Fair Globalisation

Source: www.moreover.com --- 106 days ago
Egov Monitor Jul 1 2008 4:11PM GMT ...

Source: www.intute.ac.uk --- 5 days ago
Launched in 2004, Terra Madre is an international movement promoting local and regional food cultures. As part of the Slow Food campaign to counter-act the Globalisation of fast and junk food, Terra Madre's website provides information on the activities and organisation of the network of academics, public and private companies, food producers and suppliers, and caterers who are dedicated to encouraging high quality foodstuffs and products which are also locally, traditionally produced within the principles of Fair trade and sustainability. Articles on the website includes features on the principles of slow food, events and news updates as wells as blogs, press releases and a newsletter. There is a searchable directory of food communities, cooks and universities who subscribe to the movement's principles, and a section called "Voices" which features interviews with proponents of the movement. The movement's founders include departments of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry for Agriculture, Food and Forestry. The site is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian. ...

Source: www.portfolio.com --- 72 days ago
You have to wonder if the former Fed Chair has any personal warmth for his successor. Judging by Greenspan's column in today's Financial Times, the answer would be no. Although Greenspan's ability to move markets has waned in recent months, he's still a news maker. So why is he trying to capture some of the attention on Fed decision day by allowing the FT to run his op-ed ? Especially with this choice paragraph (emphasis added): It has become hard for democratic societies accustomed to prosperity to see it as anything other than the result of their deft political management. In reality, the past decade has seen mounting global forces (the international version of Adam Smith's invisible hand) quietly displacing government control of economic affairs. Since early this decade, central banks have had to cede control of long-term interest rates to global market forces. Previously heavily controlled economies - such as China, Russia and India - have embraced competitive markets in lieu of bureaucratic edict. The danger is that some governments, bedevilled by emerging inflationary forces, will endeavour to reassert their grip on economic affairs. If that becomes widespread, Globalisation could reverse - at awesome cost. To be Fair, according to the latest research , Greenspan is on the right track in stating that the impact of monetary policy has been dulled over the last two decades thanks to globalization. But in picking today to make ...

Source: www.lloydslist.com --- 24 days ago
THE Dow Jones Index is essentially irrelevant to the shipping industry. That’s what some more optimistic shipowners have argued on public platforms this week, anyway. In this scenario, OPEC countries have upped their output of crude, which should keep tanker operators sweet, while ongoing expansion in India and China will keep bulk carriers full. So what’s the collapse of a few investment banks between friends? Credit? Who needs it, anyway? Fingers crossed, for all our sakes. But it is Fair to say that expert opinion is divided on this one. Thus, for instance, Dominique Strauss-Kahn – director general of International Monetary Fund – insisted before the great and the good at this year’s Davos confab that India and China are not immune to economic slowdown in the west. A few months later, World Bank lead economist Andrew Burns stressed the inherent resilience of emerging markets, and maintained that even recession in the US would have limited impact on Chindia. Every economic downturn combines both generic and specific features. The last occasions when we were broadly where we are now –1975-75 and 1980-81 – were in the era prior to Globalisation. China in particular has done so well economically over the last period largely by selling manufactures to the US and Europe. If the US and Europe can no longer afford to buy them – and need fewer barrels of OPEC output to boot - then we do find ourselves in a whole new ball game. Nobody ca ...

Source: chinaworker.info --- 75 days ago
Rather than the Olympic movement’s self-professed ideals of ‘internationalism’ and ‘Fair play’, the Games are about two at first sight contradictory forces: nationalistic flag-waving and capitalist Globalisation chinaworker.info “Beijing win is big business,” ran a BBC headline in July 2001. China had just been awarded the 2008 Olympic Games. The Olympics is not just the world’s most prestigious sporting event; it is also one of the most successful marketing empires in the history of capitalism. The Olympic symbol – five connected rings representing the five continents – is one of the world’s most recognisable and closely guarded corporate logos. The small, secretive, unelected group that controls the Olympics, the 110-member International Olympic Committee (IOC), commands huge financial resources and is feted by governments and business leaders the world over. Former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch insisted on being addressed as ‘Your Excellency’. His megalomania earned him the nickname ‘Lord of the Rings’. The Beijing Olympics is expected to bring in $2.5 billion from television broadcasting alone. This is set to rise to $3 billion for the period up to and including the London Olympics in 2012. The last time the Games were held in London, in 1948, the BBC reportedly agreed to pay just $3,000 to televise the event. But the British Olympic Committee never cashed the cheque, out of consideration for the BBC’s delicate financial situ ...

Source: www.norway-un.org --- 98 days ago
The Financial Times and the Norwegian Government, in cooperation with the Norwegian Trade Union Confederationand the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise, present: Decent Work – A Key to Social Justice for a Fair Globalisation, in Oslo 5 September 2008. ...

Source: www.fwicki.com --- 96 days ago
Amid the competitive Globalisation era and in a world full of turbulence, the sovereignty and peace of the nation are upheld under the Fair leadership of the benevolent ruler who also gives priority to the ... ...

Source: www.norway-un.org --- 55 days ago
On Friday 5 September the Director General of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will come to Oslo to discuss “Decent Work – A Key to Social Justice for a Fair Globalisation”. ...

Source: morris108.wordpress.com --- 24 days ago
We all got used to Jewish power. Let’s keep it and change it. First: No wars 2nd: No speculation, no futures etc, No Fiat money. 3rd: Be Fair to the Palestinians and the Arabs and Muslims. 4th: Free up the Media (or be overtaken by blogs). 5th: End Globalisation. It is a servant to finance first and foremost. Then more [...] ...

Source: www.eldis.org --- 37 days ago
This paper contributes to the discussion on decent work and Fair Globalisation. It briefly reviews some of the main findings of research regarding the ... ...

Source: www.arbeidstilsynet.no --- 41 days ago
Fredag 5. september arrangerer den norske regjering, LO og NHO, i samarbeid med The Financial Times konferansen ”Decent Work, A Key to Social Justice for a Fair Globalisation” på hotell Bristol i Oslo. ...

Source: altindia.blogspot.com --- 106 days ago
It was at one of those artificially-busy importance-assuming conferences that actually change little in the real world where an old friend thrust a copy of the 'Struggle India Reader' into my distracted hands. Welcome relief it was. From air-conditioned halls and mindless chatter. Here are indeed some issues deep from the grassroots. Issues that most of us might be hardly even aware of. If there are two clear messages that emerge from this 185-page book it's simply that, firstly, there's a lot happening in today's India which is simply invisible to the average eye. And, secondly, that alternative publishing is quickly finding its own feet here. If only we're willing to sit up and take note. Slickly yet inexpensively produced, this title was published by the New Delhi-based PEACE (Popular Education and Action Centre) group some time back. Reviews for it are overdue; but then does the media take note of books not churned out via the mainstream, commercial setup? As made clear by its preface, the goal is to question the impact of so-called "development" happening across India since economic liberalisation, privatisation and Globalisation was "unleashed" on India since the mid-eighties. This fairly slim volume tries to introduce the reader to the 'other India', as it were. It focuses on people fighting for their resources, a Fair deal and their right to life. It is divided into five sections, showing how the simple (and often poor) Indian c ...

Source: www.jacquetta.net --- 96 days ago
I just got back from London Book Fair and I'm working through my list of follow-up, wondering how to evaluate whether the effort and expense really justifies it. One thing that emerged is that printed prices on books is becoming a thing of the past. Given the strong Euro and weak dollar, the book's dollar price tends to devalue its sterling and Euro price. We're actually reprinting our Rucksack Readers leaflet without its US dollar prices at the request of our European distributor for just this reason. Worse still, we've just realised that booksellers are buying direct from Amazon.com so as to undercut prices further. One of the bizarre by-products of Globalisation (combined with the number of book trade middlemen working for narrow margins) is that many of our books are now crossing the Atlantic twice before being sold at a discount via Marketplace on Amazon.co.uk. Added to the 6000 miles they travel to reach us from our printer in Hong Kong, they are doing high mileages before they start. The customer who buys on UK Marketplace has no idea of this: the booksellers themselves claim "dispatched from the UK" – which is true only after they've completed their 12,000 miles! And in case you're wondering why books appear on Marketplace at daft prices like £0.01, it's because the seller still gets £2.75 p&p and the seller minimises what they pay to Amazon in fees. So if you can find what you're looking for on Marketplace, as a consumer you m ...

Source: babylonandbeyond.blogspot.com --- 91 days ago
Given the insights of market imperfection outlined above Stiglitz has suggested that politicians need to behave ‘more like scholars’ (Stiglitz 2002: x) but observes that ‘the opposite happens too often’. Stiglitz and Soros have increasingly focussed on the fact that economics has been either used to legitimate American interests or simply junked when it gets in the way of self-interested politicians: They talk a free-market ideology but, if you look at their politics in terms of bailouts and protectionism, it is not a free-market policy; if you look at their procurement agenda and what they did with Bechtel in Iraq, it doesn’t even look like a Fair competition agenda. So you have to sort of suspect an element of ideology but more an element of particular groups seizing control. (The Observer, 18 May 2003) Bush, they suggest, has dropped the market approach, and is looking now to heavy handed state intervention to benefit the hyper-wealthy of a hyper-power. Indeed Stiglitz and Soros in their recent writings have moved on to attack Bush’s military adventures (Soros 2004; Stiglitz 2003). A number of other voices have echoed the suspicion that Globalisation has a specifically American orientation and reflects US corporate and military interests. Will Hutton former head of the Industrial Society and editor of the Observer newspaper, specifically argues that capitalism comes in different varieties and favours Asian or European flavours to th ...

Source: craft-unbound.blogspot.com --- 35 days ago
The ongoing quest In the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement turned to traditional cultures in response to the perceived sterility of modern life. With studio practice in the twentieth century, a number of individual craft artists were inspired by non-Western craft traditions, such as the East Asian ceramics. In the later twentieth-century, a number of craftspersons made individual pilgrimages to a wide range of traditional craft communities in order to absorb the more embedded lifestyle of making. For many, this entailed long-term commitment by craftspersons in assisting their host communities to sustain their craft practice in a globalising market. You buy the story of where it comes from In response to Globalisation and its problems, the twenty-first century witnesses the rise of ' ethical consumerism '. Consumers hope that their patronage has positive effects on the community of origin. Fair trade coffee and chocolate are the most obvious new ethical commodities. At the same time, the relational paradigm in creative arts makes the construction of relationships through the work a part of the artistic process, alongside the product that results from it. Craft and design work collaboratively Relationships between modern and traditional makers are evolving in interesting ways. Those purchasing their products are buying not only a beautifully designed and made object, but also the story of its production. Relationships are ...

Source: prodicus.blogspot.com --- 34 days ago
Imagine you are a Guardian reader and you are allowed to produce one two-minute item for the Today programme. What would you want to cover? Let’s see… what a typically Neanderthal Republican bitch Palin is? USA posturing, oil-greed, etc., etc., etc… the American threat to international order? Man made global warming? Arctic ice melting? The evils of Globalisation? Wicked Big Oil? Aboriginals whose ancient way of life is under threat from Capitalism – preferably in the shape of Wicked Big Oil? (Never mind that their ancient way of life is based on hunting ickle teddy bears and baby seals . Aboriginals are allowed to hunt. It’s only the English middle class who aren’t. Toff bastards.) All couched in oblique terms, glancing references, best possible taste, etc. OK – here we go. General heading: Arctic ice melting . (Not as much as last year but we can get over that: the BBC headlined: ‘almost as much as last’s year’s record breaking melt’.) Well, dear Graun reader, you do not need to stir your little self from your Polly pin-up collection, your Compass pamphlets and your Fair trade decaff. Davis Shukman did your piece for you on this morning’s Today programme. It was sheer poetry. You’d have needed a heart of stone not to laugh. ...