Corporations - the real force behind globalization - no longer identify with a nation; they moved their production facilities to the least expensive source of resources (labor, materials, new markets) and where internal costs (environmental controls and taxes) are lowest.

Ultimately, post-war industrial era mentality backfires for governments that continue to collude with corporations that have moved abroad (while continuing to exert lobby influence) because the corporations no longer pay their equal share of taxes, don't support internal labor markets, and invest corporate profits abroad.

Transboundary pollution is worsening, natural resources are diminishing rapidly, and global labor costs have risen along with consumer wealth and buying power in developing nations that are the new home of industrialization. By taking short-cuts to avoid the need to change old habits, global corporations share in flagging social responsibility for the negatives of our newly (in historical terms) synthetic lifestyle.

Nearly all of the major issues we face can be traced to a lack of foresight in the collusion byproduct effects, where mutual benefits of institutions are achieved at significant future cost to society.

Governments can no longer afford to play handmaiden to corporations, nor can they continue to ignore the mounting environmental pollution, natural resource depletion, and unhealthy lifestyle patterns that are their legacy imprint, affecting all global citizens. Perhaps the worst of the recent trends is the pressure from corporations to provide cheap labor by allowing immigration waves, mostly originating from the poorest, conflict-wracked regions (central Europe, Middle East, Africa, South America).

Regrettably, corporations play an unseen, but significant role in fostering regional conflict, where continued natural resource access is at stake, by directly influencing the foreign policy of their former home governments - whose people they no longer serve but continue to pay the price of protectionism policy.

The social care cost to immigrant host governments is NOT offset by the industries who benefit from this cheap labor source. These are fickle employers, who will jettison their workers just as easily with the shifting winds of the global economy. Immigrants are left unemployed and unable or unwilling to return to a place they no longer consider home. As transients, they do not integrate into the host nation society, remaining discontentedly on the fringes, as do their children. Their number can estimated in the many tens of millions seeking a 'better life'.

The immigrant waves come with other hidden costs: a lifetime of malnutrition, conflict stress, and lack of adequate health care, means that they are also infectious disease carriers, because they also are often afflicted with lowgrade chronic diseases and dysfunctional immune systems. They also lack social integration that enforces altruism. Altruism is the real cement of society in hard times. Social integration dampens the darker side of human behavior: greedy self interest. Malnutrition and exposure to longterm social conflict results seems to play a role in statistics of crime among immigrants, too.

Match that influx of infectious disease vectors, with reluctant vaccination by parents, inadequate diet, sleep and exercise, and you have the recipe for a sudden uptick in childhood diseases after decades of absence.

Asia's sudden wealth and growing disparity between it's poor and wealthy classes, rapid urbanization and substantial loss of ag lands and workers, and changes in consumer demands - are boosting longer term trends of air and water pollution, resource loss, land erosion, and induced climate change. These are secondary costs of corporate mobility and it's effects on lifestyle changes in very large consumer markets.

We cannot afford the status quo of postwar mentality any longer. It's sheen has worn off, and the rusty problems have piled high and deep.

The thesis that globalization means we are all caught in common problems that will require common solutions is - or should be - common sense.

We should recall that our previous failure to achieve cooperative solutions led to World Wars I and II, a great depression, and an avian flu pandemic.

New technologies, particularly energy, could have widespread benefits. But let's be careful of expecting technology to solve behavioral problems. It's easy to be over-optimistic about unproven technology. From the Union of Concerned Scientists on Pebble Bed reactor technology:

*************
The pebble-bed reactor is rumored to be competitive with other energy technologies. It appears from a preliminary design review that the proposed reactor achieves its economic advantages by replacing the steel-lined, reinforced-concrete containment structures used for our existing nuclear plants with a far less robust enclosure building. The NRC's own Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards characterized this as "a major safety trade-off."

The safety problem with the proposed "containment-lite" pebble-bed reactor design Is compounded by the existing security weaknesses. Imagine the consequences from a fertilizer truck bomb detonated next to a "containment-lite" reactor with millions of curies of lethal radioactivity to contaminate the environment for many decades. That would truly be a nuclear nightmare.

Cost projections by the nuclear industry must be taken with a grain of salt, if not an entire salt shaker. According to the US Department of Energy, the actual construction costs for 75 nuclear power plants started between 1966 and 1977 were more than three times higher than their estimated costs. Thus, claims that the projected costs of electricity from a proposed pebble-bed reactor are competitive with the actual costs of electricity from operating renewable energy technologies must be viewed with skepticism.

It cannot be overemphasized that a facility like the proposed pebble-bed modular reactor has never been constructed or operated in the world. Consequently, its expected performance characteristics are highly speculative. It would not be prudent at this time to place undue reliance on a risky technology with unproven safety performance. Nuclear experiments belong in the laboratory, not within the US electricity marketplace.

Nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous. If nuclear power is to play an expanded role in the future, it is imperative that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission become a consistently effective regulator. ....

Failing to reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could have tragic consequences. As reported in The Wall Street Journal (enclosure 3), the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant cost the former Soviet Union several times the net benefits from all Soviet reactors ever operated. The price tag for the accident was placed at 170 to 215 billion rubles while the net benefits from every Soviet nuclear power plant was only 10 to 50 billion rubles. With the price of failure so very high, it is absolutely imperative that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission be a consistently -- rather than occasionally -- effective regulator.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/safety-of-old-and-new-nuclear-reactors.html

I know this isn't exactly on-topic, but globalization, which I believe has the potential to degrade the human condition, could begin to experience some setbacks.

The rising cost of fuel is close to the point where locally grown fresh produce will undercut the large agg concerns.

As prices rise, other products will begin to see the same pressures from local alternatives.

Want to see America really go through a boom? It won't happen from globalization, but from local planning.

There is a design for a power plant called a Pebble Bed Reactor that literally could provide all the electricity needs, including electric transportation, without emitting greenhouse gasses.

These plants are exceptionally safe; look it up. Think of the jobs created if every county built one of these (relatively) inexpensive reactors which would free us from oil dependence. Every parking spot could have a metered plug-in outlet like a parking meter, an quiet, safe, clean transportation would reign supreme.

Building this infrastructure would create a massive boon at the local level.

I'm telling you, the fat-cats looking to leverage cheap human labor have it all wrong. Fuel is going to unravel their plans for efficiency.