They are PART of the PROBLEM!!!!
"UN: Global economy needs government intervention" by Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post | July 2, 2008
WASHINGTON - Greater government intervention is needed to moderate the severe economic swings and inequalities that seem to be an unavoidable byproduct of globalization, according to a United Nations report released yesterday.
Pointing to food riots in dozens of countries whipsawed by soaring prices for wheat and other staples, and to the rising income inequality and economic insecurity that have become too-common features of economies in the developed world, the report says that governments should do more to protect people from the harshest effects of globalization.
The United Nations' 2008 World Economic and Social Survey calls for more government action, ranging from greater regulation of international capital flows to more generous foreign aid and perhaps the guarantee of a minimum basic income to the world's poorest residents. Domestically, it says, countries should offer more aid to people displaced by globalization to help them manage risk - in areas ranging from health care to retirement security - that has been piled on them as a result of the world's economic evolution.
"Markets cannot be left to their own devices in respect of delivering appropriate and desired levels of economic security," the report says.
I used to think that way. NOT ANY MORE!
Modern economic phenomena - such as global competition that erodes businesses' security, food shortages, and unstable capital flows that crimp investment and growth - are sometimes viewed as beyond the ability of governments to control. But the report says that is the wrong response. What is needed, it says, is "more active policy responses to help communities better manage these new risks."
C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the report is right to call for a more activist role for governments to ease the pain caused by globalization. He said the response should have two parts: international, with attention paid to things such as the regulation of capital flows and bolstering international aid, and domestic, with a focus on helping individuals hurt by the process.
In the United States, he said, global trade provides a net benefit to the economy but has become a hot-button issue because of its often harmful impacts on some. "The dislocating effects on American workers, impact on job insecurity, wage stagnation, worsening income distribution, require a substantial shoring up of domestic safety net programs," he said.
Without attention to that, support for globalization, which tends to grow shaky as economies cool, would be further undermined. "Where the country as a whole benefits substantially from globalization, there are certainly individuals who are losers from the process, and then they therefore oppose it," he said.I'm so sick of being lied to!
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