And while globalization and technology have opened up new opportunities and driven remarkable economic growth in previously struggling parts of the world, globalization has also upended the agricultural and manufacturing sectors in many countries. It’s also greatly reduced the demand for certain workers, has helped weaken unions and labor’s bargaining power. It’s made it easier for capital to avoid tax laws and the regulations of nation-states—can just move billions, trillions of dollars with a tap of a computer key.
New Yorker link to Obama’s lecture can be found here
John Laurence Menadue is the publisher of Pearls & Irritations. He has had a distinguished career both in the private sector and in the Public Service.
Obama has a hide lecturing the world on social issues when he was directly involved in drone murders of innocent women and children, presided over a period where inequality worsened in the USA and Wall Street strangled the economy and he wouldn’t prosecute them while citizens were thrown out of there homes. He did nothing….. nothing to prevent Russia swarming across the soft borders of Eastern Europe, or bring Putin to task when it was obvious the Russians enabled the destruction of a civilian aircraft on which innocent people were murdered.
If there was true justice in the World, this guy would be behind bars. Appalling! Seriously John, why would you put this stuff up?
I was particularly aroused in the spirit by Obama’s take on the pathway to universal freedom and social justice – “But we can learn from the last seventy years that it will not involve unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism. It also won’t involve old-style command-and-control socialism form the top. That was tried. It didn’t work very well.
For almost all countries, progress is going to depend on an inclusive, market-based system, one that offers education for every child, that protects collective bargaining and secures the rights of every worker, that breaks up monopolies to encourage competition in small and medium-sized businesses, and has laws that root out corruption and insures fair dealing in business, that maintains some form of progressive taxation so that rich people are still rich, but they’re giving a little bit back to make sure that everybody else has something to pay for universal health care and retirement security, and invests in infrastructure and scientific research that builds platforms for innovation.” And later the following – “Second, Madiba teaches us that some principles really are universal, and the most important one is the principle that we are bound together by a common humanity, and that each individual has inherent dignity and worth.”