Globalization

Globalization, or globalisation, is the increasing interdependence, integration and interaction among people and corporations in disparate locations around the world. It is an umbrella term which refers to a complex of economic, trade, social, technological, cultural and political interrelationships.

Sourced

• If America likes it, then eventually it will be gone.
  • Yao Changke http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-china-timber-htmlstory,1,2227629.htmlstory?ctrack=1&cset=true

• "Globalization" is a horrible term, in the sense that it encompasses all kinds of things; it's used very widely and vaguely.
  • Michael Hardt http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Hardt/hardt-con6.html

• Projects to stop the spread of AIDS have tried to establish protective boundaries ... by requiring HIV tests in order to cross national boundaries. The boundaries of nation-states, however, are increasingly permeable by all kinds of flows. Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 136.

• Simplifying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the processes of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 150.

• Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization, Empire with a counter-Empire.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 207.

• Let's discuss the world. To answer the question, "is globalisation possible without God", the simple answer is "yes". Globalisation is after all itself a code word, a mask, for not using the C-word, capitalism. Globalisation is basically the latest phase of expanding capitalism. This not something which is neutral, this is a capitalism that has its rules: it has its economic rules, it has its political rules, it has its cultural rules and it has its military rules. It is a system. At the heart of this system is the United States of America, the world's only existing empire today. The first time in the history of humanity that you have just had a single empire, so dominant, whose military budget is higher than the military budgets of the next 15 countries put together, and whose military-industrial complex itself is the eleventh largest economic entity in the world. This is the reality we live in, and this is the reality which confronts us in different ways.
  • Tariq Ali, 10th Globalisation lecture, VRPO. http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/artikelen/21200518/

• Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good.
  • Richard Stallman, in Znet interview.

Unsourced

• I define globalization as the freedom of our corporations to invest where and when we want, to produce what we want, to buy and sell where we want, and to keep all the economic restrictions through labour law or other political regulations as slight as possible.

• The poor complain; they always do,
  But that's just idle chatter.
  Our system brings rewards to all,
  At least to all who matter.
  • Poem by a Canadian economist (Gerald Helleiner) http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/philosophy/bm_corp_make_you_unhappy.html

• After the big companies have reached their goal and have collected enough money to buy a planet, they go home and all that is left are products. Globalization only gives us products, and kills our culture. Culture, if we help it, can last forever but toys are only temporary and are insignifigant compared to who we are.
  • Edward McMahan an English Psycologist
• The task of providing a human dimension to development in the era of Globalization has become a major challenge, since all of us have to deal not only with a radically new reality, but especially with the ethical vacuum which the idolatry of the marketplace has caused...
  • Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil