Globalization

Globalization is the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. I certainly don’t understand what that means and I don’t think most people do either. In this argument I’m going to take the anti-globalization stance and try to shed some light on those so devoted to the idea of globalization.

OK, BUT BE SURE TO ATTEND TO THE POPULAR DEFINITIONS OF GLOBALIZATION BY CITING AUTHORITIES IN DIFFERENT FIELDS. THEN, YOU HAVE THE ETHOS YOU NEED TO SPEAK TO THE COMPLEXITY THAT MAKES GLOBALIZATION A HARD-TO-UNDERSTAND CONCEPT

SHARERIFF

First things first, while it is true that globalization does encourage free trade among all of the world’s countries; it leaves the poorer tier of countries at a disadvantage to the larger, more powerful ones. This is usually because of the systems these countries use. The larger countries have used globalization as growth, and they have power to spare. The smaller countries support themselves mostly with their agriculture. This is all well and good, but the countries with the bigger economies choose to subsidize their farmers, which actually lowers the market price for the poor country’s crops, at least comparatively with the free trade price. This leaves those farmers at a disadvantage.

                The farming problem indirectly leads to another issue; the one of cheap labor. Industrialized nations like the United States bring in labor from other, less industrialized countries for incredibly low wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions. However, the salaries are high enough that the workers will have no choice but to work there because the subsidies in larger countries harm the farming in the smaller ones. This is the precise reason these countries subsidize the farming and choose not to rectify the problems of inequality. If they did, then the cheap labor would disappear and prices for their country would rise substantially. So what these governments have created is a very delicate balance between these countries that no one else sees. A strong percentage of the GDP in the lower tier economy countries comes from remittances from these workers. So now we’ve created a system where the poorer countries can’t work for themselves due to the unfairness of the market, and a part of their economies depends on their salaries which they receive here, which is more than they’d get in their own countries. So they either work here, or starve.

                Critiques of the current wave of economic globalization typically look at both the damage to the planet, in terms of the perceived unsustainable harm done to the biosphere, as well as the perceived human costs, such as poverty, inequality, miscegenation, injustice and the erosion of traditional culture which, the critics contend, all occur as a result of the economic transformations related to globalization.

There are well over 6,000 languages of the world, many of which currently face extinction at the hands epidemics, malnutrition, poverty, and tribal warfare. These are all human threats and globalization hasn’t even been mentioned yet. On top of this, there are probably tens of thousands more languages that have long become extinct for many of the same reasons as above well before the 19th century, when the modern trend of globalization found its footing. In this context, it is somewhat difficult to defend modern globalization being on the short list of menaces to linguistic preservation.

In the past, the languages in danger have been the ones that nobody knows about. The ones that get overlooked. When you go to school in another country and learn that language and you begin to speak that language alone. The native tongue will get overlooked and forgotten as they have no one to speak it with. And it continues to happen until the language becomes extinct. This is an argument for anti-globalization as well. Websites like ethnologue.com keep some vigilance over the 'health' of languages, documenting for the world just which languages are in trouble. Over this global network, a global research community works to identify, understand, and record the world's languages, providing some accountability for their continued preservation. This allows people to keep track of who’s in trouble and how it’s affecting that country. As English evolves into the world's de facto language of commerce and information exchange, progressively more places of the world will adopt it as a second language. It remains to be seen whether English will displace existing languages in these locales or supplement them (there has been evidence of both). About 75% of the world's mail, telexes, and cables are in English. Approximately 60% of the world's radio programs are in English, and about 90% of all Internet traffic is using English. It is clear how English is really becoming the language to know in the world today. Since the US, Great Britain, and Australia are some of the largest contributors to the world economy, and the main language is English for all three.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=global%20english&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=ws

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http://sustainableidentities.pbwiki.com/Jaime%20peer%20graded Unit II graded by Scott