The occasional descriptions or predictions about the
global economy that are found in the media usually come from the leading
advocates and beneficiaries of this new order: corporate leaders, their allies
in high levels of government and a newly powerful centralized global trade
bureaucracy. The visions they offer us are unfailingly positive, even utopian:
Globalization will be a panacea for all our ills.
Meanwhile, the diverse opposition to globalization
is lumped together in one ball -- whether they are environmentalists, or human
rights advocates, or small businesses, or small and indigenous farmers, or
people trying to sustain the vestiges of democratic governance; they are all
combined into a single category, "protectionist," so as to be
summarily dismissed. In the end, we are left with a public information climate
that is exceedingly shallow and one-sided. Worse, we are left with a corporate protectionism
that does not act to protect jobs, communities, democracy or the natural world.
It works to protect and expand business freedoms, to circumvent democratic
control and to establish effective transnational corporate governance.
The recent passage of the Uruguay Round of GATT
(General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), with its associated W.T.O. (World
Trade Organization), was celebrated by the world's political leadership and
transnational corporations as a sort of global messianic rebirth. They have
proclaimed that these new ruling structures will bring on a $250 billion
expansion of world economic activity, with the benefits trickling down to us
all. "The new rising tide will lift all boats" has become the
dominant economic-political homily of our time.
The global economy is new, but more so in scale than
in form. It offers new global freedoms of mobility and investment to
corporations and banks; it facilitates a technologically enhanced speedup of
global development and commerce; and it produces a profound and abrupt shift in
global political power beyond the reach of even large Western democracies.
Surely it is something new that the world's democratic countries have
voluntarily voted to subordinate their own democratically enacted laws to the W.T.O.
Also new, is the elimination of most regulatory control over global corporate
activity, and the liberation of currency from any nation's controls, leading to
what John Cavanagh has described as the "casino economy," ruled by
currency speculators.
But the deeper ideological principles of the global
economy are not so new; they are only now being applied globally. These rules
include the absolute primacy of exponential economic growth and an unregulated
"free market"; the need for free trade to stimulate the growth; the
destruction of "import substitution" economic models (which promote
economic self-sufficiency) in favor of export-oriented economies; accelerated
privatization of public enterprises; and the aggressive promotion of consumerism,
which, combined with global development, faithfully reflects the Western
corporate vision. The guiding principles of the new economic structures
assume that all countries -- even those whose cultures have been as diverse as,
say, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Sweden and Brazil -- must row their (rising)
boats in unison. The net result, as Helena Norberg-Hodge argues on page 20,
is a global monoculture -- the homogenization of culture, lifestyle and
level of technological immersion, with the corresponding dismantlement of local
traditions and self-sufficient economies. Soon, everyplace will look and
feel like everyplace else, with the same restaurants and hotels, the same
clothes, the same malls and superstores, the same TV, the same streets choked
with cars and the same universal materialistic values. There'll scarcely be a
reason ever to leave home.
But can this system work? Will the promised economic
expansion resulting from GATT actually happen? If so, can it sustain itself?
Where will the resources -- the energy, the wood, the minerals, the water --
come from to feed the increased growth? Where will the effluents of the process
-- the solids and the toxics -- be dumped? Who benefits from this? Will it be
working people, who, in the United States at least, seem mainly to be losing
jobs to machines and corporate flight? Will it be farmers, who thus far,
whether in Asia, Africa or North America, are being manoeuvred off their lands
to make way for huge corporate monocultural farming -- no longer producing
diverse food products for local consumption but coffee, grains and beef for
export markets, with their declining prices? Will it be city dwellers, now
faced with the immigrant waves of newly landless peoples desperate to find --
someplace -- the rare and poorly paid job? Can ever-increasing consumption be
sustained forever? When will the forests be gone? How many cars can be built
and bought? How many roads can cover the land? What will become of the animals
and the birds? Are we -- as individuals, as families and as communities and
nations -- made more secure, less anxious, more in control of our destinies?
Can we possibly benefit from a system that destroys local and regional
governments while handing real power to faceless corporate bureaucracies in
Geneva and Brussels? Will people's needs be better served from this?
The German ecological philosopher Wolfgang Sachs
argues in his book The Development Dictionary that the only thing worse than
the failure of this massive global development experiment would be its success.
For even at its optimum performance level, the long-term benefits will go to
only a tiny minority of people who sit at the hub of the process and to a
slightly larger minority that can retain an economic connection to it, while
the rest of humanity is left landless and homeless, groping for fewer jobs,
living in violent societies on a ravaged planet. The only boats that will be
lifted are those of the owners and managers of the process; the rest of us will
be on the beach, facing the rising tide.
Given the above, one would expect massive efforts by
media and educational institutions to explore all the dimensions of this
subject. Yet when the mass media report on some aspect of globalization, rarely
does the story express the connections between the specific crisis it describes
and the root causes in the globalization process itself.
In the area of environment, for example, we read of
changes in global climate and occasionally of their long-term consequences,
such as the melting polar icecaps (the real rising tide), their expected
staggering impact on agriculture and food supply, or their destruction of
habitat. We read too of ozone-layer depletion, the pollution of the oceans and
the wars over resources such as oil and, perhaps soon, water. But few of these
matters are linked directly to the imperatives of global economic expansion,
the tremendous increase in ecologically devastating global transport (caused by
universal conversion to export-oriented production), the overuse of raw
materials or the commodity-intensive lifestyle that corporations are selling
worldwide via the culturally homogenizing technology of television and its
parent, advertising. Obfuscation (a practice that is used to intentionally make something more
difficult to understand) is the net result.
I personally have had some harsh experience of this
obfuscation. While working with Public Media Centre in the run-up to the vote
on GATT, my colleagues and I were preparing educational ads about GATT's
environmental consequences, particularly the way it can challenge existing
major environmental laws, such as recently happened to the Marine Mammal
Protection Act and the Clean Air Act. We collaborated on the project with
fifteen environmental groups who signed the ad, among them the Sierra Club, Public
Citizen, Friends of the Earth, Earth Island Institute and the Rainforest Action
Network. The groups felt the campaign was important precisely because the media
had carried so few stories about environmental opposition to GATT, and did not
take it seriously.
Shortly after our first ad appeared in The New York
Times, a report in Newsweek advised its readers that the advertisement was not
really from the environmental community at all; it was secretly funded by
labour union "protectionists." Public Media Centre protested loudly,
and finally Newsweek ran a small corrective notice. But the damage was done. A
good opportunity to broaden the public's thinking about economic globalization
was undermined.
Other notable examples of media misunderstanding
include the coverage of the Barings bank debacle of 1995 and the Mexican
financial crisis of 1994-95. Rarely has any medium made clear the role that the
new global computer networks play in creating the capability for instantaneous
transfer anywhere on the planet of astounding amounts of money; nor do the
media describe the consequences of deregulating financial markets or the role
that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund play in creating the
conditions that encourage currency speculation. The Mexican story was carried
in the U.S. press as if the United States' "bailout of Mexico" was
some kind of do-gooder act on our part: good neighbours coming to the aid of
our Mexican friends. In fact, the main people bailed out were Wall Street investors,
who, with the direct complicity of the World Bank and the I.M.F., largely
brought on the crisis in the first place. For middle-class and working-class
Mexicans, the bailout was disastrous. That story has yet to be told by the mass
media.
Some publications did do stories about
"corporate greed" as expressed by the firing of thousands of workers
while corporate profits and executive salaries soared. Even those stories
missed the crucial point that corporate restructuring is directly hooked to the
imperatives and mobilities provided by the new rules of globalization, and that
it is happening all over the world. Obfuscation yet again.
The media like to speak of immigration crises, but
there is no mention of the role of trade agreements in making life impossible
for people in their countries of origin. NAFTA, for example, was a knockout
blow to the largely self-sufficient, small-scale corn-farming economy of
Mexico's indigenous peoples -- as the Zapatista rebels said in 1994 -- making
previously inviolate indigenous lands vulnerable to corporate buyouts and
foreign competition. In India, Africa and Central and South America, World Bank
schemes have displaced whole populations of relatively prosperous peoples to
make way for giant dams and other mega-projects. Millions of small farmers have
thereby been turned into landless refugees seeking nonexistent urban jobs.
As for the role of technology, we now have global
computer networks that enable global corporations to keep their thousand-armed
enterprises in constant touch. Biotechnology brings the corporate patenting of
new life forms and the voracious global search for indigenous seeds and plants
to patent and market, with devastating effects on Third World agriculture,
ecology and human rights. Where are the reports on this?
As for reportage about corporations themselves, the
media treat corporate figures mainly as glamorous celebrities and speak
respectfully in the new language of consolidation -- efficiency, structural
engineering and downsizing -- rarely attempting to present such activities
within their economic and social context. The media have still less to say
about global media corporations that place Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and very
few others in a position to transmit their Western images and commercial values
directly into the brains of 75 percent of the world's population. The
globalization of media imagery is surely the most effective means ever for
cloning cultures to make them compatible with the Western corporate vision.
But if the media have failed to connect the dots and
show how many of the global crises of today have their roots in the
globalization process, they have been still worse in analyzing the economic
theories that underlie it, and their expression in practice. We may find
references to World Bank loans to Third World countries, but there is scant
effort to reveal the draconian "structural adjustment" rules forced
on recipients, leaving their local economies decimated and their governance
under the dominion of transnational corporations and banks.
And when have mass media ever challenged the
preposterous idea that, on a finite earth, an economic arrangement based on
limitless growth can possibly be sustained?
The point is this: The media do not help us to
understand that all these issues -- overcrowded cities, unusual and disturbing
new weather patterns, the growth of global poverty, the lowering of wages while
stock prices soar, the elimination of social services, the destruction of
wilderness and wildlife, the protests of Maya Indians in Mexico -- are products
of the same global policies. They are all connected to the economic-political
restructuring now under way in the name of accelerated free trade and
globalization. This restructuring has been designed by economists and
corporations, encouraged by subservient governments and will soon be made
mandatory by international bureaucrats in Brussels and Geneva who are beyond
democratic control. All claim that society will benefit from what they are
doing. But the authors in this special issue of The Nation believe the opposite
is true.
In such a deprived information environment it is
truly a wonder that significant numbers of people are already conscious of what
economic globalization means to them, and to the planet, and that resistance is
necessary. Aside from the example of the Zapatistas, we have seen the strike by
hundreds of thousands of French public service workers in 1995, who brought the
French economy to a halt. They may soon do it again, if the French government
proceeds with its plan to cut wages, benefits and jobs to "harmonize"
them with Europe's single-currency agreement, itself an integral part of the
restructuring and corporatizing of the European economy for global
compatibility.
In Japan, tens of thousands of rice farmers protested
when supports were removed from traditional farming to open the country to the
global market. In India there have been a series of tremendous demonstrations
by farmers. A half-million protested the new GATT rules on intellectual
property that allow for transnational seed companies to patent and own
indigenous seeds. In another demonstration, farmers burned the offices of
agribusiness giant Cargill, and in a third, they damaged a Kentucky Fried
Chicken outlet for its role in undermining India's very diverse poultry farm
economy, to replace it with factory farms for exporting chickens.
Throughout Asia and South America, indigenous people have been fighting World
Bank dam and irrigation projects that cause the displacement of people from
their land; and a new international Native movement is opposing the taking of
Indian blood and skin samples by corporations prospecting for commercially
applicable and patentable genetic traits.
In the United States, meanwhile, dozens of
organizations that worked to oppose NAFTA and GATT have spent the past two
years broadening their sights to encompass globalization itself. Environmental,
consumer, human rights, labour, small business and economic justice groups are
now grasping that their issues are directly affected by globalization, and are
forming new partnerships here and across borders. Organizations like the
International Forum on Globalization have found that events planned for 300
people are bringing out thousands.
A growing tendency among many groups is to take it
as axiomatic that we must turn away now from globalization to a new
relocalization with economic, financial and political power rooted in place.
This is sometimes viewed as too utopian for the modern world, but that puts the
case backwards. What is truly utopianism, corporate utopianism, is the belief
that centralized economic models that defy natural limits and social equities
can ever sustain themselves. It's far more practical to fight such schemes in
all of their manifestations, while encouraging alternative solutions.