Wampum

Unfortunately "globalization" has taken on an undeserved bad connotations. When the Right uses it, yes, it is double-speak for increasing corporate profits, by-passing labor and environmental laws, and wage blackmail against unions and america's working class. On the other hand, a globalization tied with a global moral contract can benefit both american and foreign workers in the long run. The center-left spectrum cares about poverty here at home and around the world...so its the old story modified...to fed the poor today give them food...to feed them tomorrow give them the tools to provide for themselves. We are better off with global trade AS LONG as its tied to what the american labor market can handle ( kind of the way that the minimum wage is supposed to be tied to the cost of living ),labor rights and respect for a sustainable environment.
Huge problems ahead with China, where workers will work for even less then Indian workers. Its not hard to guess who's fueling Chinese economic boom, and the de facto growth of its military; the same conservatives who supportted Bush and for years cried about the tyranny of communism.

It seems to me that there are two miss- or re-directions that come up in discussion of globalization.

The first, which took up most of the comments after John Edwards' temp-take post at TPM Cafe, is that with education and basic research ... the actual effect of deindustrialization can be abstracted away.

Michael Moore made a film on the subject, and the rust belt in 2005 is proof that deindustrialization isn't fixed by retraining and education.

The second is that implantation of industries is a substitute for clean water, access to medicine, education, all the major desireables of development characterized by a century of north, and south development theorists and practitioners.

A discussion of development that begins and ends in the management of profit extracted from wage labor differentials isn't that attractive to me. One that starts with clean water, access to education for girls, health and nutrition and includes sustainable development, that is.

Laurent Fabius deserves everything they give him. The man is a hypocrite and a thief, and was in charge of the appalling contaminated blood scandal but somehow got away with it. He signed up to the Single European Act (the measure to complete the single internal market), introduced a monetarist economic policy to France, and now claims he's some sort of leftist hero.

The Constitution was a last best chance to sort out the EU's decision procedures. It was no more "neoliberal" than the original Treaty of Rome, in fact considerably less as it includes the Maastricht Social Chapter. I wouldn't piss on the man if he was on fire.

I'm not that thrilled with the regime in power in DC's approach to HIV transmission either.

Yes, Fabius and all of the European party leaderships in power, drank the single market koolaid. But the European electorate didn't. What happened wasn't "xenophobie" picking up 55% of the vote (61% in the Netherlands, with Luxembourg to vote soon too).

Even the Belgian government notes it would have liked the exclusion from qualified majority voting to cover tax and social policy -- in addition to immigration, border control, judicial cooperation in criminal matters, intellectual property, culture, civil protection, social security for migrant workers -- issues with only peripheral concern to wage labor and social support.

OT: What was the MoD final-final on the Hercules shoot-down weapon?