The site contains a comprehensive archive of Edward Goldsmith's published works, and allows you to navigate through various sections of his detailed CV.
The website is still undergoing a few finishing touches, so please keep checking in for more over the next few months while they continue to develop the content.
Helena Norberg-Hodge on TEDxTalks:
The Economics of Happiness
June 30, 2011
"Capital Is a Fickle Lover"
by Walden Bello, Foreign Policy In Focus, June 22, 2011
"China is today the ideal capitalist state: freedom for capital, with the state doing the 'dirty job' of controlling the workers,” writes the prominent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. “China as the emerging power of the twenty first century …seems to embody a new kind of capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, disdain for workers' rights, everything subordinated to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new world force."
Capital, however, is a fickle lover.
Recently, a growing number of corporate leaders are getting second thoughts about the “Chinese Model” that has been so central in the globalization of production and markets over the last three decades.
Labor Rises Up
The relief in corporate circles that greeted the East Asian recovery, powered by the massive $580 billion Chinese stimulus program in 2009, has been replaced by concern over the bursting of the real estate bubble, powerful inflationary pressures, and massive overcapacity owing to uncontrolled investment. There is also a sense that China’s leadership is fighting a losing battle against entrenched interests and structures in its drive to move from a strategy of export-led growth to one that is domestic-market-led — a move that many consider urgent as China’s traditional markets in the United States and Europe are in the vise of long-term stagnation.
But it is the worry that the key source of corporate profitability — Chinese labor — may no longer be docile and cheap for much longer that mainly nags at the country’s corporate guests as well as its rising capitalist class. And many fear that the very ruthlessness that Zizek talks about — the iron fist that the Chinese state has deployed over the last three decades in order to achieve the unbeatable "China price” — has become a central part of the problem.
The worry first became palpable last year, when workers at several transnational corporations based in Southeastern China, like Honda and Toyota, went on strike and succeeded in winning substantial wage increases. To the surprise of foreign investors, the government did not oppose the workers’ demands for higher wages, prompting some to speculate that the regime saw the strikes as complementary to its effort to reorient the economy from export-led growth to one based on rising domestic consumption.
The strike wave receded, but a second wave of protest since May of this year, this time taking a violent riot form, has both government and the capitalist elites worried. The mass base of the current protests is not the relatively educated, higher-paid workers at big Japanese subsidiaries, but the low-paid migrant workers that work for small and medium Chinese-owned enterprises that turn out goods for foreign buyers. Zengcheng, one of the centers of protest, is home to hundreds of subcontractors specializing in mass-producing brand blue jeans that end up, under different brand names, in retailers like Target and Walmart in the United States.
Guangdong Province, where most of the protests have occurred, accounts for about a third of China’s exports, prompting the authorities to respond in force. But police repression will not buy stability, says a report of a government think tank, the State Council Development Research Center. “Rural migrant workers are marginalized in the cities,” it says, “treated as mere cheap labor, not absorbed by the cities but even neglected, discriminated against and harmed. “ The report warns: “If they are not absorbed into urban society, and do not enjoy the rights that are their due, many conflicts will accumulate…If mishandled, this will create a major destabilizing threat.”
But the problem is fundamental, and there seems no easy way out. The seemingly inexhaustible reserves of rural labor from China’s hinterland kept wages low and worker organization minimal over the last three decades. Now the supply of labor to the export-oriented coastal provinces may be drying up, resulting in steadily rising wages, greater worker militancy, and the end of the “China price.”
Brazil Takes Off?
“South-South cooperation” was what was on the mind of many observers when, at the conclusion of her trip to China in April, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, announced that Foxconn International Holdings, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, was shifting some of its operations from China to Brazil, and was expected to spend $12 billion building factories in her country. But there was apparently more to the move than BRIC solidarity. Foxconn, the maker of iPhones and iPads for Apple, computers for Dell, and many other devices for well-known high-tech customers around the world, reported a loss for 2010 because of higher labor costs in China.
It is not only Foxconn that is voting with its feet and going to Brazil. The key reason investors are flocking to Brazil seems to be that the country under Lula not only became friendly to capital, having attractive foreign investment laws and following conservative macroeconomic policies, but also had social policies that promoted stability. One of Brazil’s most enthusiastic boosters, The Economist, compared Brazil with China and other “emerging markets” for investment:
Unlike China, it is a democracy. Unlike India, it has no insurgents, no ethnic and religious conflicts nor hostile neighbors. Unlike Russia, it exports more than oil and arms, and treats foreign investors with respect. Under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade-union leader born in poverty, its government has moved to reduce the searing inequalities that have long disfigured it. Indeed, when it comes to smart social policy and boosting consumption at home, the developing world has much more to learn from Brazil than from China.
Continuing its paean to Lula’s Brazil, the magazine says, “Foreign investment is pouring in, attracted by a market boosted by falling poverty and a swelling lower-middle class. The country has established some strong political institutions. A free and vigorous press uncovers corruption—though there is plenty of it, and it mostly goes unpunished.” It concludes: “Its take-off is all the more admirable because it has been achieved through reform and democratic consensus-building. If only China could say the same.”
Lula seems to have squared the circle. Is this for real? The progressive analyst Perry Anderson believes it is. In a long, illuminating article in the London Review of Books, he says that Lula’s innovation was to combine conservative macroeconomic policy and foreign-investment-friendly policies with an anti-poverty program, the Bolsa de Familia, that cost relatively little in terms of government outlays but produced socially and politically significant impacts. Bolsa, a program of cash transfers conditioned on parents keeping the family children in school and subjecting them to periodic health checkups, by some estimates, has contributed to the reduction in the number of poor people from 50 million to 30 million — and made Lula one of the few contemporary political leaders who is more popular at the end of his reign rather than at the beginning. As for organized labor, which accounts for 17 percent of the Brazilian work force, it has largely been content to follow the leadership of Lula, who rose from the ranks to become the country’s top union leader before he launched his political career.
Indonesia’s Moment?
Much the same boosterism now marks the business press’ commentaries on Indonesia. Brazil and Indonesia are roughly comparable population-wise and in terms of geographic spread. While Brazil is the world’s eighth largest economy, Indonesia is the 18th largest. Both were barely touched by the global economic crisis, being primarily domestic-market-driven instead of export-driven, though they have strong export sectors. While the rest of its export-oriented neighbors in Southeast Asia suffered significant declines in economic growth at the height of the global economic crisis in 2009, Indonesia managed an impressive 4.6 percent.
In recent years, according to Mari Pangestu, the minister of trade, the country has been the recipient of “a lot of displacements” from China, brought about by “the [appreciating] yuan, the increase in salaries, the strict regulation of work and all the problems China had to face.“ With average wages now lower in Indonesia than in China in many sectors, such as information technology, the country is becoming a choice relocation site for firms worried about double-digit wage increases in China and Vietnam. Foreign investment was approximately $15 billion in 2008, fell to $10 billion in 2009, recovered to $12.5 billion in 2011, and is expected to hit $14.5 billion in 2011.
This year’s site for the World Economic Forum for East Asia on June 12-13 was Jakarta, and with it came a glowing endorsement from global capital’s chief promotions agency. In its report on Indonesia’s “competitiveness,” the WEF noted, “Among Indonesia’s strengths, the macroeconomic environment stands out…Fast growth and sound fiscal management have put the country on a strong fiscal footing. The debt burden has been drastically reduced, and Indonesia’s credit rating has been upgraded.” It pointed out that “as one of the world’s 20 largest economies, Indonesia boasts a large pool of potential consumers, as well as a rapidly growing middle class, of great interest to both local and foreign investors.” Infrastructure is still insufficient, but providing it is also what makes foreign capital salivate, with the Wall Street Journal in an otherwise laudatory editorial warning the government to surrender infrastructure provision to the private sector and foreign capital.
But it is Indonesia’s governance that makes it most attractive to foreign capital. Corruption is still a pervasive problem and some foreign capital investors complain that the revised labor code is more favorable to labor than to capital. But Indonesia is said to have traversed the fall of the Suharto dictatorship, the Asian financial crisis, and a chaotic period of democratic experimentation with flying colors. Thirteen years after the overthrow of Suharto, the country’s unique advantage is said to be its offering global capital “rapid growth with democratic stability.” While there is no one program like the Bolsa in Brazil, Indonesia’s poverty reduction is trumpeted by the United Nations and the World Bank as being among the most impressive in the world, with the number of those living in poverty estimated at 13 percent of the population. Contributing to this has been what many regard as one of the Suharto regime’s few enduring positive legacies: a successful population management program.
Lula’s Indonesian counterpart is President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former general under Suharto who is credited with stabilizing the economy while consolidating democratic governance during his first term in office from 2004 and 2009. Like Lula, Yudhoyono is popular not only with global capital, but with the people: In his run for a second term in 2009, he coasted to a commanding victory. And like Lula, who did not behave as labor’s representative in power, Yudhoyono — “SBY” to most Indonesians — has not ruled in the top-down fashion expected from an ex-military man.
For many on the left in both countries, however, the social situation is far from ideal, and they see Lula and SBY’s formula of friendship with capital cum poverty mitigation as the wrong formula to address their countries’ massive problems. Their skepticism is not unjustified: According to the Institute for Applied Economic Research, social inequality has not changed in 25 years. Half the total income in Brazil is held by the richest 10 percent, and only 10 percent of the national wealth is shared by the poorest 50 percent. Owing to continuing plunder by powerful logging interests with friends in high places, Indonesia’s rate of deforestation is among the 10 quickest on earth, the main reason it has become the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. For the moment, however, these dissenters are a subdued minority.
Does Global Capital Need More Liberal Regimes?
It will take some time before China is displaced from its premier position as global capital’s preferred investment site, but the latter’s fears are increasingly coming to the fore. Zizek is right, and wrong: it seems that while iron fisted authoritarian rule served global capital’s interests well for the last two decades, it also — in the view of China’s corporate guests — produced a polity with deep fissures that now regularly erupt. Their great worry about China is that it is becoming a pressure cooker with few safety valves, as the Communist Party comes down harder on labor and becomes even more resistant to democratic initiatives.
It seems that for the stable reproduction of capitalist relations during the current phase of the global economy, more open political systems that allow conflicts to be settled via elections and possess more liberal labor regimes are a better bet, from the perspective of capital.
The irony of the situation is that even Chinese corporations may eventually find the social regimes of Brazil and Indonesia more favorable for their profitability and stable growth than China itself.
IFG Board Members Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow Together on Earth Day Speaking on the Rights of Mother Earth
New Report from the Council of Canadians:
A Review of Private Sector Influence on Water Policies and Programmes at the United Nations was presented May 4, 2011 at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development’s 19th session (May 2-13, New York).
Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow writes, “For years, many human rights, social justice and environmental groups, as well as grassroots communities around the world fighting for their right to water, have decried the growing influence of big water corporations at the United Nations. Read more
New Report by IFG Board Member, Maude Barlow:
Calls for the Great Lakes to be named a Commons, Public Trust and Protected Bioregion
Our Great Lakes Commons: A People's Plan to Protect the Great Lakes Forever, March 2011
Our Great Lakes Commons: A People’s Plan to Protect the Great Lakes Forever is an in-depth report about the critical importance of forging a new future for the Great Lakes watershed, which provides life and livelihood to more than 40 million people in Canada and the United States, as well as thousands of species that live around it.
The paper is intended to serve as a background and a call to understanding and action on a new proposal to designate the Great Lakes and its tributary waters as a lived Commons, to be shared, protected, carefully managed and enjoyed by all who live around them.
Stefania D'Alessandro/Getty Images
Vandana Shiva: Environmentalist and founder of Diverse Women for Diversity
When Shiva, 58, and women villagers wrapped their arms around trees to prevent them being felled by commercial loggers, the name "tree hugger" was born. Since then Shiva's influence on the global environmental movement has grown. Fascinated by physics, she went to the University of Western Ontario but left her formal scientific work when she was
inspired by the non-violence of the Chipko movement. "My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I learned from the [peasant women] what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge." Shiva founded her Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in 1982, in a cow shed at the foothills of the Himalayas, to "serve the powerless not the powerful, which would not get all its cue from Western Universities and international institutions, but would also be open to learn from the indigenous knowledge of local communities".
Her organisation promotes biodiversity, conservation and small farmers' rights. She is an authority on globalisation and biodiversity, lobbying governments and challenging agriculture giants such as Monsanto.
She has been called naive, with critics saying her promotion of organic farming will not be able to support the world's food needs, but Shiva has always said this is a short-term view. Vandana's main theme is biodiversity - the power of agribusiness, she says, will lead to a domination of homogenous genetically-engineered seeds, that will eventually require farmers to use vast quantities of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and water. Farmers in developing countries will not reap the economic benefits of their harvests, she argues; instead, that will go to a handful of global companies who will also hold the future power of food security.
Describing herself as an ecofeminist, Shiva, who also founded the organisation Diverse Women for Diversity , says feminism and environmentalism are inseparable. "Women who produce for their families and communities are treated as 'non-productive' and economically inactive. The devaluation of women's work, and of work done in sustainable economies, is the natural outcome of a system constructed by capitalist patriarchy. This is how globalisation destroys local economies and destruction itself is counted as growth."
Latest Story of Stuff film on corporate influence in U.S. democracy
To support the folks flexing their citizen muscle in Wisconsin and celebrate the launch, The Story of Stuff Project ran a full-page ad in the Wisconsin State Journal March 1 to highlight Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's relationship with the Koch brothers-the union-busting, climate-denying poster children for everything that's wrong with Citizens United.
Koch Industries was one of the biggest contributors to the governor's election campaign and gave over $1 million to support candidates during the 2010 elections.
That probably helps to explain why Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute and other Koch-funded organizations were among the biggest boosters of "corporate free speech" when the Supreme Court was considering Citizens United v. FEC.
Make sure to sign Public Citizen's petition for a constitutional amendment to undo the Citizens United decision. Its time to get the corporations out of our democracy and get the people back in!
The Story of Citizens United v. FEC is an exploration of the crisis of corporate influence in American democracy. Released March 1, 2011
Kalahari Bushmen win right to water in Botswanacourt decision: important win! Test case for UN right to water resolution
27 January 2010
Survival International reports this morning that, "In a momentous decision, Botswana’s Court of Appeal today quashed a ruling that denied the Kalahari Bushmen access to water on their ancestral lands. ...Celebrating after the decision, a Bushman spokesman said, ‘We are very happy that our rights have finally been recognized. Like any human beings, we need water to live.'"
Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow says, "This is a major win, it's the first test case of our right to water resolution at the United Nations."
In an August 2010 Survival International media release, Barlow condemned the Botswana government’s failure to allow Bushmen to access water. She stated, "Last week, the UN General Assembly declared that everyone, everywhere, has the right to water. But now the world witnesses one of Africa’s most prosperous countries denying its first inhabitants the right to sink a well, while promoting mining and safari camps just a few miles away. It’s hard to imagine a more cruel and inhuman way to treat people. One can only conclude Botswana’s authorities view Bushmen as less important than wildlife. Many people around the world will be horrified at what they’re seeing."
Survival’s director, Stephen Corry, said today, "This is a great victory for the Bushmen, and also for Botswana as a whole. ...This is, after all, a victory for human rights and the rule of law throughout Botswana."
The Economics of Happiness: Berkeley Screening with Director and Special Guests Presented by International Society for Ecology & Culture
Thursday, January 13, 6:30 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Brower Center, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Theater
2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 Tel: 510.809.0900
Join Producer Helena Norberg-Hodge for a screening of “The Economics of Happiness.” The film will be followed by a panel discussion with special guests Richard Heinberg (Post Carbon Institute), Jenny Kassan (Sustainable Economies Law Center), Rosa Gonzalez (Bay Localize), and Eric Holt-Gimenez (Food First). Learn More
2010 Board Member
News
Dr. Vandana Shiva Announces:
Independent People's Tribunal on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab, & Operation Green Hunt
April 9-11, 2010
Constitution Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi
Let us stand in solidarity with voices from Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal.
Justice Sawant, Justice Suresh, Admiral Taheliyani, Professor Yash Pal, Dr. P.M. Bhargava, and other eminent judges will preside over the tribunal, joined by activists, social scientists, lawyers, writers, and other experts.
Hosted by Citizen’s Against Forced Displacement and War on People More information - (Tel.) +91-9899111320 or +91-9818905316
People's
Will to Stay GMO Free, Feb 10, 2010 - by Vandana Shiva The Minister of Environment Jairam Ramesh
announced the Moratorium on the Bt. Brinjal. As he stated,
moratorium implies rejection of this particular case
of relief for the time being. It does not in anyway mean
conditional acceptance....
Read full story or download the entire 200K
pdf Read
"Indian Farmers' Letter To Minister on Bt Brinjal"
The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced,
fact-filled look at the leading climate solution - emissions trading
- on the negotiating table at Copenhagen and in other capitals.
Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street
financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils
in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits
to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what's really
required to tackle the climate crisis. If you've heard about Cap & Trade,
but aren't sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film
is for you.
The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory
and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are
straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark
puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing
polluting chemicals floating in the air.
Which is one reason “The
Story of Stuff,” a
20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become
a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.
The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment
of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it
has been embraced by teachers eager to supplement textbooks that
lag behind scientific findings on climate
change and pollution...
(Read
entire article.)
Live
like a green heroine - and hold the stuff Wednesday, April 8, 2009, Noelle Robbins,
Special to The SF Chronicle
Annie Leonard, named one of Time magazine's
2008 Environmental Heroes, knows better than most: It's not so
easy living green.
Leonard created and narrates the international Web documentary
phenomenon "Story of Stuff," which summarizes her 20
years of global sleuthing: tracking the source of the stuff we
buy and the fate of the stuff we throw away. This lively animated
film makes the point that if everyone on Earth consumed at U.S.
levels, we would need five planets.
Leading by example, Leonard shows how simple
steps and a little patience can help people create environmentally
friendly, energy-efficient, stuff-free lives..... (read
entire article)
IFG
Congratulates our Board Member Annie Leonard,
creator of the acclaimed video "The Story
of Stuff" on being named a TIME Magazine
Hero of the Environment 2008
Heroes
of the Environment 2008: Annie Leonard By BRYONY SCHWAN Bryony Schwan is executive director
of the Biomimicry Institute in Montana
My friends often don't believe
me when I say I can spend an entire evening listening
to stories about garbage and be completely mesmerized.
That's because they haven't met Annie Leonard. She
has been relentlessly explaining the absurdity of
our throwaway culture to me and many others for decades.
While her mastery of detail is impressive, it's her
passionate style that transforms bleak facts into
emotive stories that compel you to take action. Read
the rest of the TIME Magazine Article....
UN President Appoints Canadian as New Senior
Advisor on Water Maude Barlow appointed first
Senior Advisor on water issues by Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, President
of the 63rd session of the United Nations. More...
New
Report from the Council of Canadians Our Water Commons - Toward a new freshwater
narrative
Written by Maude Barlow
