Globalization Backfire

We’re all living in Amerika

Amerika ist Wunderbar

We’re all living in Amerika

Coca-cola, sometimes war

The lyrics above I took it from one of my favorite band Rammstein titled “Amerika”. The song is telling us about that currently we’re all living in the US, because as you can see most of the product that we’re using today mostly were made in US. This is what we called Globalization.

United States is one from many countries who implements globalization. She liberates her market freely for her citizens to do economic activities in all over the world and permit other countries to invest their capital into US as well. But now it turns out that US suffers an economic turmoil caused by globalization. because the liberal economic policy, the capitalist in the US prefer to invest their money outside the US due to the price for investment outside US is far cheaper than in US. for comparison, in US the cost for labor is US$ 22 per hour but in other country like Vietnam or China the labor cost is only US$ 0.86 per hour.

The implication of this policy is there are so many capital flows outside US and the investors are reluctant to invest their money in the US because the cost of investment in the US is more expensive than other countries. furthermore, this policy causes the decreasing of the middle-class in the US because the unemployment rates is increasing. currently, one out of eight people in the US or around 37.9 millions people are receiving food coupon issued by the Federal Government to tackle the starvation problem in the US. Gorbachev, the last leader of Soviet Union once said that

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

But, as Warta Ekonomi magazine said that the dream of living well in US is now just a history. America suffers  severe economic problem now.

Senator John McCain (R)

So many action had already taken by the US government to keep the money not flowing outside US. One of the step that had been taken by the Fed is by decreasing the interest rate after 9/11 tragedy. Because at that time investors thought that investing in US is no longer safe anymore. But it implicates to another nightmare which is US sub-prime mortgage which led to global economic crisis in 2007-2008. And I still remember during his presidential campaign in 2008, John McCain promised to urged all US companies such as General Motors to move their factories from outside US back to US. But it appears that he lose the election.