Global Free-Market Capitalism
Global Free-Market Capitalism
It is merely impossible to oversee the similarities between David Harvey’s ‘Rebel Cities’, Timothy Mitchell’s ‘Rule of Experts’, and the current global economic crisis we are seeing on the news today. Though it was tough, I sat down to watch Bill O’Rilley last night and was shocked to see that a lot of what he was saying pertained to the issues we have been dissecting in class. Our national debt is around seventeen trillion dollars, and we are adding around $3.2 billion A DAY in our current spending cycle. I have to assume that this is in part due to the spread of global capitalism, with the United States as its front-runner. As seen in the bailouts of the past decade, the public sector [the US government] is taking in the risks of the private sector [such as GM] by subsidizing and giving incentives to large companies in order to create more jobs. This was done with the intention of keeping jobs in the United States, and in turn creates this ‘race to the bottom’, which we discussed in class. National, state, and local governments are giving more and more to the powerful and fickle private sector; as competition from other cities grows, negotiations must become more intriguing to the private sector in order to keep them in the US [since cheap labor is ample in other parts of the world].
Outsourcing in the United States has become a drastic issue, as O’Rilley spoke of and Harvey and Mitchell focused on. This is because large private sectors do not want to pay US citizens’ minimum wage or union contract wage; they want to make sure that labor is cheap and docile, which they find in ‘developing’ countries. Though Mitchell’s ‘Rule of Experts’ was to exemplify the issues in Egypt, it makes a clear connection to what is happening in the rest of the world, especially in the Occupy Wall Street movements that Harvey also tackles. In order to create a ‘global capitalism’ that is a positive reinforcement to the chaos the US capitalist system,
It is merely impossible to oversee the similarities between David Harvey’s ‘Rebel Cities’, Timothy Mitchell’s ‘Rule of Experts’, and the current global economic crisis we are seeing on the news today. Though it was tough, I sat down to watch Bill O’Rilley last night and was shocked to see that a lot of what he was saying pertained to the issues we have been dissecting in class. Our national debt is around seventeen trillion dollars, and we are adding around $3.2 billion A DAY in our current spending cycle. I have to assume that this is in part due to the spread of global capitalism, with the United States as its front-runner. As seen in the bailouts of the past decade, the public sector [the US government] is taking in the risks of the private sector [such as GM] by subsidizing and giving incentives to large companies in order to create more jobs. This was done with the intention of keeping jobs in the United States, and in turn creates this ‘race to the bottom’, which we discussed in class. National, state, and local governments are giving more and more to the powerful and fickle private sector; as competition from other cities grows, negotiations must become more intriguing to the private sector in order to keep them in the US [since cheap labor is ample in other parts of the world].
Outsourcing in the United States has become a drastic issue, as O’Rilley spoke of and Harvey and Mitchell focused on. This is because large private sectors do not want to pay US citizens’ minimum wage or union contract wage; they want to make sure that labor is cheap and docile, which they find in ‘developing’ countries. Though Mitchell’s ‘Rule of Experts’ was to exemplify the issues in Egypt, it makes a clear connection to what is happening in the rest of the world, especially in the Occupy Wall Street movements that Harvey also tackles. In order to create a ‘global capitalism’ that is a positive reinforcement to the chaos the US capitalist system,