Free Republic

"With grim economic news coming from many directions, it's easy to get discouraged about our ability to repair the damage of years of failed economic policies. And yet, there are pragmatic solutions to our biggest challenges, including ways to restore health care and retirement security, to create family-supporting jobs, and to reestablish a leadership role in the global economy. Collaborating with some of the nation's top progressive thinkers, EPI researchers have been exploring and refining solutions for the better part of two years. Now, just in time for national debates on economic direction, EPI has compiled the best of these...

Coming to America by: Jesse Masai, November 04, 2008 America’s global dominance has found its basis in economic supremacy and both could be ending in light of on-going domestic and international economic difficulties. Carnegie Mellon University professor of political economy and public policy and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Allan Meltzer presented a paper at a recent briefing at the Washington, D.C. think-tank. In the paper, entitled End of the American Century, he argued that major changes are needed in global institutions and that the period of U.S leadership may be coming to an end, and as...

October 8, 2008 Why globalisation will yield to regional fiefdoms While we watch the drama of the global banking system slashing its own wrists, the real economy has just arrived at outpatients with headaches Carl Mortished: World Business Briefing While we watch the grotesque drama of the global banking system slashing its own wrists, the real economy has just arrived at outpatients with headaches. There is tummy upset in the West, while a mysterious rash has broken out in the East. In China, steelmakers are in deep trouble, the Olympics are over and the building sector, inflated by huge injections...

Remember the good old days, when the world economy hummed along and globalization seemed exciting? When President Clinton told Americans to stop what they were doing and help him build a bridge to the 21st century? When famous columnists celebrated the fact that The World Is Flat? Well, those days are over. The world economy is teetering. Suddenly globalization seems frightening. Construction on Clinton's bridge has been indefinitely postponed. And apparently the world is no longer simply flat. It's Hot, Flat and Crowded. Future historians will spend careers arguing over when this new era began. They'll have plenty of options....

The bricks are crumbling in the house of global trade and the Brics, those fashionable emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, China, are crumbling, too, wracked by inflation, slackening growth and the flight of hot money. In Geneva, Kamal Nath, the Indian Trade Minister, was gritting his teeth, doing his best to justify a wrecking operation that has earned him brickbats from all round. He has brought to an end a seven-year struggle for a global trade agreement that would open borders and reduce subsidies and he knows it. However, he was not looking at his negotiating partners, the Brazilian,...

irredentist - One who advocates the recovery of territory culturally or historically related to one’s nation but now subject to a foreign government. [alphaDictionary.com] It must come as a shocking news to all those who preached: “We are one global community, now. We are all the citizens of the world. As freedom and democracy are spreading all over the globe, there will be wars no more.” Despite their dire predictions based on such absurd inventions as “diversity is strength”, “nation states are anachronism in today’s world”, and “a key to peace and prosperity is a lack of border and immigration...

THE UN headquarters on New York's East River was supposed to have been in darkness on Friday night, the diplomats tucked up at home to watch the fireworks of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Instead, they were in their offices long into the night. As overhead television screens outside the Security Council showed Russian tanks invading Georgia, Russian and Georgian envoys traded insults. Russia's irritation with Georgia dates to November 2003 when pro-democracy protestors took to the street ADVERTISEMENT s in the so- called Rose Revolution to denounce an election rigged by pro-Moscow politicians. The result was a new election...

When Tesla Motors, a pioneer in electric-powered cars, set out to make a luxury roadster for the American market, it had the global supply chain in mind. Tesla planned to manufacture 1,000-pound battery packs in Thailand, ship them to Britain for installation, then bring the mostly assembled cars back to the United States. But when it began production this spring, the company decided to make the batteries and assemble the cars near its home base in California, cutting more than 5,000 miles from the shipping bill for each vehicle.

Israel, Ireland, and International Law by: Daniel Smith, July 18, 2008 Experts on Middle Eastern nuclear affairs met July 14 at the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) to discuss the September 2007 Israeli airstrike against Syria. Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, described the event as “troubling”; David Albright and Avner Cohen discussed the “strange” and “bizarre” issues surrounding the event. Albright is the President of the Institute for Science and International Security and Dr. Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Dr. Cohen encapsulated the chief concern among the panelists: the...

It is interesting how, in the aftermath of the past year’s run-up in oil prices, we have been hearing less and less talk of “globalization” from the chattering classes. Why is this? On the surface, there are several reasons. First, the topic high oil prices presents an easy segue to bring up the annointed’s favorite mantra: green technologies and the need to continue de-industrializing America. We can all get high-paying “green” jobs to replace the textile, manufacturing, computer programming, and bio-tech jobs which have been developed in the United States and then shipped offshore. And the high oil prices themselves...

Migration: Who Cares? by: Ben Giles, July 17, 2008 Coming to the conclusion that migration should not be thought of as a distinctly national issue, authors Marie Price and Lisa Benton-Short presented data on their research of metropolitan cities experiencing and influx of foreign-born immigrants. Their new book, Migration to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities, reveals that 20 major cities across the globe account for 37 million of foreign-born residents. Or, one in five immigrants will choose one of those cities as their end destination. Audience reception to the authors’ July 15 presentation of their book was...

Trade Facilitation by: Ben Giles, July 15, 2008 The Cato Institute’s Daniel Ikenson and World Bank’s Simeon Djankov presented the findings of a new Cato trade policy analysis at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 11. Ikenson’s paper, entitled Protection without Protectionism: Reconciling Trade and Homeland Security, highlights the disconnect between Americans’ perception of the economy and the realities of international trade. “The polls tell us that Americans have soured on trade…” said Ikenson. “It’s because Americans are barraged nightly by reports on the news that they’re losing their jobs and that the economy is imperiled by globalization and...

Last year, more than 20 workers at a factory in Wuxi, Jiangsu province that produces nickel-cadmium batteries for electronic products giant Panasonic were found to be suffering from high levels of cadmium, a toxic and cancer-causing chemical. Two of the workers were diagnosed to be suffering from cadmium poisoning, an affliction high on health authorities' danger list of occupational diseases. Such poisoning is said to be able to cause kidney failure, lung cancer and bone disease. "For the safety of workers and environmental protection, this kind of battery, which is cheap to produce and safe to use but hazardous to...

June 11, 2008 Oil price crisis threatens to reverse globalisation Carl Mortished: World Business Briefing With brutal efficiency, the oil price is beginning to duff up a monster of the 20th century: globalisation. Those great tentacles that gripped our world in a hideous embrace are suddenly weakening and the multinational octopus is looking a bit pale and sickly. The extraordinary rise in the price of crude oil is wrecking outsourced business models everywhere and distance from your customer is no longer merely a matter of dull logistics. Whether you are selling coiled steel or cut flowers, the cost of transport...

Jihad is an ugly word to weak politicians, limp professors and lapdog liberal media who refuse to look at Surah 2:190 in any copy of the Koran and read where every Muslim on Earth gets his marching orders to participate in holy fighting and is clearly commanded that no one but Allah be worshipped. Denial comes so easily for those who noodle aimlessly around recorded facts, or try to change them.

For the first time in history, a genuinely global economic system has come into being with prospects of heretofore unimagined well-being. At the same time - paradoxically - the process of globalization tempts a nationalism that threatens its fulfillment. The basic premise of globalization is that competition will sort out the most efficient, a process that, by definition, involves winners and losers. If there are perennial losers, they will turn to their familiar political institutions for relief. They will not be mollified by the valid proposition that the benefits of global growth far outstrip its costs. Moreover, to remain competitive,...

What's the world's greatest moral challenge, as judged by its capacity to inflict human tragedy? It is not, I think, global warming, whose effects -- if they become as grim as predicted -- will occur over many years and provide societies time to adapt. A plausible case can be made for preventing nuclear proliferation, which threatens untold deaths and collapse of the world economy. But the most urgent present moral challenge, I submit, is most obvious: global poverty. There are roughly 6 billion people now alive; in 2004, perhaps 2.5 billion survived on $2 a day or less, says the...

WASHINGTON—In March, inspectors checking Chinese seafood arriving at U.S. ports made some unsettling discoveries: fish infected with salmonella in Baltimore and Seattle, and shrimp with banned veterinary drugs in Florida. Meanwhile, a shipment intercepted in Los Angeles on March 19 and labeled "channel catfish" wasn't catfish at all, though records don't say what it was. "A lot of those products coming in from overseas, you have no clue as to what is in them," said Paul Hitchens, an aquaculture specialist in Southern Illinois, where cut-rate Chinese catfish are threatening the livelihood of fish farmers. China rapidly has become the leading...

...The globalization paradigm has turned out to be very convenient for politicians. It allows them to blame foreigners for economic woes. It allows them to pretend that by rewriting trade deals, they can assuage economic anxiety... But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the world. Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force driving economic change. Some Americans have seen their jobs shipped overseas, but global competition has accounted for a small share of job creation and destruction over the past few...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Sovereign wealth funds are growing at a whopping 24% a year, and could grow at that pace for at least the next three years, surpassing the economic output of the U.S. by 2015, according to a study released Monday. New data from financial analysis firm Global Insight showed that sovereign wealth funds racked up a combined $3.5 trillion in 2007. The largest funds were fielded by China, with $1.2 trillion, Russia and Kuwait, but could soon be outpaced by up and coming funds in Nigeria and Oman, the report said. Funds from developing countries are advancing...