General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe devastating impact of globalization upon poor, minority communities
No sensible person can say globalization has helped poor minorities in America. In fact it has made their situation worse.
One thing you'll never get out of a fan of globalism is what they think happens to one of these communities when a factory closes and moves overseas. It's a whole lot different than moving out of state. Hint: moving to a job outside the country requires a passport and immigrating or getting a work visa, either of which is a long, expensive and horrific process in addition to the cost of moving, that is assuming the other country will even let you in. Nope, you won't hear about that, because then globalism isn't looking so great, is it? Especially if you're a poor minority.
But hey, as long as we aren't "protectionist" it's okay to throw the poor minorities under the bus, right? Right?
http://global-ejournal.org/2009/05/15/globalization-the-global-trope-and-poor-black-communities-the-recent-american-experience/
Globalization, the Global Trope, and Poor Black Communities: The Recent American Experience
Today, in the shadows of shiny gentrified blocks and gleaming downtown skyscrapers, many poor African American neighborhoods in America continue to suffer. Globalization continues to afflict these already punished terrains in ways that are now well chronicled. Most conspicuously, globalization engulfs these terrains and eradicates decent paying jobs and lowers pay rates. Hyper-frenetic, globally coordinated businesses and corporations, increasingly dominating urban economies, potently order and re-order locations of jobs, investment, and physical infrastructure (notably plant and store locations). In a process described by David Harvey (2000, 2005), capitals continuous search for profitability takes the form of a restless and relentless re-making of the spaces of production. In its wake, these communities experience intensified poverty, underemployment, and unemployment.
But the impact of globalization on these communities has another dimension. Less recognized is that globalization, as a kind of cultivated imagining that is aggressively spoken, is widely put in the service of neoliberal urban politics (via diverse kinds of communicating) that deepens the production of these disadvantaged communities. Here, what globalization is thought to be by people is seized and wielded like a cudgel to punish and discipline planning measures, social welfare programs, and urban policy. Planning, political expediency, and opportunistic pronouncements of a new ominous reality meld into one potent political force. In the process, the public often comes to casually accept an entrepreneurializing of cities that afflicts these racialized communities. Let me provide specifics about this profoundly influential but only dimly recognized process (see also Wilson, 2007).
These poor African American communities today continue to suffer with a strengthened functional logic assigned to them: to warehouse contaminants in the new competitive, global reality. These communities across Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and the like have, for decades, warehoused the racial poor as the real-estate sectors in these cities have used planning and policy to keep key housing markets healthy and profitable. But in the latest twist on this, ghetto maintenance has increasingly involved wielding the recent fear and obsession within a supposed new era: globalization. This elaborate rhetoric, now served up heavily in newspapers, planning documents, and politician oratory, has been a key trigger to mobilize and put into play crucial ghetto-afflicting forces (targeting of government resources to cultivate a robust entrepreneurial city, retrenching the local welfare state, rhetorically attacking these populations and spaces). This rhetoric, which I term the global trope, typically extends neoliberal principles and designs into common thought and city planning measures (particularly the notion of the private-market as best determinant of social and land-use outcomes). The global trope, in this frame, is served up as a frank and blunt package of truths about city realities and needs that can no longer be suppressed. In assertion, its pleas correspond to core truths; deft interpreters read and respond to clear truths as a policy prescriptive, progressive human intervention onto a turbulent and fragile city.
The rhetoric of the global trope has thus been a perceptual apparatus with profound material effects. It has served up a digestible reality that, following Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1994), guides construction of programs and policies by making certain actions thinkable and rational and others not. Imposed webs of meanings, like symbolic cages, build bars around senses of reality that place gazes within discrete and confining visions. One reality is ultimately advanced while alternatives are purged. Here is Mikhael Bakhtins (1981) implicit dialogue with other points of view, the simultaneity of asserting one vision and annihilating others. This strategic affirmation and rebuke, forwarding what exists and what does not, continues to make this rhetorical formation a fundamental instrument of power. As this apparatus has resisted and beaten back competitive visions of city and societal realities, even as it is contested and struggled against, it grows stronger in many U.S. cities.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)A lot of people supported NAFTA in the 90s because we were told there would be programs for structural readjustment. To re-train workers for new jobs and place them in newer and supposedly better jobs. That never really happened. There are some small programs but clearly not enough. It's also pretty clear that the newer jobs never really materialized in the first place. I doubt too many people are falling for the "free trade" con anymore.
lalalu
(1,663 posts)if outsourcing had not moved up the skill ladder. There were people who predicted that the first and hardest hit would be low skilled African Americans. Then it moved to blue collar White American workers.
It was only when higher skilled Americans started seeing their jobs outsourced that people started panicking. When employers started lying and claiming they needed skilled Visa workers while laying qualified Americans off and moving overseas.
Until then no one cared.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)wiping out manufacturing was a fatal blow.
Manufacturing produced millions of high-paying jobs. They have been replaced with low-paying temp jobs. And now there are fewer jobs than there are people seeking them, too.
I was protesting the advent of outsourcing back before NAFTA passed. A lot of others did, too. H. Ross Perot sure as hell did. Lots of people cared. Just not enough of us.
Response to Zalatix (Original post)
Post removed
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)And from my relative lifetime in those communities, I call bullshit on that. It's an erroneous Republican talking point.
As for the rest of your broad brushing and negative stereotyping about black people, who along with Latinos constitute my heritage... bah. All hide-worthy, but worse shit gets let go by a jury.