Eliminate a policy designed for the betterment of the population! So that's one of the aims of the WTO, to promote corporate interests, even when it's bad for the general population.
Personally I believe that whatever consenting adults get up to is none of the government's business, whether it's weird butt stuff or selling each other unlimited quantities of sugary water. If you're going to ban one, why not ban the other? They're both enjoyable to certain people and both have negative public health consequences.
-Samuel Butler, Erewhon.
Not satire as much these days, sadly.
https://chomsky.info/secrets03/
Here is Bernie Sanders being visibly upset at raising immigration levels and instituting "open borders" policy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
I am kind of interested how the current liberals become pro-globalization all of the sudden. They went from organizing large anti-globalization riots, and getting tear gased fighting it, to "What do you mean? We love globalization!".
I want to see a more specific analysis in how the shift happened, and maybe a more detailed timeline. Certainly an interesting topic.
Here is of course Zuckerberg with his letter worrying that people are not buying the globalization shtick very well anymore:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38998884
If you squint enough to not notice the liberal veneer he puts on you might think he is one of the Koch brothers.
https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/d...
Recent generations have been conditioned by society to accept globalisation - amongst other things. The book, which I only recently read myself, describes what has been happening for hundreds of years and it's to do with progress - technical progress, of which technology is just the pinnacle.
Those people who were against globalisation on the left were the old guard, the people who were strong supporters of trade unions and were proud of their local communities. Sanders is an example in the US, Corbyn or Skinner are examples in the UK.
He looks at these topics from a long term economic viewpoint. He has a left wing academic perspective, which clouds his conclusions though. There are lots of lectures from him on YouTube.
There are a lot of groups under the "liberal" tent, like there are a lot of groups under the "conservative" tent.
If you take everyone to the left of Reagan and put them all under one label of "liberal", then confusion understandably results. In particular, conflating Millian "liberals" with Marxist "socialists" with whoever happens to be running a street demo is a bad idea. The riots were specifically the work of the "black bloc", a small group of left-anarchists.
The general complaints of the (non-violent) protestors were to do with exactly this kind of thing - the use of a transnational process to override local environmental / labour law improvements for the profit of multinational companies.
The liberal (not socialist!) argument for free movement of people is partly the libertarian "why are you using force against a natural freedom" argument, and partly a pragmatic one that if capital now has free movement labour should as well.
A situation where capital can freely move to the most favourable jurisdiction but labour cannot is politically unsustainable.
(Yes, I left all this out of the original one-sentence snark.)
The riots was hyperbole, there were not the only ones advocating for anti-globalization. So was Bernie Sanders, Chomsky and many others. There were not tear gassed for it regularly but the ideology was there.
> A situation where capital can freely move to the most favourable jurisdiction but labour cannot is politically unsustainable.
The point was it was traditionally the Koch brothers and the like who advocated "globalization" not anyone calling themselves "the left". So it seems there was a reversal on the topic which I think is interesting.
You mention libertarianism, but that was usually closer aligned to conservatism than "leftism" so to speak.
> In particular, conflating Millian "liberals" with Marxist "socialists" with whoever happens to be running a street demo is a bad idea.
Yes that is the issue. I think both are referred to as "the left". And at some point it is worth pointing out the difference and seeing that from a traditional point there isn't much left left in "the left" (pun intended), which I think is interesting and was trying to find a more detailed analysis of it.
It seems to me there was split around the late 90s where the divisions are more like between "faux-liberalism + corporatism" (this includes Democrats like the Clintons and Obama), "faux-conservatism + corporatism" (Bushes), "conservatist populism" (Trump and company), "traditional left" (Sanders, Chomsky).
The "faux" bit is because the liberalism vs conservatism is a veneer used to attract whatever is deemed popular at the time. Latest Clinton campaign and Obama used identity politics and immigration to sell corporatism. Bush (junior mostly) used religion to sell "conservatism".
Also it is rather interesting that Trump capitalized on a traditional leftist position of anti-globalization (anti-NAFTA, pulling out of TPP, talk about workers etc). He probably saw a void there with Democrats abandoning that ideology and moved in opportunistically to capitalize on it.
Reminds me of the planet Norstrilia in Cordwainer Smith's fiction, which exports an astronomically precious immortality drug, yet maintains its archaic culture (resembling Australian ranchers with a British cultural inheritance) with import taxes of over 20000000%.
Depends who you ask. Some people understand the risks of junk food but still want it (same as with alcohol and tobacco). Junk food also tends to be cheaper per calorie.
Not bellow junk food.
Hell, I'd be willing to bet that more people who eat junk food become effective "junk food addicts" and develop resultant health problesm as a percentage than do people who use LSD, MDMA, or even cocaine.
The food is designed to be a hyperstimulus, moreish beyond anything humans would find to eat in the wild.
How is the food not the problem?
but bananas? Yes, some people get fat eating too many fruits
You can gain weight on a high fruit diet, but bananas are an unusual choice. Fruit juice on the other hand is much easier way to gain weight, but like most processed foods less heathy.
And it's not like you're only eating fruit. These people would eat a normal meal and then snack on fruits constantly. So if they didn't eat fruit they'd only be getting 2000 calories a day, but it's quite easy to eat 500 calories of dried dates or dried figs.
Why draw the line there? Because hard drugs so directly impair the mind.
In general, countries like that don't have unhealthy, locally-produced food. And the article agrees with that assertion. We have a patent on junk food.
Patently false assertion. I'm ethnically a pacific islander who grew up on a small island in Micronesia and I can assure you that local island dishes are quite unhealthy.
It's easy to attribute dishes as healthy when just considering fish and taro, but this fails to acknowledge its traditional preparation with high amounts of coconut milk, salt, and sugar. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a nutritional facts label for any traditional dish? I can only speak anecdotally in that traditional Samoan dishes are not unlike Micronesia to the degree that Georgia Southern foods are clearly distinct from Alabama's flavor (that is to say they're not).
I think one of the biggest problems is the dependence of poorer remote islands in the Pacific on less perishable foods: think canned goods like Spanish sausage, Spam, sardines, Palm corned beef (from NZ), etc. or cheap frozen meats by the box, e.g. ribs, chicken, turkey legs, etc.
When I was growing up, my father would make the ocassional business trip to the FSM (specifically Palau). He'd bring boxes of frozen ribs and chicken with him and exchange for coolers of fresh lobster with his local contacts. Throw in a few cases of canned Budweiser and those business negotiations always turned out great. This might sound crazy to people who grew up in 1st-world countries, but it's a thing, and if you grew up on the islands as I did, then you know precisely what's up.
Just a couple of quotes from the article that my assertion is based on fact.
Experts say the region’s health crisis is primarily driven by a decades-long shift from traditional diets based on root crops toward ones that are high in sugar, refined starch and processed foods.
It is so wrong what is being done to exploit these nations by providing a food supply that is not, in the long term, better for health,...
As I've pointed out in a previous comment, when was the last time you saw a label of nutritional facts on any local dish anywhere in the Pacfic that allowed vetting of such a claim? When traditional preparation methods of natural foods are simply dismissed without consideration, it's easy to attribute these foods as anything but unhealthy. That's the misjudgement I see having personally grown up on a wee little-known island in the Pacific.
The quotes in the article point out the seriousness of the issue primarily driven by foreign food products high in sugar, refined starch and processed foods. I'm definitely in agreement with this claim, but it does not--indeed cannot--assert as fact that locally-produced foods are intrinsically healthy, and by that I specifically mean how they're traditional prepared.
Which begs the question: Was rigorous Western medicine on the scene prior to foreign influence that it was able to ascertain the health baseline of an indigenous population prior to its exploitation? If foreign dietary choices disappeared overnight, that doesn't necessarily mean that overall population health will realize some normalcy comparable to the rest of the 1st world. I believe there are deeply rooted cultural norms distinct to each island that have yet to be addressed.
Countries are free to join the WTO, if they don't feel the package is worth it, they are free to opt out. What they can't do is get it piece-meal.
In this case a good reason, but I can just as equally imagine that (eg) some subsidy or tariff is there primarily to protect a powerful voting bloc, or friends of whichever government put the rule in place.