Global Business and Nationhood

We’ve seen recently some of the side effects of the globalization of business.  It has been brought to light how banks and other businesses use our laws to bring in temporary workers to take jobs from people already doing them, and use that avenue to later outsource the work to other countries.  We have seen how lax safety regulations in foreign garment factories, producing clothing for our markets, can cause over 1100 deaths from a building collapse.  Many of us don’t know the country that our cars were actually built, no matter the “nationality” of the manufacturer.  We have seen what globalization of business means. 

It is not so much the cheaper labour that drives companies to other countries any more, although that is still the rationale given, so much as the ability to use the laws of one country against another.  Do you have a country where the environmental laws are weak, then let’s put our environmentally unfriendly industry or mining there.  Do you have a country with lax banking laws, so then let’s speculate there.  You get the picture.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not against trade and the movement of goods from country to country.  That practice has been going on since the dawn of time, and probably has more to do with the growth of civilization than any other practice.  Great empires were built on trade, although it has also resulted in great conflicts as well when countries tried to gain an advantage in trade.  And then there was colonialism which locked up resources and markets for the colonizing nation.  But the thing about all of these cases, from ancient times to the colonial era, is that they were done to enrich one country.  It was done for nationhood.  The question is can the same thing still be said for modern globalization?  Are nations and business in conflict?

The one thing that business cannot do is make laws.  Business does try to influence laws as they are made, and they are not above challenging laws that they think may harm their business.  But as of now, they cannot propose nor pass laws.  That is still the purview of the state.  Business, however, is not above making rules within their own organization or within a business group. Many business groups would like to regulate themselves, and some do. 

But global business seeks to be above any single country.  They want unrestricted free trade and unfettered movement of capital from one jurisdiction to others.  Business no longer respects even their home country.  Business has only one loyalty – to their shareholders.  Read the mission statement of almost any big company and you will see their pledge to do business for the benefit of their shareholders.  Since shareholders for such companies now come from all over the globe, the need to be beholden to any particular country or region no longer applies. 

So how will this play out?  Since large businesses now have access to more capital than some small or economically depressed countries, it is not inconceivable to assume that the thought of “bailing out” such countries by one or more businesses will occur.  The business would then “own” the country and be able to rule it and make its laws.  They could run it like a business with a board of directors and a CEO selected by and for the benefit of their shareholders.  The fact that none or very few of its shareholders are from that country would not matter one bit.  Unfettered at last!

As this, no doubt, lucrative business model grew, more and more companies would be tempted to get into the game.  With global banks able to manipulate the currency of any still free country, hard economic times could be imposed on any of them until they were forced to “sell out”, literally.  Businesses in this model would no doubt grow larger as the rich ones could, in effect “socialize” smaller companies or smaller rivals.  Some would argue that this would be a good thing.  Wealth would be spread around the world.  The temptation to war would be significantly reduced since not business would want to see its assets damaged or destroyed.  The world would be run by an elite of smart business executives.  All would be good.

How would life be, however, for the common man and woman?  Well, unless you’re a shareholder, preferably a large one, of one of these companies, probably not very good.  Unfettered laws in favour of business would undoubtedly lead to a very restricted life for ordinary people.  Would you, for example, have any job mobility from one company to another?  Would you be able to raise a grievance against your boss or the company?  Would any sort of trade union be allowed?  Would health and safety needs be considered?  All of these freedoms and concessions that have been fought over and won by working people would no longer be in the best interest of the shareholders would they.  And what will become of judicial matters?  Who would judge disputes and punish crimes?  The businesses?  There will no other authority.

So is the nation state to become a thing of the past in the days of ever growing power by business?  Stay tuned and see what happens in Europe and North America in the next few years of fiscal challenge.

An Explanation of Sorts

Anyone who has ever worked in a busy office, particularly in a supervisory role, knows that you do not have to give explicit instructions to get things done.  It is easier when you trust the people who work for you and who are prepared to carry out your needs.

That struck me this week when I was listening to all the talk about who knew what about the sad events in the Canadian Senate recently.  The current controversy revolves around the PM’s chief of staff giving what most of us would think of as a lot of money to a Senator who had claimed expenses he was not entitled so that the Senator could pay off the outstanding funds owed.  The deed actually happened a couple of months ago, but the payoff only came to light within the last ten days. Now everyone is trying to figure out if the PM himself had a hand in this.  He has said that he did not “sign off” on the payment, and that he only found out about the payment within the past two weeks.  And I believe him on the letter of his statement.

But let me give you a little scenario about how I think it could have happened.  In February and March, things were going pretty bad for the Senator in question when the extent of his undeserved expenses came to light.  Since said Senator was a member of the PM’s party and had been appointed by the current PM, it was spoiling the image of that party.  I suspect that one day, the PM expressed to his chief of staff that he wished that some way could be found to make the problem go away.  The PM didn’t have to tell him explicitly how to make this happen.  He trusted that the CoS would find a way. The chief of staff found a way.  So the PM had deniability of the facts.  But does he really have deniability of the direction he probably gave?

Who Knew . . . ?

Who knew a blogger could get writer’s block?  I seem to have had that for the past week or more.  Ideas would come bubbling forth, but the words would not follow.  I have started two or three efforts in that time, but I ran out of words after only a paragraph or two.  Here I am hoping to post a blog every few days, and this happens.  This is not performance.

Then thinking about it, I thought about the whole question of writing.  Not business letters or reports.  I’ve done hundreds of those over my professional career.  Plans, presentations and critiques I’ve done by the dozens.  No, I was thinking of creative writing, either fiction or non, including this blog.

My desire to write goes back many years. I even talked about it in university.  The thought never really left me, but most of the time I was too busy writing those plans, letters, reports and presentations.  I concentrated my left over time to reading.  I read hundreds of books over the years, mostly history or mystery.  Still, I kept telling myself I could one day do it myself.  I finally got started when I retired from full time work.

My opportunity came when I attended a reunion with the men with whom I survived a terrible calamity in the Navy.  They kept asking when someone was going to capture their story.  So, forty years after the event I undertook that task.  The result, after a year of effort was the book “We Are as One”, the story of the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the Canadian Navy.  It even got published and it was well received by its primary audience – my survivor shipmates.  It felt good to do something original and tell an unknown story.  I must admit I felt proud of my accomplishments.

But once you have tasted the fruit of success, you want to do more.  You don’t want to stop at just one.  So after that, I looked for additional ideas and tried my hand a few short stories, one of which, “Retirement Age” appeared in an earlier posting on this site.  I think I also wrote the shortest short story ever created, one paragraph, which hasn’t seen the light of day outside my computer yet.  Maybe one day, I’ll get brave and post it on this blog, but I warn you, it isn’t pretty.

I find writing a wonderful avenue for exploring ideas and expressing yourself.  With the word processing capability of the modern PC, you can write, edit, put aside and even delete just about anything you want.  You can start an idea and put it aside until you come up with additional words or thoughts to change or enhance it.  Maybe some of the ideas that I started over the last couple of weeks, but ran out of words, will yet show up on this blog.

And that brings me to the latest iteration of my writing endeavors, this blog on JGForbes@blogspot.ca.  With the byline, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways”, it is a way for me to express and hopefully share some of my ideas and ideals.  I hope that you, dear readers, will indulge me in that and perhaps find something interesting along the way. For that indulgence, I thank you.  Here’s hoping that I don’t run out of words very often.

Summertime, Summertime, Sum, Sum, Summertime!

If I have been remiss in not posting any blogs for a couple of weeks, you can blame it on the onset of summer-like weather here in Ottawa.  Being able to get the outdoor furniture from its winter dungeon, watch the grass and trees start to turn green, and contemplate the possibilities for golf this year are all part of the phenomenon.  Mid-twenties temperatures don’t hurt either. 

Of course, summer also means baseball and golf. For a player, golf is a game you can play all your life.  It gets you a few hours outside walking and swinging, and can lead to meeting some nice people.  Baseball is the most social of spectator sports.  Unlike hockey or football where you always seem to be surrounded by yelling and screaming, baseball, with its more leisurely pace, allows social interaction.  It is a great way to spend an afternoon or evening with friends or family, particularly children or grandchildren.  What could be better?

We all look forward to this time of year, even, I suspect, die-hard winter sports fans.  Of course, like all Canadians, we find some problem with the weather, no matter how perfect it appears.  My dour, old Scottish Grandma, on a lovely summer day, would inevitably observe, “We’ll pay for this.”  Canadians, and apparently Scots, cannot seem to believe that there is any such thing as a perfect day.  However, I would point out that these sudden warm days of spring, with their moderately hot temperatures, low humidity and cool nights, sure must come close.

I have experienced summer in a number of places and climates.  I grew up in Hamilton, Ontario where the sooty air could become so oppressively hot and humid.  I spent a few summers in Victoria, British Columbia where you could have some absolutely fabulous summers interspersed with summers of what seemed to be constant rain.  In Halifax, too many summers were spent waiting for the coastal fog to clear.  I was there in 1967 where ships from navies all over the world gathered for a Naval Assembly to honour Canada’s Centennial.  The fog was so persistent during that week that the only photograph that captured the entire fleet was taken at two o’clock in the morning when the fog had cleared for a few hours.  I survived two summers in Charleston, South Carolina where you treated those months from June to August the same as we spend winter here – mostly indoors.  The heat combined with the coastal humidity restricted outdoor life to early morning or late evening.  From four to seven o’clock every evening, a band of thunder storms would pass through Charleston and vicinity.  It might not rain at your home every evening, but you could guarantee it would rain someplace.   My wife spent two years in Florida and the weather was much the same there in summer.  I must admit, however, the other nine months of the year in Charleston were worth the three months of an uncomfortable summer.

For all of the complaints we may have about summers in eastern Ontario, our summers aren’t really so bad after all.

Just Your Everyday Bullying

It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
  - Mark Twain

Recent stories of teen suicide caused by being bullied have brought a spotlight to the issue of bullying.  There has been talk of special committees to study the issue.  There has been talk of expecting schools of doing more to prevent student bullying.  There has been a lot of talk.  The talk, however, has concentrated almost exclusively on the problem with teenagers.  This is a pity because it does not address the entire problem and what may be the actual cause of teen bullying.

Bullies have always been with us. When I was in middle school many years ago, there was a group of three boys who tried to get me into a fight almost every day on my way to school.  Not knowing what else to do, I ignored them.  I just kept walking to school.  After many months (maybe it was only a few days, but it felt like many months), they finally gave up.  Some years later, when I was working over the summer as a playground supervisor, there was one boy who thought I should fight him.  I couldn’t because to do so would have lost me my job.  But slowly, I co-opted him until he used to come around and help at the playground.  It turned out he was just bored and needed something to do, or someone to recognize him. And he did it in the only way he knew how.

In later life, in my first civilian job, my boss kept telling me that if I personally did not bring in new business, I would lose my job.  The fact that I was an engineer, not a marketing type, made no difference.  I and I alone, was responsible for bringing in new business.  This too was bullying, a fact exacerbated by the fact that I was suffering through clinical depression at the time . . .  and he knew it. 

The fact is that bullying is all around us every day in overt and subtle ways.  The only question is whether, in any given situation, you are the bully or the bullied.  Are you the boss who berates a subordinate in front of others? Or are you the boss who gives in to a loud, insistent employee?  Are you the driver who insists on cutting in on another driver who has the right of way?  Are you the shopper who takes your frustration out on a store clerk who has absolutely nothing to do with your problem? Or are you the store clerk who uses your passive-aggressive capability to deny that same shopper, or the next one, proper service? Or are you the homeowner who lets in a pushy salesperson who insists that your house has a problem?  Or are you the pushy salesperson?  See if you can recognize yourself in any of these scenarios.

These are all examples of the bullying that we see every day.  And in most cases we feel helpless to do anything about it.  But if we do, the results can be tragic.  The two teenagers who carried out the shootings at Columbine High School were not ideological terrorists.  They had been bullied in that same high school and were now taking their revenge.  But that does not mean that, as a society, we cannot take action to curb the all too familiar bullying theme. 

Going back to teen bullying, let’s start at home.  As a parent, do you advise your child to take what’s his, regardless of the consequences?  Do you tell your child to stand up for himself and show him how to fight?  Better still, do you come home from one of the encounters I described above, and tell your children how you “told somebody off”, “got in their face”, or “got my way” and showed them how proud you were of it?  Did you ever show off to your child how you are “the man” by being aggressive toward someone else?  You tell your child that they shouldn’t bully the little kid down the street and you think that is all that’s needed.  Teenagers don’t pay much attention to what you tell them.  But they do take in how you act.  They are far more swayed by example that by words.  They want to see and emulate what you do, particularly those things that seem to enhance you.  Did you ever have a kid ask why you were mean to a store clerk, and your answer was because they deserved it?  Can you start to see now the reason for teen bullying?  Can you now start to see why some people go on to be bullies all their lives?  Like bigotry, bullying is an acquired habit, learned through example from those a child grows up looking up to. Are you the cause of bullying?  Think about it.

Holidays

The word holiday derives from the words holy day, and several of our annual holidays are based on Christian holy days. With the recent celebration of Easter, it got me thinking about these holidays.

Our principal Christian holidays are Christmas, Easter, St. Valentine’s Day and All Hallows Eve (Halloween).  The celebration of these days goes back to the early days of Christianity and the religious traditions for them are well established in our traditions. 

Islam and Judaism take the celebration of their holy days very seriously and their traditions too run deep. 

Our Christian holy days, on the other hand, are celebrated as a mixture of religious and pagan tradition.  Want a good example?  There were no such things as fir trees in Israel 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, for the religious among us, the pagan part of the tradition has become the more powerful and alluring.  Christmas is considered a success by the amount shoppers spend on gifts rather than how many people celebrate the birth of Jesus. One of my tree ornaments shows a harried woman lugging several shopping bags under the title, “Spirit of Christmas Stressed”.  Easter is celebrated with big family meals and by the state of the spring weather, rather than the remembrance of the crucifixion and resurrection.  St. Valentine’s Day and Halloween are about parties and candy.  And they are all dependent on the purchase and sending of cards. 

All of our holidays, both religious and otherwise, have now become associated with sporting events.  After all, you can’t have a perfectly good audience going off to thinking about their religious traditions when they can be distracted by a good basketball or football game.  And so at Christmas, it is National Basketball Association games.  At Thanksgiving, it is football, both Canadian and American.  New Year’s Day and many days before and after, it is US college football.  And at Easter it is often US college basketball (“March Madness”) and sometimes a golf tournament called the Masters where Amen consists of the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th holes at Augusta National Golf Course.

The trend, or should I say headlong rush, toward secularizing holy days is a shame because it masks the beauty and tranquility of the religious observance.  A midnight church service at Christmas with its solemn formality and the beautiful Christmas music can be a wonderful way of releasing the tension that the other aspects of Christmas inevitably cause.  A sunrise service on Easter Sunday can evoke the glory of the resurrection and spring like nothing else.  The secular side of the holiday traditions seem to be designed to cause stress and confusion.  The religious traditions of holy days usually result in tranquility of the soul and body.

So let’s try and bring more of the religious tradition back to our holidays/holy days and reignite the beauty and peace that these traditions can evoke.  Non-believers are advised not to celebrate any of these holy days in order to preserve their ideals.

The Cult of History

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.   - Edward Gibbon

I love history.  I have seriously read about it since I was in college, even although I studied engineering.  Having a military background, I read a lot of military history, but I try and balance that with reading about the peaceful times and what life was like for ordinary people.  It is all pretty fascinating stuff.  And of course, I have added my own little bit of history having written the book “We Are as One” (http://www.weareasone.ca), the story of the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy (sorry for the self-promotion). 

Along the way, I have come to some truths about the uses and abuses of history, and about what history has shown us. 

Truth #1 – history is made by ordinary people and their society, and can only progress as fast as these people can be moved.  Kings, Presidents and Emperors may try and influence the advancement of society but it will only move at the pace set by the ordinary man.

Truth #2 – history does not necessarily repeat itself, as some people expect, but it does show us what can happen in similar circumstances.

Truth #3 - You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. Jeannette Rankin.      This obviously depends on what you consider by “winning” a war.  In general, both sides lose something during a war, whether it is wealth, resources, territory or, most tragically, the lives of its young adults.  The old men who make the decision for war hardly ever lose their lives, they send their young for that.

Truth #4 – In every war, one side fights to save the status quo.  They never succeed.  War inevitably changes society on both sides, whether it is changes in government, scientific discovery or the way we view ourselves and the rest of the world. See also idea #2 above.

Truth #5 – you cannot judge the past with the rules of the present.  There are great movements in revisionist history going on these days, whether it is the resurrection of figures like Louis Riel, apologies to nations for past wrongs, or condemning our ancestors for the way they lived their lives.  This is a travesty to the memory of those who made our world through the ages.  The men who found Louis Riel guilty of treason truly believed, given their education, fears, prejudices and life experience, that he was just that. And we can never understand them because we do not live in the same era, have the same education or life experiences.  This applies to those who made war with other nations and took whatever steps they thought they were necessary to protect their own citizens and win the war.  Someone who has not lived in a country in the middle of a war can understand this.  Our ancestors lived the way they did because that was all they knew.  They did not have access to our knowledge of medicine, the environment, philosophy, critical thought or any of the other ideas that we now use to condemn them.  Nor could the people of the past have foreseen the consequences of their decisions any more than we can today.

Truth #6 – in every war, look for the economic reason.  Whatever rationale is espoused for a war, there will be an underlying economic reason.  No warlord, country or group is going to undertake a war unless they think they see a profit in it.  The opposition may have to fight to save its existence, but one side at least is after the spoils.  Although the Crusaders went off to save the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they also had in mind new lands and riches.  Many of the early Crusader knights were second and third sons who needed to find their own estates in order to prosper.  Hitler, for all his rhetoric about master races, really wanted to expand the size of Germany in order to enlarge the population, and increase the raw materials available to Germany.  By winning hegemony of Europe, he also gained economic hegemony.  Iraq was all about saving oil resources.  The various rationales that are spouted to justify war whether it be religion, “honour”, patriotism or power, are primarily used to rally the foot soldiers that will not necessarily benefit from the economic advantage gained.  The economic advantages will mainly accrue to the old men who send the foot soldiers off to war.  I sound cynical, don’t I?  Well, I am when it comes to war.

But I am also optimistic, because my study of history has shown me how much progress we have made over the centuries.  How men, and now women, have overcome their prejudices and limitations, and have really improved our lot.  And I don’t think so much of the material progress; the machines we have invented, the medicines and cures we have discovered, the wired (and wireless) world we have made.  I think of the advances in the human condition; of the intellect, of overcoming prejudices, of allowing us to express ourselves more fully.  Not just a small intellectual elite, but practically every member of society can now benefit from this type of advancement.  As long as we can balance human progress with material progress, and I admit that may be more difficult the faster material progress develops, we should be optimistic about the future which will soon enough become history.