
How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility - JoachimOfFiore
https://www.sapiens.org/culture/globalization-downfall-gladstone-australia/
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Felz
The article's central point seems to be that it's more difficult to track
accountability and causality in an increasingly "overheated" and complicated
world. True.

But the major system for addressing that currently seems to be People Getting
Upset, and the article proposes more organizations for People Getting Upset.
But this isn't very efficient; sometimes the global economy DOES need to make
Gladstone a bit less pretty. And people have only a limited amount of Upset
within them, not nearly enough to make the system work well.

We need better tools of addressing externalities as a society.

Or maybe just the ability to actually implement those we have. Property rights
work pretty well where they can apply. Carbon taxes seem decent, but they
usually go straight to government coffers and don't pay out to citizens (that
seems like a flaw to me). I'm not an economist, but I'd be interested in
better ideas.

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afterburner
Carbon taxes change the profit math for companies, which affects their
decisions, that's the biggest change. They have to be high enough to change
the decision though.

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thaumasiotes
> They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

This is why I've stopped listening to people attempting to make externality-
based policy arguments. If you believe that a carbon tax needs to be high
enough to change companies' decisions, you're not actually making an
externality argument. You've already decided that the world should change, and
how it should change, and you're just trying to find some magic words that you
think will get other people to agree with you.

A real externality argument would try to determine the value of the
externality, and set the tax to equal that value. It's not relevant at all
whether that changes anyone's decision -- if there's no change, and you see
just as much pollution as before, that's fine, because the cost of that
pollution is now being accounted for correctly, and it's been decided that the
pollution was better than the alternative.

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afterburner
Are you saying the jury is somehow out on greenhouse gases? Because we
definitely know it's affecting the planet. And we definitely know we need to
cut back on carbon emissions. And we even know by how much. The externality is
not hypothetical, we're living it, in real time, and so have a pretty damn
good idea what we have to do to bring things to neutral.

Anyone claiming otherwise simply would rather not lose their profits, or is
being payed/brainwashed by those people.

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glitchc
Multi-national corporations are counting on the disparity to essentially play
arbitrage with labour. Nationalism feeds into that, so it's in their interest
to stoke nationalist sentiments.

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vowelless
> Nationalism feeds into that

How?

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westiseast
I assume he means because nationalism stokes tensions between citizens while
companies quietly extract value from society.

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shard972
Why would nationalism stoke tensions between citizens? The point of
nationalism is to unite the society around the nation.

It seems to me that multiculturalism if anything leads to more tensions as it
seeks to add more groups that don't have as much in common as the people
already there.

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nafey
Contemporary history suggests nationalism is almost always a reactionary
movement. Reactionary movements are by definition in reaction to some other
political entity. Thus the tension.

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acd
The corporation takes away personal responsibility. For a corporation profit
is usually number one priority far more than caring for the environmen.

I think globalisation under mines union, to some extent labour laws. I you
don’t do the job there is often someone cheaper who don’t care about work
hours, vacation who will.

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rm_-rf_slash
And environmental protection laws, and human rights laws, and civil rights
laws, you name it, globalization has effectively undermined.

The best lie that America ever told the world (best exemplified by the 1939
World’s Fair[1]) was that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. But when
the U.S. blinked after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre and kept on buying
cheap goods from China, it became clear that the Western world - the only long
term bastion of democracy - cared more about capitalism than democracy, and
China showed the world that you don’t need democracy for capitalism. Democracy
has been in decline ever since, along with human rights.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_New_York_World's_Fair](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_New_York_World's_Fair)

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jacobolus
> _when the U.S. blinked after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre and kept on
> buying cheap goods from China_

The US did very little trade with China in 1989, though more than a few years
earlier. I don’t think Tiananmen Square or its response says much about US
internationalism or commitment to whatever abstract principles. You can draw
much stronger conclusions from them about internal Chinese politics.

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cryptonector
What could the U.S. have done about Tiananmen? Serious question. Military
intervention would have been absolutely out of the question. U.S.-China trade
back then was very small, so the U.S. had no leverage. The U.S. could not have
armed a guerilla either. There was really nothing the U.S. could do about
China in 1989.

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AnthonyMouse
> What could the U.S. have done about Tiananmen?

Impose Cuba-style sanctions on China until they held free elections. It may
not have changed their policy, but it would at least have shown we were
serious about it. And knowing what we know now, it would obviously have had
significant economic consequences over time.

~~~
jacobolus
That was basically US policy toward China in the 50s–60s. It was utterly
ineffective.

US policy toward Cuba had much bigger impact because Cuba is a tiny island
next to the North American continent, and being cut off from your obvious
larger trading partner is more severe.

The US sanctions on Cuba didn’t have anything to do with free elections
though, and their primary effect was entrenching the Cuban government while
impoverishing the Cuban people.

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AnthonyMouse
> US policy toward Cuba had much bigger impact because Cuba is a tiny island
> next to the North American continent, and being cut off from your obvious
> larger trading partner is more severe.

The US is China's largest trading partner and the relative size of China's
economy was much smaller at the time. Moreover, other democratic countries
could have adopted the same policy which would have given it real teeth.

And the sanctions did nothing to entrench the government. The government was
already entrenched. If the people there don't like the policy then they know
how to end it -- change their government.

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RestlessMind
The answer lies in Politics. If a multinational is ruining your beaches /
water supply / air quality / whatever, use the power of government to apply
regulations and taxes. One common argument against that is that a company will
simply go to another place which offers friendlier regulations. In that case,
good riddance.

Now, if someone depends on those multinationals for a better living and have
no options otherwise, then they gotta pay up one way or the other. Typical
path we have seen is for societies to get rich first and then start demanding
nicer things like clean air / water.

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shard972
Which society stands to become richer? The country that sold it's beaches to a
foreign company, or the foreign country which operates the business and owns
the profits?

To the extent this is politics, I guess you could say it's a battle between
liberalism which would see the situation as efficient and the result of free
capitalistic action while a nationalist perspective would lead you to see the
beaches are apart of the nation itself and cannot simply just be sold off.

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RestlessMind
When played smart, the answer can be both - the country willing to pollute its
environment and the country which is outsourcing the "pollution". For example,
China and the USA.

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roenxi
I'm nowhere near Gladstone, but I have a lot of exposure to the planning &
approval process for Australian mines.

Firstly, it is unlikely that the mine manger has less power in the modern era
than they did in the days of old. Mine managers wield enormous power under law
and in practice.

Secondly, the real issue here is likely that nobody cares about small
limestone mines, but the economies of scale in Gladstone are such that the
mines are projects of importance at the State and global level. Local groups
with real power (enough influence to get council moving) can still sway mine
operations quite convincingly, larger mining companies have had some
experiences with fighting real local opposition and it is not a profitable
exercise. But the flip side of that, once a mine operation gets large enough
it can no longer please everyone, and when the State & local governments
support your operation, the people who are not pleased feel very powerless.
Nobody likes that situation, but there isn't a straightforward resolution.

The idea that globalisation is responsible is a bit tenuous. Make the case
that councils are blinded by greed, that is an easy one. I will politically
remind the reader that the State government, who takes the cut, is also the
same group who needs more money to fund schools & hospitals. _EDIT_ And mining
corporations usually spend lavishly on local projects to suppress organised
opposition on council.

tl;dr; I have observed the process and don't believe that globalisation has
broken the chain. Local government still has sufficient power to yea, nay or
influence operations. State governments have absolute power to yea, nay and
influence operations. They are responsible, not some shady globalist in
Shenzhen, America or Japan.

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deregistered
Seems you haven't put international agreement such TPP and international
arbitration into account.

Yes, local goverment still have power and no, the state goverment don't have
absolute power when the contract has been deal.

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mtrn
Modernism. Cause and effect are separated. Or, as Flann O'Brien wrote: If one
throws a stone up in the air, no one can tell where it will land.

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css
Sounds like more governments around the world could use a dose of layer cake
Federalism.

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makapuf
Could you explicit or ELI5 what you mean by this ? Worldwide federalism ? More
intermeduary layer to better control centralized bodies ?

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css
The idea behind layer cake federalism is you define specific scope that gets
handled at different levels of Government; the point being that people in
Estonia may not want the same policies as those in France and both should be
free to choose independent of a globalized body (here, the UN).

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travelbyphone
Maybe if we could buy shares of Earth there would be some economic value in
preserving the well being and environment. How could one put economic value in
preservation instead of exploration?

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shard972
That sounds like a way to accelerate the lack of accountability. If i wanted
to reduce accountability of american companies, I would make it so you could
only by US stocks through unified stock.

You would just have 0 ability for anyone to apply market forces and
accountability on a localized level and it would become giant scam for elites
to siphon off.

The only way to add more accountability in the way you want it would be more
selling off of public land to public companies that anyone could buy stocks
in.

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pbadenski
One way to resolve this tension is to limit the corporate personhood. If CEOs
of this multinational corporations earn tens and hundreds of millions maybe
they should have a tiny bit more accountability.

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grosjona
The problem is that people with power are getting more power and they are
getting fewer in numbers so they have limited bandwidth for dealing with
issues efficiently. So they delegate everything to people who are on their
payroll and who themselves will delegate subtasks to other people also on the
payroll, etc... In the end, what we have is no different from communism. There
is no incentive for employees of big corporations to work harder because
mobility is limited based on who joined the company first.

