Category: Globalisation

The Davos Question

On Saturday the little big men of the World Economic Forum checked out of their Davos hotels and made the hop home in the company Gulfstream.  Along with the customary hookers and political whores, the high-powered networking and, doubtless for some, the plain high, our heroes left behind all that damned public caring - at least, for another year.

Actually, the caring thing was pretty well done this year.  They concocted a public relations exercise involving a somewhat bland question:-

What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?

There was a lot of hot air vented about knowledge and poverty, climate change, and water.  But the hot button issues among the real players were the decline of the dollar as the world currency and the threat of a US recession.  These merely reflects the corporate-heavy interests of the Davos “community”.  Of the issue of the rights and interests of real people and peoples there was, of course, no sign.  Or almost no sign.  This report appeared this morning in the lower middle-class rag, the Sunday Express:-

EUROPEANS THINK ISLAM IS DANGEROUS

AN “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night.  The poll, carried out across 21 countries, found “widespread anti-immigration sentiment”, but warned Europe’s Muslim population will treble in the next 17 years.  It reported “a severe deficit of trust is found between the Western and Muslim communities”, with most people wanting less interaction with the Muslim world.

Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.

The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.  It reports “a growing fear among Europeans of a perceived Islamic threat to their cultural identities, driven in part by immigration from predominantly Muslim nations”.

Now, I’ve been all over the WEF’s brave new website and I can’t find a trace of the former Arch-Songster’s study.  Which is odd.  The only half-useful mention of migration which crops up via a word search on the site concerns this curious working session:-

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The Bear’s Lair: Eroding Western living standards

Here is Martin Hutchinson’s latest at Prudent Bear, quietly informing bovine optimists that globalisation carries profound and profoundly depressing implications for more than the benighted working class in the West.

Tata Motors’ emergence as front-runner to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from the ailing Ford brings one question uppermost to a commentator sitting at a wealthy Western desk: Precisely which economic sectors can be relied upon in the future to provide jobs for Westerners at wages higher than are obtainable in the Third World?  Will there continue to be opportunities to improve Western living standards, or are those living standards destined to descend to some kind of population-weighted average between Boston and Benin?

Tata is a typical and highly capable example of that new breed: the third world multinational company. Part of the multi-industry Tata Group, over a century old, from which it had access to both capital in its formative years and steel currently, it has established itself as the premier manufacturer of light trucks in India and as one of the top three automobile manufacturers. At the bottom of the market, it has announced plans to being out a 100,000 rupee (about $2,500 currently) automobile, which if successful will undercut its major competition by more than 30% and greatly expand the market for automobiles among the still impoverished Indian people.

Conventional Western business analysts have no problem with Tata manufacturing mini-cars for the Indian market, or indeed for developing country markets in Africa and elsewhere. They imagine that Tata is able to use its comparative advantage of cheaper labor to squeeze costs out of the manufacturing process, thus achieving what in the West would be an impossibly low price. They point knowingly to the expensive environmental features that the new automobile will lack, and imagine smugly that the it will be both tiny and of low quality, adequate for the noble impoverished of the Third World, but not seriously to be imagined as competition on the roads of London, New York or Stuttgart.

The announcement that Tata is to buy Land Rover and Jaguar has thus caused a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance. Land Rover and Jaguar are both icons of British automobile manufacture, hand crafted by generations of British skilled labor. Admittedly in the 1970s Jaguar’s quality control became so poor that Jaguars rivaled the Moskvich or the Yugo for frequency of repairs, but since 1979 or so quality has improved and the marque has established a cherished if not particularly profitable niche among the luxury automobiles of the world.  Moreover, would Western buyers shell out the substantial cost of a Jaguar if they knew it had been manufactured in India; after all, how could the quality be relied upon?

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Bilderberg 2007: Welcome to the Lunatic Fringe

With thanks to Flavio Gonzales at Troy’s forum, I’m pasting - without additional comment - the meat of an article on Bilderberg 07 by Daniel Estulin
GW

The delegates at Bilderberg 2007: Istanbul, Turkey May 31-June 3

This year’s delegation will once again include all of the most important politicians, businessmen, central bankers, European Commissioners and executives of the western corporate press. They will be joined at the table by leading representatives of the European Royalty, led by Queen Beatrix, the daughter of the Bilderberg founder, former Nazi, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Bilderberger President, Etienne Davignon, Vice Chairman, Suez-Tractebel from Belgium. According to Bilderberg Steering Committee list which this author had access to, the following names have now been confirmed as official Bilderberg attendees for this year’s conference (In alphabetical order):-

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The Bear’s Lair: International Perspective

Here’s Monday’s piece from Martin, posted originally at Prudent Bear.  A dose of cold realism for Mr Wolfowitz and the World Bank.

The World Bank gave the developing world an unexpected Christmas present Wednesday, when it unveiled its annual “Global Economic Prospects” report, looked out to 2030 and projected a higher developing country growth rate than in 1980-2005 and a huge emerging Third World middle class.  Since it’s the job of the Bear’s Lair to deflate unwarranted optimism, the report represents a challenge that must be addressed.

The World Bank stated its expectation that GDP per capita in the developing world would grow 3.1% per annum as against 2.1% in 1980-2005. Its central argument is that the rapidly emerging global middle class, 1.2 billion strong in 2030, three times its 2005 size, with family incomes between $18,000 and $60,000, will realize their true interest and vote for World Bank-friendly policies such as open trade barriers and globalist foreign policies.

Even were they to do such a thing, it’s doubtful what effect they could have, since they would still be far outnumbered by the 6.8 billion impoverished souls who gain little from globalization and who would have to depend on benign “pro-poor policies” voted by the emerging middle class for the meager handouts that made their miserable existence possible.

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The Bear’s Lair: Trading in intellect

It’s Monday, and this week prudentbear.com ran the Hutchinson take on property rights and the brief and likely fatal joys of outsourcing.  The bearish nature of this message runs with the dissident grain and is a clever man’s way of introducing reasonable doubt into the conventional-thinking, mainstream mind.

GW

In a world in which information is an increasingly important commodity and intellect is the principal means of producing such information, David Ricardo’s 1817 Doctrine of Comparative Advantage may no longer be valid.  However the theory that free trade enriches all participants, central to modern globalization, depends crucially on Ricardo, with protectionists being denounced (sometimes correctly) by professional economists as economic illiterates.  What then is an economically literate framework for trade in a post-Ricardo world?

In his 1990 paper “Endogenous Technological Change” economist Paul Romer showed that economic growth is caused primarily by the spread and interaction of information, some but not all of which is “excludable” in that others can be prevented from using it once it’s created.  As an instance of information-driven technological change, he instanced Francis Cabot Lowell’s 1811 industrial espionage on British power looms, through which he created the U.S. textile industry.

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The Bear’s Lair: Is the world global?

This afternoon my OE Inbox mysteriously received Martin Hutchinson’s latest Bear’s Lair piece.  This one considers the prospects for the globalising economy.  I am very pleased to publish it here.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, is well deserved. While imperfect, his invention of micro-lending is an important tool to make the free market system work better for the world’s poor. Nevertheless, the vision that Grameen represents, of a peaceful integrated “globalized” world in which can all prosper, is increasingly coming under threat. In 1996, with Communism defeated, Bill Clinton in the White House and the Internet rising to prominence, a globalized “Washington Consensus” world seemed the inevitable future. However, it’s not 1996 any more.

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A tale of two Indias

A gated development for the subcontinent’s super-rich ... and a funeral for a cotton farmer, forced into suicide because of spiralling poverty. India’s economic growth is dazzling but, in the new, globalised era, its inequalities are becoming even more polarised, discovers Randeep Ramesh

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Ocean Frontier Fertility: The Global Prospects

The prospects are great for ecologically imposed patriarchy enhancing the fertility of whites via oceanic frontiers.  The majority of the earth’s surface remains not only uncultivated, but not biologically productive despite the presence of adequate sunlight and near-adequate nutrients. If recent experiments in iron fertilization of high nitrogen low chlorophyll oceanic surface regions are any indication, the primary ingredient lacking is the pioneering spirit that led to the cultivation and increased carrying capacity of the Anglosphere’s frontier territories: The United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.  It is reasonable to expect that the Anglosphere alone could increase its numbers by a factor of 10, relatively unmolested by multicultural supremacists, during this pioneering renaissance and maintain if not improve the quality of their populations.  Other, less sea-faring European peoples could enjoy smaller but nevertheless profound population and territorial relief.  Moreover this population increase could be very rapid if the fertility rates of the United States frontier is any guide.  This is a prospect that seems plausible in no other way short of world war.

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Compare and contrast

Here is a photo of the EU parliament

And here is a photo of the former Supreme Soviet of the USSR

Terrifying, is it not?

Mass migration destroys humanity?

A key distinguishing feature of humanity is its communication ability.  But what exactly is communication as opposed to manipulation?  How does communication arise?  What are the conditions for its continuation?  There have been a number of attempts at simulating the evolution of communication but till the simulation described in this article was run, none of them combined migration, climatic variation and the prisoner’s dilemma.

The simulaton is schematic but suggestive that migration can eliminate the very genetic capacity for communication and replace it with pure manipulation.

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Pioneer Greatness:  Burt Rutan

A little good news is needed now and then. The pioneer spirit is still alive. As a person somewhat responsible for the resurgence in technology prize awards, I have a few things to say about Burt Rutan’s capture of the Ansari X-Prize by being the first to fly a man to space in a reusable craft twice within a week. He follows the great technology pioneers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both of whom came to prominence during similar fair contests: The Guggenheim Trophy and Orteig Prize respectively. (From these exemplars some might now see a reason the powers that be shy away from fair contests—contests where they can’t really control who wins the prizes—and it was left to an Iranian family, the Ansaris, to fully fund the X-Prize.)

A speech by Burt Rutan before the National Space Society is worth a view (requires QuickTime ). He repeatedly and angrily declares his embarrassment at the risk averse culture that has strangled the pioneer spirit since the feats of the 1960s—nearly 40 years ago. I’ve got my issues with his speech but we clearly agree that something went horribly wrong with the pioneer spirit subsequent to the 1960s. The turning inward of the human potential has resulted in the halting of human progress upward and outward with aerospace technology being bureaucratically and monotonously scaled up for jumbo jet transportation. The result is the sort of danger warned of by Charles Lindbergh in his 1939 Reader’s Digest article “Aviation, Geography, and Race”: a sea of humanity threatening our race which is, after all, a global minority. Indeed the technological exemplar of this era has been driven by the rise of finance to preeminence—the inward-turning microelectronic revolution. The unintended side-effect of this revolution you see before you now as a website, but it is small consolation for the damage to our pioneer spirit.  As we were warned by Henry Ford the great struggle of the 20th century was creative industry vs global finance.  Global finance has dominated the past 30 years or more. Perhaps men like Burt Rutan can lead us out of our malaise and realize the human potential.  If so it may be due to prize awards like the Ansari X-Prize that give men even younger than Burt Rutan a chance to make a name for themselves purely via their own grit and gifts.

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Zimbabwe “Govt to cede land to Chinese” In Desperation to Grow Food

The government of Zimbabwe after starving its population by driving the Germanic farmers from their lands—farmers who had accepted Mugabe’s invitation to stay in Zimbabwe and build a more “integrated” nation—now is to “cede land to the Chinese” a “fast growing nation”, in an attempt to bolster agricultural production.

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The Bear’s Lair: An agenda for 2008’s Democrats

It’s increasingly likely that an unpopular war and a teetering economy will bring Republican House and Senate losses in 2006, and throw the 2008 Presidential election wide open. Free market economists, frustrated by the George W. Bush administration, should thus be thinking about ideas to pitch to the potential Democrat Presidential contenders of 2008, who will shortly start scouring the country for campaign money and voter-friendly policies.

For more, click on the link to the Great Conservatives website below:

http://www.greatconservatives.com/pages/6/index.htm

Life During Wartime: Tips for Surviving and Thriving

How long were you stuck in the lemming herd? Did your eyes and lungs hurt when you coughed-up the trail dust which shortened your breath and clouded your vision? When you discovered the lies you accepted as truth did your stomach hurt? While traveling with the herd did you ever see the shepherd’s hand, or hear his commands, or like most, did you meekly follow the ass stuck in your face? Still, somehow, you broke free.

Have you also realized there is no hiding place? One can’t simply flee, or move, to some refuge or sanctuary, nor can one avoid the mental poison from television or government schools.

For example, this weekend I visited Sears, the same store I first entered 35 years ago holding my father’s hand, but this time I was an alien - and my enemies knew it. Their contempt for me was on their faces as they cut-me-off in line and cackled their barbarian speech in my face. Some tongues I couldn’t even identify nor could I determine their race: though they were all brown. Remember too, I live in Kansas, the very center of the American continent and not in New York or California. There is no place to hide!

This missive is not a racial awakening confession, it is exhortation to you - the isolate - the independent thinker - to lead and communicate: an exhortation to rebuild your home, family and influence those around you. I have some strategies I’d like to share and I’d be interested in hearing your ideas, but before I begin consider this quote:

I call my clothing a personal weapon because if I am tempted to do something which by law is not right, one look at myself, my hat, my coat, my tstitsis reminds me who I am. Nobody is there to see except me, and believe me that’s enough.*

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Death By Democracy

...expect the barbarians to be gracious - at first. Once they realize the power available at their fingertips - made possible by the Democratic franchise - everything our ancestors built, for our posterity, will be looted.

Salvation by Democracy is as strongly affirmed today as was devotion to relics during the Middle Ages. Accordingly each generation in the supreme act of fidelity hurls itself, as lemmings do, off the high precipice: their last words, sang in unison are Democracy, and just before smashing themselves on the jagged rocks a faint whisper rises from the brainless herd Freedom.

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The Bear’s Lair: Oceans of liquidity

As many commentators have outlined, there is currently a very high level of liquidity in the world economy, with risk premiums for emerging market bonds at low levels and high foreign investment in many countries.  This can’t last, and serious fissures will open up when it changes.

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CAFTA

The House is voting on this monstrous trade bill tonight. The unofficial tally is close, many of the political whores are still undecided. I called my rep (he is still siting on the fence) and told him to vote NO. There is still time to call your Rep: Call your rep. toll free TODAY at 877 762-8762. Faxes are probably better. Click here to look up your rep and get the fax numbers. E-mail can also be sent (click here for info).

American Patrol has more.

UPDATE

H. R. 3045 Vote: 217 Yea - 215 Nay

Outsourcing Glitch

I have followed the outsourcing controversy in America over the past year (from about the time campaigning for the election began). But it isn’t just an American issue, it is also a British issue.

So this story caught my eye. It appears some call centre employees in India sold bank details of a thousand account holders for a pittance (the story first appeared in the Sun). But this wasn’t the first. There have been other cases (and this may just be the tip of the iceberg).

Perhaps the Banks ought to have thought about it for a second before outsourcing sensitive data to nations that value crookedness and dishonesty.

In some of the debates here, interesting arguments have been advanced to account for dishonesty that seems endemic in much of Asia (but not just Asia). Our colleague John Ray once suggested that poverty explains it. I have always thought such arguments reflect poorly on Conservatives. If we reject arguments that poverty is what causes violent crime, why do we accept the argument that poverty causes dishonesty? 

The Bear’s Lair: Three billion new friends

“Three billion new capitalists,” a new book by Clyde Prestowitz, head of the Economic Strategy Institute, highlights the potential rewards and dangers to the U.S. economy inherent in the full emergence of India and China’s 2.5 billion people (and the former Soviet bloc’s 500 million) onto the world’s economic stage. Old patterns are dissolving, old rules are no longer valid, but the new patterns and new rules to deal with them remain shrouded in mist.

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The Bear’s Lair: The African problem

Professor George Ayittey of American University presented his new book “Africa Unchained” at Washington’s Cato Institute last week, which demonstrates that Africa’s problems primarily result from that continent’s appalling political leadership. This view hasn’t been widely enough vented, and may provide the germ of a solution.  I would however add a rider: the West is at least equally responsible for the mess that is Africa, and the West’s help will be needed to reform it.

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The Bear’s Lair: Lashed by dragon tails

In ancient Chinese mythology, dragons live in the center of the earth, and when they awaken and shake their tails, earthquakes result.  The Chinese economic dragon has very clearly awakened; dealing with the lashings of its tail will be no mean feat. 

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Donald Rumsfeld: A Manager’s Life

We are told our governments rule with the consent of the governed.  Schoolchildren are taught this bromide, accompanied with words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. Yet, our lives are engineered by a class largely unknown to the public, a managerial class.  Their actions are not subject to oversight by the public, since they are not elected: they have few loyalties, other than to the international system which they manage; they despise superannuated bourgeois attachments to particularism, religion, ethnicity, or soil.

These managers are not unlike feudal princes, they sit at the top of powerful financial and military bureaucracies like NATO, the World Bank, The United States Federal Reserve System, and the W.T.O. And much like feudal princes they exchange fiefs and titles, and marry among their class, for example a director of the World Bank may be tomorrow’s U.S. Secretary of Defense, or NATO ambassador. They often oppose each other, but never the managerial system itself.

Consider the life of Donald Rumsfeld, a lord in the managerial class:

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The Agenda of the Ruling Class

Despite the public’s wish for an end to migration to America, the transnational elites that rule the North American co-prosperity zone, formerly Canada, the United States, and Mexico are attempting to destroy the border entirely.

This is what “your” government is doing, el Stupido:

“… the co-chairs call for a loosely defined “border pass” allowing all North American residents to freely cross internal boundaries.” .

Do we owe such a government our allegiance? Is this the same contract our founder’s signed 215 years ago? Don’t we have the right to abolish a rogue government, as Thomas Jefferson said?

Courtesy VDARE.

The Bear’s Lair: An agenda for Wolfowitz

(published by United Press International, March 21, 2005)

If Paul Wolfowitz survives the inevitable sniping from Europeans to emerge as President of the World Bank, he will at least represent a different approach from outgoing president James Wolfensohn. It’s about time!

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Never Renounce Your Heritage

Stunningly obvious were Buckley’s criticisms in 1951 when God and Man at Yale was published. Yale being chartered in 1701 to further Christian civilization but by 1951 had degenerated into a platform for socialists and the confused – Buckley noted the obvious: the institution had lost its ‘reason for being.’

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