Global Village or Global Pillage, Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, annotated bibliography

Hiroko Yoshimura, Akiko Toya, and Masanobu Okada

The main argument of the reading is how globalization has resulted to benefit the developed countries by exploiting the labors and resources of the developing countries. The author first explains how the global competition of business came about (p. 143-145). In the 19th century, old businesses, including shoemakers and hatmakers started competing against each other. When the globalization came about, such competition began involving developing countries, using their cheap labors. As a result, we see factories such as Maquiladoras, in which people’s labor is exploited and their human rights are taken away. (Hiroko)

As growing globalization of business, advanced countries tend to take advantage of developing countries. For example, since companies in advanced countries are trying to sell product as much as they can at low price, they force labors in developing countries to produce product by working at law wage, unreasonable length of time and treatment in bad work environment. To combat such a situation, the authors introduce the concept of “Grand Bargain” (p. 110). This is an idea of mutual negotiation done by both the advanced and developing countries to come to the solution that benefits both groups. Examples of this type of negotiation are “Earth Summit” and “Social Summit,” formal dialogues about environmental and social issues by many of the representatives of both advanced and developing countries (p. 111). (Akiko)

The world is in the midst of the unstoppable flow of globalization. The main question Jeremy and Tim posed in the essay is “how can those who oppose downward leveling do so effectively?” (Jeremy, Tim 105). Because there is no global government to legislate on behalf of the world’s people, the flow of globalization seems to be in stuck and bring considerable problems. Jeremy and Tim regard the system of nation-based economies as the core cause of the issues. In the essay, they propose the concept which might be silver bullet: transnational citizen action. They believe that this transnational citizen action can call on genuine democracy at bath local and national level depending upon people organizing themselves and acting independently of government. In doing so, the idea they call “Lilliput Strategy” is effective to be applied. Lilliput, described in the story Gulliver’s travel, succeeded to capture and control giant Gulliver by trying him down with hundreds of tiny threads. As this metaphor demonstrates, Jeremy and Tim state that people need to establish the dense network of threads tied around the world which can control the speed and degree of the globalization. If people succeed to do this, they can “utilize the relatively modest sources of power available to them” and “combine them with often quite different power to other participants” in order to deal with seemingly powerful global forces and institutions (106). (Masa)