Increasing inventories is one. However, the solution is only temporary. Businesses ignore the cost and risk of a long term disaster. Wall Street implicitly assumes governments are not only willing but capable of restoring normalcy in the invent of an emergency. The current coronavirus with the current White House has once again disproven the assumption.
The other method is diversifying our supply chains. Moving a factory from China to Vietnam doesn't help. You would want a factory in both China and Vietnam. Preferably you would have another one in Bangladesh and Europe and the USA as well. If disaster strikes one place, you simply scale up production in another. However, you need to maintain all the factories simultaneously in order to prevent prolonged supply chain disruptions.
You can't just diversify your supply chain on the fly. Everyone else is going to be looking for a factory out side the disaster area at the same time as you. Priority is given to the businesses who were already doing business at the alternative location.
This presents a problem stockholder optimization model. That's the real problem here. Representing stockholders not only prioritizes just-in-time inventory. You're also pressured to reduce diversity (a.k.a redundancy) within your supply chain. Scale means larger margins. Diversity means more but smaller scales. Hence, lower margins. Stockholders will choose a single bulk source every time.
13
@Andy I know this may sound radical, but how about a factory in America?
19
@EJS
Who will you sell to? And how much of a pay cut do below the minimum wage to sell outside the US? If you don’t sell outside the US where will you get all your resources?
Globalization isn’t the problem. Profits over people is.
Be careful for what corrupt crony capitalist corporate human plutocrat oligarchs hope and wish for aka the Midas Touch.
But there is only one evolutionary biological DNA human race species that began in African 300,000+ years ago whose national origin is Earth.
What we call race aka color is all about producing Vitamin D and protecting genes from damaging mutations in ecologically isolated human populations in relation to differing levels of solar radiation at altitudes and latitudes.
What we call race aka ethnicity, national origin and faith are evil malign demographic, economic, educational, historical and political myths meant to supremely superiorly empower a select human majority/minority over inferior lesser other humans.
'No man is an island entire of himself. Each man's death diminishes me. And therefore I n'er tend to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee'.
6
@Blackmamba
"I believe we should make it a principle that the definition of racism is the belief that the human species is divided by race." —Christopher Hitchens
6
@Blackmamba
Imagine
1
@David Illig
Thanks.
I mean... "unabashed nationalist" implies that DJT actually cares about this country (and by extension, individuals other than himself) in some way shape or form. I think he's pretty well established that's not the case at this point no?
3
@NYCLady
Nationalists often don’t care about their country. They care about their skin color.
As we have seen in Texas with the closing of hundreds of polling places in Latino communities. It’s not about the nation, it’s about in our face racism.
Nationalism is the cover as the excuse. Just like changing immigration laws or exploiting broken ones is cover for blatant racism. The ICE attacks on communities is designed to divide and sow distrust. It is there to harm the community and set people against each other.
Once again the great unwashed masses have it wrong. Globalization could be good for all from the bottom to the top of the economic ladder. The problem is putting in charge of governments ignorant, under-educated and just plain unintelligent politicians who care more about their political fortunes than they do about the welfare of the people who put them in the positions of political power. For prime examples we need only look at who we Americans chose to be POTUS and members of the Congress who are more interested in themselves than they are about their constituents. Too bad for those closing borders and turning their backs on their neighbors. Xenophobia has never produced wealthy nations.
1
@RLW And yet "enlightened" liberals have encouraged both outsourcing and immigration as much as the oligarchy, both of which have resulted in stagnation of wages at the bottom in developed countries and hugely increased inequality. Caring about your own country and countrymen first isn't xenophobia, it's basic responsibility.
10
@KM
Because when we try to tax the profits and implement social programs the enlightened conservatives shout socialism and corporate funded democrats remain silent because they are bribed to maintain their job.
2
@KM, they also promote raising the minimum wage, strengthening workers' rights and higher taxes on the rich.
Isolationism has been tried by many countries in the past. It generally doesn't pan out.
1
If workers in China were not treated as slaves in sweatshops, we would all be better off. I think we have reached a point where the world will understand that cheaper is not better. This is a game changer.
14
As long as Americans continue to be gluttons in their eating habits, they will be gluttons in their buying habits: cheap junk, and lots of it.
About half of America is obese. Probably just as many purchase a new Chinese-made TV set "half-price" every couple of years. You think change will come any time soon?
6
The left wants to throw mud at Trump...but economists from BOTH sides of the aisle, and business persons from BOTH sides have been talking about the domestic supply chain for years. It's time we re-think medicine and other critical products. Spreading the wealth did NOT raise living standards in far away places...it simply made dictators and oppressive governments WEALTHY beyond anything we can imagine. They say 100 multi-billionaires run China. What about the rest of the Chinese people.
15
@Tom
And how many multi-billionaires run the US?
These people made their money by shipping off supply to China, no one stopped them, and they never shared the wealth.
Capitalism is what got us here, because it is cheaper to manufacture in China than the US, and in capitalism the dollar rules all.
So blame capitalism and corporate greed - don't blame China. They simply saw an opportunity to become a world power and took it. Americans fell for the bait. We are now suffering the consequences.
7
For the record. As someone very pro immigration. This idea of open borders is INSANE. My liberal friends, please draw back your opinions slightly to something less extreme. Open borders is unmanageable, unpalatable to a majority of Americans, and unhelpful in its messaging.
35
@Brian Brennan
I’m sorry but you don’t allow racists to craft immigration policy. I would rather have open borders than support anything this administration desires. They have nearly completely stopped legal immigration, are starting to strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship, are actively attacking and suppressing the vote against entire legal citizens as we see in Texas during the democratic primary where they closed hundreds of polling places.
They are racists. Open borders is their catch phrase.
I support plans like Warrens. The ultra progressive extremist obviously based on centrists here. It’s on medium. “ A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System“
I’m a progressive. I won’t tolerate the racists nor support any of their changes. Get them out. I support a fair legal way. And I support legalizing the people who wealthy people used as cheap labor for decades because their families love her.
If you throw these people in prison you need to throw the wealthy people who hired them in prison. That called justice.
Pretty simple isn’t it.
4
@Mathias You can have open borders or support/benefits for the poor(welfare,snap medicaid, section 8, etc.) but you can't have both. It just will not be financially attainable. Go ahead and pick one!
1
Warren just dropped out. So, no, not simple.
3
This is not a new problem. How many Indigenous were killed by small pox brought to the American continent by Europeans?
7
There are so many comments here declaring that this is a “right wing anti-globalization agenda”! What is being ignored here is the fact that this virus spread around the world in less than two months. This is an easily verified fact - not a politically motivated agenda issue.
13
@Maureen
So does the flu.
@Maureen
I think they mean that Republicans are using the Corona Virus as an excuse to push their agenda through.
What this analysis misses however, is that being against unregulated globalization has been the Left Wing agenda for half a century. The Right has finally admitted that unfetterred free trade has been a disaster for American workers.
Unfortunately, establishment Democrats are going against the bases of both parties to protect a system that had lowered US GDP growth by 50% since 1980, helped create global warming (by moving opposition to low regulation countries, among other things), and has all angered workers enough that democracy is under attack.
Democrats cannot win the Whitehouse or Congress by refusing to admit that there is a problem and refusing to help American workers.
We need to start trying to create fair trade, not protect OPEN BORDERS for global corporations, while those corporations tell the people they fired it was the fault of immigrants.
The Right IS trying to use the Corona Virus to move their agenda, but not their public lie of an agenda, but their real agenda of rewriting the Constitution without amendments (because they can't ratify one).
Pence is in charge because he is an expert disaster capitalist. While they attack immigrants they are still deregulating and slashing taxes on the rich. The trade war is just a distraction.
The Right is able to manipulate workers, because Centrist Democrats keep refusing to actually help workers.
1
@Maureen
Apparently the world is round and the wind blows around it.
The tax-Free, infected Chickens come Home to roost. And to spread sickness. Who could possibly have guessed ?
6
Not to seem frivolous, but the release of the James Bond flick "To Time to Die" has been delayed from April to November over coronavirus fears.
Even if only short-term, things like this, or people not going to malls or museums or ... will have a serious impact on people who NEED to work.
2
Very little sympathy here. Multinational corporations care not for people or the environment. They only care about profit. Globalization has increased climate change dramatically (just think of all those container ships and jet planes polluting our planet as they ferry products and people across the globe). Monolithic farming methods have devastated the environment as well. Half the worlds jungles and rain forests have been replaced by oil palm trees which provide absolutely no diversity. We brought this upon ourselves by allowing the wealthy to run our governments.
15
If folk stop flying around in jets and live a bit more simply there is enough here in the US for us all.
1
Perhaps the backlash against globalization is simply the human mind trying to find a label and a scapegoat for something it doesn't fully comprehend but nonetheless senses instinctually.
While one upside to globalization is an economic disincentive to wage war, globalization is often driven by corporate colonialism that thrives on exploitative labor and evasive tax and environmental practices.
But this corporate colonialism isn't sustainable. We, and these corporations, are living beyond our means and beyond the earth's resources. In addition, rich nations and their most high-profile wealthy have set an example that poorer nations and their populations want to emulate, and they will pursue that goal by any means necessary, including the destruction of wildlife and their habitats that impact the earth's ability to sustain life as we know it.
What may be helpful is a sustainable balance to our lifestyles that includes more regionalization in all areas of commerce, including agriculture and manufacturing. It will mean a new business model that's not driven exclusively by profit margin - and the legislation to support it.
7
Nothing wrong with globalization, if done right.
It wasn't done right.
The spectacular failure of the neoliberal economics- and shareholder-driven model of globalization that prevailed for the past 25 years is the root cause of much of the turmoil engulfing the world today.
And we have only begun to reckon with its massive negative consequences.
The backlash is just beginning, and will get much, much worse as billions of "negative externalities" make their angry voices heard in the coming decade.
The recent phenomenon of "The Era of Strong Men" reflected in the leaders of developed and developing countries alike does not bode well.
Blood will be shed in this course-correction, I'm afraid. Lots of it.
And the Artificial Intelligence Revolution is about to destabilize even further an already dangerously unstable world.
If you're not scared, you're just not paying attention.
9
@TB
People like Milten Friedman promotes a healthy order until they junked it’s and focused on completely unrestrained capital.
Capitalism is in opposition to democracy. Always has been. That is why it must be regulated. When we globalized we freed capital. It wouldn’t be so bad if we taxed the profits of globalization to offset the needs here.
But the capitalists are using fear if socialism, communism etc to stop such infrastructure.
And do here we are. Where they achieved their goal and the world is smoking all because we chose to value profits over people, over democracy, over liberty, over justice, over integrity, over decency, and even over life as we see with our health system.
3
“Globalization” has many meanings and many implications. Like the term “elite,” “globalization” has lately been so overused that is has become almost meaningless, and consequently can be bent to serve almost any political goal.
For example, “globalization” can refer, variously, to factory locations; manufacturing supply chains; capital flows; financial hubs; consumer markets; communication networks; trade agreements; security pacts; immigration patterns; human rights; environmental policies; scientific research; and, yes, public health.
Perhaps it is useful to think of the world as an airplane on which we are, all of us, traveling together. We breath the same recirculated air, eat the same limited supply of food, use the same few lavatories, and the plane has a finite fuel supply. We cannot get off the plane. The curtains that separate first class from business class from economy do not prevent the flow of recirculated air between classes.
Like the airplane, the world is small. The world is a contained space. Like it or not, we are, all of us, living in this same contained space together. Isolation along nationalistic or political boundary lines is neither practicable nor helpful. We need greater global cooperation, not less, to solve global challenges like, say, pandemics and climate change.
4
We protect ourselves and our families. We protect our homes and our nation.
Protection is not a bad thing. Protectionism may take protection too far, but "unfetterred free trade," with no protections also goes too far.
Just like the idea that everything should be on the internet, because we can, has led to serious problems including many ways for foreign countries to attack our elections, globalization at all costs, because we can, has led to many avoidable problems.
We were told that unfeterred free trade would make everyone better off over the long run. Since 1980, the long run has come and gone, and many Americans are WORSE off. Like expectancy is falling! Wages have been essentially flat for forty years, benefits have been slashed, job security is gone, and democracy is under attack. It is possible to be creative, without destruction.
The Right saw China stealing our steel industry and said "we can't pick winners and losers." The Left wanted to protect critical industries full of high paying jobs, but Centrists compromised with the Right, instead of fighting for jobs. They let China steal industry after industry, including solar. So Trump blames Democrats!
"Free trade" is a scam that lets the owners of capital manipulate markets without intervention from democracy.
Article I says "regulate trade"
FAIR TRADE that protects industries, jobs, consumers, and the Earth takes TIME to negotiate, not SECRET deals FASTTRACKED through bipartisan surrender to billionaires.
7
The phony choice is between globalization and 100 percent made-in-USA.
The better choice would be a truly distributed global sourcing and supply system that doesn't concentrate economic power in a handful of countries, and thus is less susceptible to major disruptions due to predictable events like tsunamis, floods, pandemics, revolutions, etc..
12
In terms of business and finance, Globalization has many positive points but only if Diversification remains a a priority as well. It is not just diversification in terms of manufacturing but also in the larger area of the supply chains. From Apple phones to bird seed too many companies have over-weighted their needs to a small group of suppliers and geographies. Leaving security concerns and intellectual property concerns to the side, it seems grossly irresponsible for a company like Apple to become so totally tied to China. In this outbreak of coronavirus China is as much a victim, only tragically more so, as Apple. However, Apple's management and Directors put themselves in an exposed position. Why? Clearly it was down to profits. That chase to profits blinded the company as to risk. Not a totally sound way to conduct business. Next time the threat may not be disease but something more man made! I don't solely mean to single out Apple and China as I'm sure many other companies have irrational exposures in other countries. The message is for companies and industries to use globalization to diversify and mitigate risk, not to use globalization to increase risk.
5
We've had epidemics for as long as we have had cities. Maybe longer, but urban living gave rise to literacy, which allowed humans to document the details of their lives, which include epidemics and trade. Rather than putting our heads in the sand, building walls and vilifying the other, humanity should be working on ways to deal with the ramifications of an interconnected world.
8
Did the many anti-globalization commenters even read to the end of this well written article?
Before I read this well written article’s eloquent conclusion, I was thinking, “Pandemics have existed from the very beginning of time, spread globally, and required enormous efforts to contain and stop them.”
In case you did not read to the end, here’s that conclusion:
“But if some are inclined to use the coronavirus as an opportunity to write globalization’s obituary, others say that misses the point of an outbreak born in a global manufacturing hub, propelled by modern air travel and spread by the irrepressible human impulse to move around.
“This is just an indication that globalization is what it is,” said Maria Demertzis, an economist and deputy director at Bruegel, a research institution in Brussels. “People will always want to travel. They will always want to trade. The answer is not to again build walls. You need more cooperation and clear information.””
11
If by "globalization" we mean "international trade and commerce", then it is a very old thing -- a feature of world history going back to antiquity.
But if by "globalization" we mean "usurpation of unique nation-states gradually replaced by a generic world regime of finance", then it's a recent phenomenon.
21
My company seems to be laying off anyone without an H1B visa. Why? Because H1B workers are basically cheap indentured servants.
The other article about immigration on the times right now talks about how immigration is "good for our economy". Sure, bringing in cheap labor to undercut American workers is going to be good for corporations and our aggregate GDP, but it isn't good for American workers.
Hypothetically - would you rather an economy of 10 people earning 10 dollars ($100 GDP), or an economy of 100 people earning $2 ($200 GDP). The later is akin to the argument that "immigration is good for our economy" - A higher GDP, but with more people earning less.
57
@George ... More like the top 1 people make 200, rest make 2
3
Nationalism and confronting Climate Change are not compatible.
We are a global planet and the symbolic concepts of 'moats' and 'walls' are no longer a technology of note.
6
I'm surprised by our corporate leaders in how they placed all of their eggs in one basket just to save a dollar. Why not have plants scatter around the world to avoid this. If Tech can have support centers placed strategically around the world, why not manufacturing? Maybe labor is not as cheap as it is in China, but that's the cost of redundancy.
6
@AJ
Plants around the world require negotiation with many different governments.
@AJ Labor is being replaced by robotics. The reason more factories are going into Southeast Asia is there are actually customers in Southeast Asia.
A highly educated growing middle class actually buys stuff.
3
@AJ corporate America no longer engages in long term planning. They only look 6 months out to their next bonus evaluation.
1
The idea that globalization is the spurring the coronavirus Is nonsense as is the idea that bringing supply chains home will help. It is only logical that the pandemic will hit your country at some point (tourism alone would spread it), and that the factories that produce the widget that you need for your product will be closed as well. I agree wholeheartedly that the way globalization has been left largely unchecked and has caused severe social, environmental and economic problems worldwide. But that is capitalism left to its own devices. The nature of capitalism is to seek greater profits and growth. It is amoral as to how to do so. That is the job of governments to have guardrails that will ensure that economic growth is done in an ethical, equitable way. How to ensure that we have governments that will do so is another matter. The same companies that advocate for unchecked growth are, many times, the same entities funding the politicians.
10
So, when American companies, such as Computer Associates, eliminates American employees and replaces them with cheaper subcontracted workers in the Czech Republic and India, who they don't pay benefits for, is this globalism or just business today? Should we blame foreigners for this or just make up a new label for American problems so that people can point and yell?
Until American Government deals with the American companies who use the resources of the world and America to exert such a tremendous influence upon the society, bad and alarming things are just going to happen to Americans.
35
During the plague times the rich would wall themselves up in their castles and towns would restrict entry sometimes effectively sometimes not. Quarantine is a valuable tool, but it does not address the underlying problem of the disease itself which we must do.
But as spelled out in this article separating ourselves from others has other more insidious causes such as racism and xenophobia the causes of which must also be confronted with even more difficulty as it is part oh human nature itself. That we hide behind a virus to obscure from ourselves our hatreds and fears only compounds the problem.
1
If we want global trade and travel we now find we also require global healthcare for all.
10
I like globalism but this first incarnation like all betas is flawed. How you ask? Why due to a lack of responsibility by Corporations. Companies moved to China and Asia and Central America not just for the low wages. They went to avoid taxes and pensions and healthcare. They went to countries who didn't care about pollution, worker safety. They went to countries where workers, adults and children, work in terrible conditions for a lot longer than 40 hours a week. This is the reason chinese companies don't flourish in the US : We have Laws. That is the danger with Mitch McConnell and Trump and all the other international billionaires who want to be outside the law,you become know - it- all gangsters and warlords like Putin and his oligarchs. Rules. Nobody wins a baseball game by beating up the other team or not taking care of your players.
35
@Jamie Lynne Keenan
The race to the bottom that you describe has been aided and abetted by the democrats and the left as well as the republicans. There is far too much money involved. There is a simple solution. Every product imported into this country has to meet the same environmental and labor standards as those in place here. Given the added costs of transportation many companies would choose to move their plants here. As it is, we make it easy and profitable for companies to to do the wrong thing at every turn. They have rewarded our politicians for their part in this disaster.
10
@Jamie Lynne Keenan : then what is it you LIKE about globalization? the gazillionaires? the vast corporations like Apple and others, making their products with slave labor from Foxconn (so miserable, they must put nets around the buildings to catch all the suicides!)?
Or is it the low, low prices of cheap plastic junk from China?
4
Finally something that has people of all classes recognizing that we all live on this planet together. We've known for decades that poor people are going to drown when sea levels rise, but we've done little to nothing.
I hope from all of this we learn how to work together as equals, equals with each other and equals with the planet.
Buuuut that seems pretty unlikely. So here's to wishing. There's probably a lot of that going on these days.
2
@C-Dubb Scott ......agree.... prejudice, greed and walls will not stop air.
ANd a science based managed response to an unknown virus is different from the usual isolationist and worst using it to again rant lies and ignorance.
If the dynamics were local within a nation, the same prejudices would be used.
2
Bunch of baloney. Causalities of previous epidemics before globalization are in the millions of lives. Globalization sure helped the disease spread faster but it created quicker awareness. Countries now have more incentive to launch a coordinated response even if they are not directly affected yet.
It's not an issue of globalization but rather a "Chinalization" where 99% of world's supply chain is tied up through one country.
World is setup for single point of failure.
12
Subsidized shipping led to over-concentration of manufacturing scale to achieve lower marginal cost of production. Parallel redundancy was lost, and the whole system became fragile.
8
@Steve Bolger : but you didn't care until NOW, when corona virus threatens YOU or YOUR family....did you?
You didn't care when our Midwestern jobs and whole US manufacturing industries were shipped overseas to China (and India and Pakistan and Vietnam and Mexico and others)....because the truth is, Steve, you hate the white working class and you took pleasure in our pain and economic losses! (*why? because we refused to "vote YOUR way"!!!)
NOW that you might get corona virus and may be very sick or even die....NOW you are concerned about "subsidized shipping" or "over concentration of manufacturing"....now when it is YOUR ox that might be gored.
Too little, too late, sir.
1
You statement-- "The impact is especially palpable within the 27 countries of the European Union, which has long been governed by a central belief that economies and societies are most dynamic when people and goods are able to move freely across borders. The arrival of millions of migrants in recent years has tested that thinking."--is a bit confused. What you write refers to immigration *within* the EU, not immigration to it.
5
The point is the immigration to the EU has prompted politicians to challenge immigration within.
2
@Peter
That's true. Any and each EU country is entirely able to determine its own quota of non-EU immigrants. If France wishes NO immigrants from outside the EU, then that's what France gets. Nor is the EU able to force any EU nation to accept refugees, asylum seekers and the like, if they don't want to. The UK took pretty much NO Syrian migrants during the 2015 crisis other than a few hundred children. The Visigrad countries refused to accept any at all. It was Germany's decision to take a million desperate people as refugees - not as proto-EU citizens, that saved the day. They're all still confined to Germany.
Having utterly failed to use the existing EU laws to control immigration from WITHIN the EU, the UK chose to Brexit because of EU immigration. The idea that Germans, Czechs, Italians can come live and work and receive benefits in the UK got up the noses of Brexiters - most of who perceived no merit in the fact that they THEY could receive reciprocal advantages in other EU states. The average Brexit voter doesn't seek to expand their career working for the European Space Agency or Airbus in France or Germany's advanced semiconductor industry.
Where else does the ludicrous Brexiters' justification that 'the EU is racist because it favours white Europeans over other citizens of the world' come from, if not from a dislike of EU immigrants?
@RG : sigh....only 5 years and you have forgotten that ANGELA MERKEL threw open the doors of Germany (so effectively of all the EU) to the WORLD'S refugees, asylum seekers and ECONOMIC MIGRANTS....prompting a flood of millions of people....mostly the latter (economic migrants)...demanding "Germany or Sweden" for the most luxe welfare benefits.
The US already had a severe problem with 25 MILLION illegal aliens (also all economic migrants) from Mexico and Central America.
Altogether, a ticking toxic time bomb.
DIVERSIFY! The lesson to be learned from this is that companies, big and small and around the world, need to diversify their supply chains. A mix of onshore and offshore, with offshore distributed to counter concentration in any one manufacturing country. This is good for globalism by sharing the wealth among many nations, and it is good for survival when one source is compromised. This also heads off right-wing nativist backlash.
28
Open borders are not the problem.
Closed minds are the problem.
61
@Mark Davis: Failure to stabilize global population in line with longer life span and more per capita energy consumption is the problem.
22
@Mark Davis
Give me your address, unlock, or better yet, remove your front door and see how open minded you remain.
In is lunacy to say that an Open border is not problematic.
2
As I would say "Own your own Atmosphere" or your own Sky. There is nothing beyond the Sky.
1
It’s a lame and fake backlash, if it exists!! They can’t have their bread buttered both ways! If they want cheap stuff and insist on maximizing their dollar or lira or pound etc, they can’t whine when they face the challenges of that global arrangement! Sorry!!! They need to enjoy the program!!! It’s they who have promoted all those right wingers who are pro the bottom line and global finance etc. they can’t have it both ways!!!
7
@Fread
Or: Maybe the American consumer should wean itself off of "cheap stuff": How about saving more/spending less? Or scaling back manufacturing? Maybe you've heard this about Amazon: https://www.retaildetail.eu/en/news/general/amazon-destroys-millions-unsold-products
And this assessment of the coronavirus' impact on retail is eye-opening: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172wx94jfgn0lc
3
Up until recently, everyone in America, liberal and conservative alike, defined "globalism" as "the rest of the world conforming to America's rules."
.....
The Internet made certain that everything America knew about globalism....is wrong.
....
As the Internet is now pervasive everywhere....connections are established and removed at the speed of light....firewalls(borders) appear and disappear just as quickly.....offshore banking has lost its meaning.....and trade networks are created overnight to compete and cooperate with one another.
...
Globalism no longer means one unified set of rules......it means a diversity of trade networks with a confusing array of methodologies/ideologies/protocols/etc.
.....
There is no "backlash" as described in this article. what the writer is describing is the human adaptation to the maturity of the Internet in the 21st Century.
1
@Wherever Hugo : the internet has not made even on single person sick with corona virus.
The vast majority of cases crossing borders is do to TRAVELERS....making the rest of us (too poor to get to have lavish vacations to Europe or Asia!!!) pay brutally for their "fun times".
3
@Concerned Citizen What you say is true....but that ignores my point.
That point being that globalism has not faded away.....it has changed from a 20th century American version into a 21st century arrangement of many different forms of globalism.
The present day reality of a sneeze in Wuhan causing people to think that Wall Street is crashing emphasizes that observation.
The open borders spreading coronavirus are those borders passing all those tourists at LAX, JFK, etc.
5
Too many people
Globalization means lowest common denominator for workers everywhere
58
The right wing demagogues should remember that while striking its targets the coronavirus is as indiscriminatory about the persons as about the size of geography--global or local.
2
The problem is not with globalization. The problem is putting all the eggs in the China basket. Apple squeezed an extra few points by making the China the main country for producing its product. This was and is a bad strategy. No different to a foolish investor who puts his/her own money in a single stock. Enron? Boeing? John Boggles market index ETF should be applied and the risk minimized by having multiple countries produce Apple products. No doubt the average price will be higher, but over a decade, Apple and other US multinationals will be better off.
8
@Ben : the late Steve Jobs was once asked why he could not make the iPhone in the US.
He said he could and there was no problem with finding workers or producing an excellent high quality product here. But he said "it would cost him an additional $40 per phone".
These are phones that cost $700 to $1000.
Jobs was a billionaire many, many times over. But he would rather steal thousands of US jobs than lose $40 per phone (and btw, buyers would have almost certainly paid the $40 extra on a $1000 phone....so it wouldn't have come out of HIS pocket anyways!).
Of course, now he is dead. And the phones are still made exclusively in China, by slave labor at 40 cents an hour.
6
Great, because globalization and diversity are not the"all" benefit they claim to be - lots of costs fail to be accounted for!
13
Wake up. This is exactly how unbridled greed works.
If we allow, and even praise, Jungle Capitalism, we are going to suffer.
19
The flu pandemics of 1918 -19 made it around the world in less than 8 months
This was a world nowhere near
Interconnected as ours is today
It is still coming
The fear spread and the politicization of a health emergency is not only shameful but truly ignorant. It demonstrate a willful failure
to understand how science works. Thank you GOP Trump and the spread of fear you actively promote
It would be ironic to see such narrow minded extremists suffer and die from this outbreak not ever leaving their homes
4
@Adam S Urban Warrior : so....the corona virus is now all Trump's fault?
Did he also bring it to China? Italy? all the other nations with cases of the virus?
Gee, he must be the most powerful person on the planet!
Written from a pro-globalization point of view. The decline of globalization is tied to the failure of a multi-culturalism badly weakened by jihad and representative democracies too easily kidnapped by special interests, which produced the greatest income inequality seen in a century. We know who globalization made rich. To understand why it is in decline, write about who it made poor.
19
@Jim : you must understand in all this, that lefty liberals -- not just capitalists or billionaires -- were the ones behind globalization -- because they love to see themselves as well-traveled "citizens of the world!" and sophisticates (vs. Americans) and the people who were affected by globalization and made poor...are "the deplorables in a basket" who live in "icky flyover country".
The lefty libs HATE these people anyways -- hated them for many decades -- and take pleasure in our pain! when they hear about people without jobs, and whole regions decimated by globalization -- they sneer and laugh and point fingers -- "why can't all the coal miners just move to San Francisco and Palo Alto? and get jobs as software engineers? and pay $4000 to rent a 1-bedroom apartment?"
To understand this....you must understand why Hillary called us "deplorables"....and lefty libs TO THIS DAY approve and second her remarks.
5
The caution against spread covid-19 is warranted until a vaccine at hand, but hype & economic panic are more dangerous than the coronavirus flu. I am a Professor of Medical Genetics. There are numerous unexplained cases of coronavirus in the US and elsewhere. This is in line with the notion that that the coronavirus has been spreading un the human population or quite a while. I suspect that as for now population wide screening will show that in every country a certain % of the population are corona virus carriers. Very informative in this regard are 2 recent medical articles in The Atlantic 1. You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.JAMES HAMBLIN FEBRUARY 24,. Professor Lipsitch a Harvard epidemiologist says that with in the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus ,and It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease”2. The Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic The differences between the global response to the Great Flu Pandemic and today’s COVID-19 outbreak could not be more striking. MARCH 3, 2020
8
@lieberma
For some reason, people are loathe to hear that this isn't the plague. It's as though they want it to be worse than it is. Perhaps to write articles like this in defense of their own ideology and criticizing those who disagree?
In other words, it's useful to ideologues and newspapers who sell to them.
3
@lieberma : I agree, but if you read between the lines...the lefty media is very eager to blame the pandemic on Donald Trump, as a way to get him out of office.
They don't care about science (though they claim to do so, all the time!) -- they care about POWER and taking the government back, so they can impose all the social engineering of their lefty dreams.
Making people panic over the corona virus is part of that.
1
@Concerned Citizen
Agree!
1
“Globalization” is not such a great idea, obviously. If we can all be felled by this — and we can, obviously — the dollars and cents saved by already very rich corporations simply won’t matter. Not to us.
China is no bargain, anyway. Their money fixation and lack of scruples I personally find abhorrent.
“Let them go their own way!”, I say, and we ours. It ultimately will become that very thing. Bet on it. Millions of people will spend billions of dollars trying to fend off this Chinese bug, and fail miserably. They will retaliate at the polls.
2
@Steve Singer These bugs can originate from anywhere. Who knows where the next bug will come from? Even the U.S. is not completely protected from originating new bugs, especially with a scientifically illiterate president like Trump.
2
Dan, there was an interesting op-ed a couple of weeks ago by a Chinese sociologist who wrote that viruses tend to originate in China precisely because of Chinese eating habits and superstitions. Probably most educated Chinese would agree with him.
Any culture that eats, among other rancid delicacies, bat guano -- and calls it Golden Pebbles -- or swears by ingesting tiger penises to aid male potency -- or believes that first frightening a dog so that it runs around frantically before killing it and eating it shortly thereafter will increase one's energy -- is sure to pick up (and, sadly, spread) disease.
2
@Dan -
The Trump phenomenon (which I deplore) is grounded on popular resentment of what “globalization” has done to “Blue Collar” Americans and their “rustbelt” communities. It devastated both. Add open-border undocumented immigration to it (a valid charge or not) you’re going to get what we got: a general public backlash. President Trump’s specious claim that NAFTA unfairly took advantage of us only pored more gasoline on the brightly burning fires.
Many people on here talk of the failings of globalization in regards to dependence on other countries for necessary components, hominization of culture, negative impact to local economies, etc. - and while I assume most of those critiques hold water, rashly throwing out all of globalization as an idea is not the correct course of action. Globalization has been the driving force for uplifting underdeveloped countries out of poverty, reducing consumer costs, etc. Just don't throw the baby put with the bathwater.
4
The operative phrase in this piece is,"the supremacy of shareholder interests". Throughout history trade between nations meant that each country had its own goods to grow, mine or make for export trade. Modern globalization has shifted the grow and make to the area of lowest cost and therefore greater profit. When pharmaceuticals were made in the US, the cost of production was a mere 7 cents of the total. The rest of the dollar was spent on marketing, research, executive perks and shareholder returns. In order to reduce the 7 cents cost, American pharmaceutical companies moved their production to low cost countries, especially China, India and Ireland. Magnify this model across all manufacturing industries from air conditioners to automobiles to electronics and you leave 20 million workers behind. Guess for whom they will vote? A person who will promise a return of jobs, not a return on investment. The backlash against Globalization in American and Europe is too long overdue.
18
Humans are at the top of the food chain because we have higher brain function than competing species. Our base instincts often ignore that to our own peril.
Right wing nationalism is simply base instinctual brain function looking to solve complex problems that only higher brain function can solve. It's always lurking waiting to be exploited.
4
What happened to the PSAs from my childhood encouraging the pu chase of American made goods? Well, the companies moved manufacturing overseas for cheaper labor and the unions are decimated so no one ever makes this argument anyone but I still try my best to buy products made in the US even if a bit more expensive.
Cars and other large, expensive items are one thing but for small consumer and household items there is no reason a country as huge as the US can’t manufacture more domestically. It’s simple: corporations will make a small amount less in profits for their investors and consumers will pay a small amount more for goods (and maybe throw fewer items in the trash heaps).
This would also significantly decrease the environmental damage caused by shipping tons of cheap disposable plastic goods all the way from China to the US.
40
@Olive H
I agree: The impact of cargo shipping is under-reported:
https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/shipping-and-environment/shipping-and-climate-change
(The absurdity of shipping raw material from the US to be processed in China, then returned to the US for sale: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/supply-trade/us-china-trade-war-re-exported-processed-product-duty-exemption-model-not-an-option.)
6
@Olive H
The labor and environmental costs of shipping from China are quite low relative to US manufacture.
1
What the coronavirus has done is to highlight two major risks to our economy.
The first is the "just in time" lean manufacturing systems, so any disruption causes a halt in production. This is compounded by reliance on a single source of supply. In engineering terms, this results in a "single point of failure risk" - there is no redundancy to fall back on.
The second is that the economy is based solely on the consumer. Granted that the refrigerator not bought today may well be purchased in October, the trip not taken and the restaurant meal not eaten in March will never be replaced. So we will see a decline in economic activity that will not be fully made up for.
And by the way the spread of the disease was not caused by immigration, but by tourism.
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The sooner we reduce our dependence on China for just about everything we need, the better. Better for national security, better for human rights, better for the environment.
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@Sue
Years ago the LA Times did a survey...buy American denim skirt for $36 or one from Mexico at $26. Made in America lost by a tremendous margin.
We have taught ourselves that cheaper is best and finally the real bill is coming due.
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@rjb People are more socially aware now and I believe, hope, that those who could, would today buy the $36 skirt.
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@Sue How is people fro other parts of the world loss job better for human rights, less people get out of proverty, better for the human rights? If you are truly for human right, concerned about the situation of their people you would go there and fight their government, instead of think ways to harm their innocent people.
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Who do think “opened” the borders? American businesses that went global. Border walls did not and will not stop that. Not that there is anything wrong with it.
The spread of this virus was facilitated by countries like China who practice secrecy and have poor health systems. It’s migration from there was facilitated by global travelers. A majority of which are business travelers.
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These people area out of their minds. Epidemics have occurred throughout human history. In fact, the greatest infectors of humanity throughout the ages have been insects. The bugs that transmit diseases have caused more death and sickness than anything else. Are we supposed to wall them off too?
Globalization is primarily responsible for the raising of living standards all over the world. It spreads democracy. It allows for entrepreneurship to flourish. (Inequality is a product of unfair taxation and labor exploitation). Globalozation suppresses international violence as you don't go to war with your trading partners.
The solution to eliminating diseases from infectious agents is vaccination. We have rid the world of many terrible illnesses through the application of vaccines. Guess what? The way vaccines eliminate transmissible diseases is through globalization. They have to used everywhere.
Globalization isn't the problem. Trade isn't the problem. Walls and isolation are not the solution. International cooperation is the solution and it's not a one time fix. It has to be maintained.
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@Bruce Rozenblit I agree with you in many ways but don't you think it prudent to at least restart some types of manufacturing, particularly medicines, here in the States? To me that is an extension of the "buy local" movement.
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How is democracy doing in China? We were hoping to spread democracy there but instead got Corona!
Trade and globalization works best when our values are compatible.
We generally don’t complain about trade with France or Germany; why is that?
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@Bruce Rozenblit
Excellent summary. Engagement with the world is a necessity and promotes peace.
The Chinese are smart, very hard working people. They filled vacuums we and others created. The massive lifting out of poverty that has happened there has to be one of the greatest in history. Human rights issues there, etc. etc., but credit where credit is due.
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We can do a lot of analysis, but clearly our first actions should be to get "made in America" on a lot more products.
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@Judy T
Careful you sound dangerously close to wanting to Make America Great Again .....
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Globalization has really been a new form of colonization. In the old days colonization was done to protect the economic interests of the colonial power. Trade was the key that opened to the eventual colonization of India. The same happened all around the world. All western European countries became colonial power, except Finland which is the only western European one itself colonized by Sweden and Russia. After WWII, maintaining political control over other countries became unsustainable. Globalization became the new form of economic dominance. Walmart can get its shirts made for a paltry sum in Bangladesh, Nike gets its sneakers made in Indonesia for a few bucks that fetch hundreds of dollars, and Apple gets its iPhone, iPad and Macbook in factories in China that run in ways possible in China. The high priests of economics coined the tern "labor arbitrage" to justify the exploitation of labor in these countries, just as the colonial masters did blatantly. If Trump hates globalization, so do the leftist leaders in countries lime India. To be honest, I buy at Walmart, but the couple dollars that I save isn't worth the concomitant results. Actually, I have no choice. All clothes sold by upscale shops also are made in the same sweatshops in Bangladesh, Vietnam or El Savador. Like colonization, globalization is fast becoming obsolete political- economic model. Coronavirus is accelerating that now.
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Mr Goodman provides a cursory yet incomplete analysis of globalization and its risk. Two compounding factors that he doesn't nearly address enough:
1. Overpopulation. Our planet, as is clearly evident from climate change and its ensuing impacts, can NOT support 7 billion humans and growing. While we've beaten the impacts of drought and crop failure that often led to famine, it's been at a tremendous cost by overstraining the eco-system.
2. Mass production and global trade in food and agriculture products. Our industrial agriculture system has lead to the greater transmission of food based ills such as listeria, animal borne diseases, etc. can be directly linked to huge growth in the global food chain.
Overpopulation far outweighs food borne disease (and all other ills due to globalization outlined by Mr Goodman), yet these two combined need to be seriously checked if we're going to progress forward - or wither as a species.
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@Common Sense
The world is not overpopulating. Population growth is slowing down, and/or has stopped and is in decline in most of the first and second world. As soon as women are educated and emancipated in the third world, then birth rates will drop there too.
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@Common Sense : "but you cannot tell the poor brown-skinned peoples of the world how many children to have! that would be xenophobic racism and bigotry!"
Perhaps it is time for the USA to value education.
Education is the one thing that cannot be taken away from you.
Education allows you to adapt to a changing world, a world where automation will be cheaper than labor costs. Because automation reduces variation and increases throughput, manual tasks will be given over to robots.
Education has been shown to be more effective in reducing radicalization than eliminating poverty from that same group.
Education is the one thing that people complain about when they get there money's worth.
Perhaps it is time for the USA to value education to effectively manage and lead a changing world.
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I fear the time to value education, or better said keep valuing education, passed a few decades ago.
Education is about being and consumerism is about having; I don't think there is any doubt that the later overcame the former long ago.
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Educated people are harder to manipulate and control.
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@AM Murphy
Insert the obvious Asimov quote here...
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Of course "Many in the manufacturing world dismiss such talk(returning production to the U.S.A) as politics masquerading as economic policy". The money that would have gone to the salaries of American citizens and health/environmental regulations in the USA now goes to the hlgh-level executives and shareholders of global companies who minimize their costs by employing semi-slave labor in China, Mexico, Bangladesh, etc.
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@Si Campbell ~
And the income "benefit" of the workers would go to the increased costs.
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@Si Campbell, I am in agreement with you. Before retail consolidation, smaller towns (as well as cities) were comprised of family-owned stores. I look at pictures of family celebrating gatherings from the 1950's and they didn't seem to be living the deprivation of those from the 1930's. However, they weren't living in grand victorian homes with large grave stones of deceased families from the gilded age in the local country cemetery, whose decedents no longer live there (probably lost their farms in the Great Depression). Now, rural US where I grew up is a Dollar Store economy with a few affluent small business owners and more minimal wage hired help, whereas when I grew up, most farmers (with the help of immediate family and neighbors that traded labor) did not hire permanent employees. Yes, I suppose I enjoy that I have been exposed to international cultures, food because I didn't stick around. But if we are going to have free trade, those who benefit the most from it are going to have to share their spoils in the form of a social safety net for their citizens or the old advanced economic societies are going to have a repeat of 1930's Germany.
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@sj
You are thinking of 1920s Germany I assume and the incredible inflation.. By the 1930s the Nazi had taken over... and nominally Jews (practicing or converted) were denied admission to most other countries in the world.. including the USA>
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The answer to a global health outbreak is global science. The requirement for global science is global communication and cooperation.
We can live together, or die in separation.
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@Paul C. McGlasson best comment I have read.
The coronavirus has exposed the weakness of the globalization regime in multiple ways.
1. The most important is our reliance for basic necessities on ONE country that is in deed and in spirit, our ADVERSARY. I have been troubled by this for several years and I am hopeful that more people are awakening to this essential fact. If manufacturing must be outsourced to countries with cheaper labor, why not spread it across multiple countries? Why not insist on labor and environmental standards? To the extent that this was not done, the whole globalization regime was about PURE GREED. Unfortunately, as always, the rich -- the ones who caused this debacle -- are well-protected. It is the rest of us who will pay the price.
2. Globalization has devastated labor at all levels in Western countries -- from high-value IT to low-value manufacturing and everything in between. It was never good for workers in the West. Globalization has decimated individuals, families, and communities. It has destroyed our base of talent and innovation. It has robbed our people of hope and agency.
The day our companies limit their exposure to China and start upholding liberal values about human dignity and labor, respect for the environment and animals is the day our world will start on a process of healing.
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@na Do you think Vietnam or Bangladesh respect the environment or human right? All corporations want is cheap labor so they can get the maximum profit so the stock will rise which we all are now forced to contribute to 401k for our retirement which we keep watching daily or weekly when its turn into 6 figures amount. The poor in the development countries will cried for jobs coming back but it won't. Peoples will be forced to put money into stocks/IRS/401k for retirement. It will never end. Just make sure your house is pay off and invest. Life will get harder for the poor of the rich/developed countries.
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@na
For this we need the return to power of labor unions and multinational trade deals like the TPP that are meant to protect workers' rights in other parts of the world.
With the Party of Trump in charge we will never get either one.
Vote Blue No Matter Who, at all levels, in all elections, until the Party of Trump goes the way of the Whigs.
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@Nathan Hansard Right, vote blue, the party that wrote NAFTA. Gotcha
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When mature trees were quickly dying in my Queens NY neighborhood in the early 90s due to the Asian beetle infestation, I knew then that globalization had some serious problems besides American manufacturing job losses.
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@:-( Why I am sure a lot of molecules that you comprised of come from Asia or once upon a time located in Asia.
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sure they want to throw up walls NOW. the plague of globalization has been ripping the world to shreds for centuries and now that the consequences are coming home they of course want no part of it.
well the sad fact is that there is no escaping what is coming. what we seen is just the tip of the iceberg. but hey the profits were great for what 500 years?
SO IT GOES.
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Look, for anyone with half a brain, the fact that our medications or ingredients for medications, medical devices, appliances, car parts, military uniforms, rivets for our bridges, plasterboard for our houses, electrical wiring, computer components and other items are made in China is enough to make one sleepless at night. For me, this uneasy feeling has been going on for many years.
Look at the fine print on the packaging of anything you buy. This state of affairs was never good for our employment, and I have never felt it was safe.
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@B. - for anyone with half a brain, the fact that our medications or ingredients for medications, medical devices, appliances,...are made in China is enough to make one sleepless at night."
Anyone with the other 1/2 brain would know a lot of jobs in the US today are due to globalization both directly and indirectly. If you check the record you'll see mfg jobs have been on the decline for the past 35 years, starting well before globalization became a buzzword. Just as automation has brought jobs to the US as well as destroyed jobs in the US, so has globalization.
Globalization has kept inflation in check. That's kept away an economic damper that would've cost the creation a lot of the domestic jobs currently existing. Jobs directly related both to product imported into the country from china and exported from the country to china. Then there are the indirect jobs related to the affordability of purchase due to lower cost of imported items. Lower cost has provided extra cash to purchase additional product, product having nothing otherwise to do with imports from china.
Like most everything in this life globalization is a two edged sword. Those who don't keep up with the changes of economic reality fall by the wayside, crying about their lot in life rather than do something to improve it.
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While I agree with much of what you say, I was addressing a narrow aspect of globalization: that items on which our healthy and safety rest are made in a country with a proven track record for shoddy products.
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@B.
Defending globalism and attacking those who oppose it cannot hide the fact that there's a real problem with China.
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