[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: Globalism, democracy, and the ports deal - Robert Kuttner - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Globalism, democracy, and the ports deal

By Robert Kuttner  |  March 11, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE US POLITICAL elite has finally encountered a situation where 
globalization isn't an unmitigated blessing. President Bush, having used 
the fear factor to trump every other issue, was caught flat-footed when 
public opinion recoiled at a Persian Gulf company taking charge of major 
US ports.

The Dubai case was a genuinely close question. On the one hand, non-US 
companies already own US port operations. And the US Coast Guard is 
responsible for port security, regardless of who owns the facilities. On 
the other hand, it's harder to monitor the executives of a company based 
in the United Arab Emirates, and Al Qaeda might have an easier time 
infiltrating a Dubai company than a domestic one. These details got lost 
in the political uproar.

The Dubai ports affair invites a closer examination of the premise that 
the freest possible commerce in goods and services is all benefit and no 
cost. Let's see whether we are ready to take a serious look at 
complications of globalism.

There have long been national-security exceptions to the supposed ideal 
of free trade. The effort to contain proliferation of nuclear 
technologies and materials is one, but hardly the only one. The Defense 
Department and the corporate community regularly joust over which 
exports of advanced technologies should be constrained because of 
potential military uses.

The United States has an entirely schizophrenic view of trade in other 
weapons. It is the largest exporter of arms; this is presumably good for 
both business and for the project of knitting together other countries' 
military establishments with ours. Then US intelligence officials worry 
about these weapons falling into the wrong hands, which they often do.

But at least in the area of defense, there is a serious conversation 
about the limitations of free trade. When it comes to social and 
economic policy, however, anyone who raises the complications of 
globalism is dismissed as an economic imbecile.

However, we are citizens of the United States of America. There is no 
world government for us to be citizens of. In this country, civic 
decisions are made by the political process, not by the marketplace. 
Some of these decisions necessarily constrain the marketplace. To the 
extent that commerce is privileged over all other values, it erodes 
those other values.

As Americans, for instance, we have benefited from a social compact of 
protections enacted by our democratically elected representatives -- 
minimum wage laws, safety and health laws, social insurance, consumer 
safeguards, the right of workers to unionize, and so on. When we trade 
with nations that have no such protections, we run the risk of importing 
the absence of a social compact along with the products. That doesn't 
mean we should seal up our borders, but it does mean we should look 
harder at the terms of engagement.

Shouldn't we insist on certain social minimums in nations that want to 
trade freely with us? Should we allow the exploitation of foreign labor 
to lead to the battering down of wages and standards at home?

Business insists that trading nations respect its property rights. What 
about human rights and social rights?

Not only are we are importing restrictions on rights and liberties. In 
the Bush era -- witness the US government's kidnapping of terrorism 
suspects to countries that flagrantly use torture -- we are also 
exporting despotism. The same thing is happening in the private sector, 
where software companies have happily exported Internet censorship kits 
to several dictatorships.

Immigration is also complicated by the ideal of free global trade. Freer 
movement of products and services invites freer movement of people. Yet 
America remains a civic community, not just a marketplace; and there is 
a limit to how many immigrants can be absorbed at any one time.

The Bush administration is completely whipsawed between the desire of 
its business constituency to have as many cheap, vulnerable workers as 
possible and the backlash in the heartland, where such nationalists as 
US Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado are leading a revolt not just 
against illegal immigration but against all immigration. The United 
States needs to gain control of its borders, precisely to remain a 
liberal democracy where the working class gets to have normal rights and 
to vote. A hugely inflated and undocumented immigrant population does 
neither.

The question of how to engage with the global economy and remain a 
secure democracy is anything but simple. The Dubai debate had its share 
of demagoguery. But maybe it will get us thinking about some 
long-deferred, hard questions.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/11/globalism_democracy_and_the_ports_deal/
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