Globalization In America

U.S. presidents have often cited the widening gap between the rich and the poor as being the number one obstacle to world peace. So it is interesting to find that this gap is the greatest within the United States of America. Globalization has only widened this gap further in the U.S. and in countries where the U.S. has spread its capitalism through the exporting of U.S. businesses. Why then do U.S. presidents preach about the negative correlations between widening class gaps and civil disturbances when they themselves propagate and enable those who widen this gap further through U.S. policies? The United States exports capitalism in its raw form while practicing a mixed economy at home. Why? Could it be because the U.S. citizen will not
In the documentary, Life and Debt, the U.S. exported its great capitalist way of life to that poor backwards country to save it from itself. All we succeeded in was to create sweat shops and cause a division of wealth that is so great that there are riots in the streets. We exploited Jamaica for what we needed which was another market to sell our goods and cheap labor. We have effectively destroyed that country and turned it into an economic slave to our will. In Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place she says that in Antigua (a place similar to Jamaica in what has happened), “eventually the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way.”(pg. 80) The “masters left in a kind of way” is exactly right because they may have left physically but they never left economically because we control their economy. The “slaves were freed in a kind of way” is to say that just because they are not called slaves or have a master as in ownership they are still slaves just with an elevated status so as to not be a slave but not be free either. Ten dollars a week is not going to sustain anyone for long and therefore it is slavery with pay. Antiguans and Jamaicans alike don’t have a choice of whether or not they want to work for that amount because that is the only job they have available to them because the local businesses were pushed out
Capitalism does not promote freedoms and equality for all, but exactly the opposite. Inequality and economic slavery are the fruits of capitalism. The United States has spread its inequality across the globe allowing for the largest portion of the worlds wealth to ever be held by so few people. We have used capitalism and our armies to dominate the world. Could globalization and free trade ever promote greater freedoms that we have yet seen in the world? Only a world working together for the benefit of all and not the few could deliver the freedoms dreamed of by all. It will not come from armies nor will it come from capitalism. Capitalism has proven that it solely supports the few rich in the world who control the majority through economic and military might. The only way to ever right the wrongs that we have committed would be to cause our capitalist system to crumble under the weight of its greed, because only then amongst the turmoil can real change take place. The world needs a system that promotes the welfare of all not just the few and the only way to do that is to write a constitution that safeguards the people right to all those things essential to life. A system that limits the slice of the pie one can have is needed, because if this is not done then the more pie one person has the less there is