My goals for the week are to share why I am so passionate about what I do in order to arouse passion and action from you, and to make myself available for thoughtful critique and advice. I'm typing this Sunday night from the San Francisco airport, waiting my flight home to Seattle. I've spent the past four days at two meetings. This morning and yesterday, I spoke to a crowd of about 600 members of the San Francisco World Affairs Council at their 55th annual conference at Asilomar, south of San Francisco on the Monterey Peninsula. However, by this morning, I couldn't help but remember some of those 1950s commercials where kids sit at picnics on the farm under the spray of DDT clouds.
Globalization is, more simply, the system of our time.
For as long as people have existed, they have conducted trade to the maximum abilities of their transport and technological tools. Now those tools allow us to trade and communicate globally. The 10,000 pages of rules in the WTO's guidelines are merely one possible set of rules. When it came time for my morning plenary talk, I'd spoken with enough of the conference participants to recognize their dissatisfaction with the sunshine speak. The participants represented an above-average cross section of wealth, age, and education, but the unrest brewing across our land of plenty was alive and noticeable within these people.