Quotes About Globalization

We need the children of Indonesia and the Philippines to manufacture our freedom of choice.

I had begun to understand that although most Americans have no idea that lifestyles are built on exploitation, millions of people in other countries are aware of it.

The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world's population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995.3 The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the planet.4

Is anyone in the U.S. innocent? Although those at the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid gain the most, millions of us depend—either directly or indirectly—on the exploitation of the LDCs for our livelihoods. The resources and cheap labor that feed nearly all our businesses come from places like Indonesia, and very little ever makes its way back.

The modern slave trader assures himself (or herself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community.

Read Civilization on Trial and The World and the West.

The goats were replaced by two hundred bright yellow American trash compactor trucks, provided under a $200 million contract with Waste Management, Inc.

Joined by retired Democratic senator George Mitchell and former Senate aide Charlie Scheeler, DLA Piper sought to protect the avaricious interests of its clients, including one of the retailers identified with the factory collapse (Gap), at the expense of the people and economy of Bangladesh.1

The very idea of a nation-state intentionally built on ideas and a multiplicity of races, languages and myths doesn't fit into the historic Western framework and therefore cannot be real.

The rapid global economic growth from the 1950s required ever-increasing quantities of raw materials and foodstuffs—metals, oil, coal, timber, fish, meat, and agricultural commodities of all types. Heightened demand for these pushed commodity frontiers ever outward, into parts of the world that were not yet wholly integrated into the modern economy.

In the half century after 1950, the global economy grew sixfold. Annual economic growth averaged 3.9 percent per year, far outstripping the estimated historical averages for the industrial age up to that point (1820–1950) of 1.6 percent per year and for the "early modern," post-Columbian world (1500–1820) of 0.3 percent per year

Other countries pass laws requiring that their movie theaters, television networks, and radio stations have to play a certain percentage of homegrown entertainment. Because if they didn't, Hollywood would wipe it all out. We're not a world leader because we have nuclear missiles and submarines. We are because we have Bugs Bunny and Friends. Our planet is what Hollywood has made it.

Your president only speaks for Americans. American movies speak for your world. Who hasn't seen Wizard of Oz? Or Jaws? Or Star Wars? We've seen them, and we're not even from this planet.

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.

When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.

We belong to a tradition where we treat the entire universe as our family. For me, globalisation is the manifestation of nationalisation. There is no contradiction between the two.

In its current form, globalization cannot be sustained. Democratic societies will not support it. Authoritarian leaders will fear to impose it.

In foreign countries they fear baldness. They are so rich in foreign countries, they can afford to fear all kinds of silly things.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was, the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China. To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land.

But I'm hesitant to introduce myself with this characterization, immediately reducing everything I am to my alcoholism. It's strange that the tendency in this global world is to accentuate identities, picking the one that most marginalizes you—sexuality, race, disability. I'm struck by the way we all rush to join our particular group, emphasizing what makes us different from everyone else, in order to make us all the same.

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

America is becoming more and more dependent upon imports from foreign manufacturers than we are exports from our country in all fields: in appliances, in clothing, even food. This year America may become for the first time in its history a net food importer.

Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.