WK6 Mander (1996) The Negative Impact of Globalization Article Summary Please be original and follow the instructions. the article citation and article is

WK6 Mander (1996) The Negative Impact of Globalization Article Summary Please be original and follow the instructions. the article citation and article is enclosed. ‘v 15/22, 1996
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What the Media Are Missing
1 JERRYMMDER 1
conomic globalization involves arguably the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet’s
political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution. Yet the profound implications of these
changes have barely been exposed to serious public scrutiny or debate. Despite the scale of the global reordering, neither our elected officials nor our educational institutions nor the mass media have made a credible
effort to describe what is being formulated, to explain its root philosophies or to explore the multidimensionality of its effects.
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
10
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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 &d indigenous farmers, or people trying to sustain the vestiges of
democratic governance; whether Perotites or Naderites or
Buchananites, covering a wide political spectrum-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 protectjobs, 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.
he 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”‘hasbecome the dominant economic-politicalhomily 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, 1eading.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 “fiee market”; the need for free trade
to stimulate the growth, the destructionof “import substitution”
economic models (which promote economic self-sufficiency)
in favor of export-oriented economies; acceleratedprivatization
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
~
’
Jeny Mander is a seniorfellow with Public Media Centec San Francisco, and co-founder of the IntemationalForum on Globalization.He
is co-editor, with Edward Goldsmith, of The Case Against the Global
Economy, forthcomingfrom S i e m Club Book in September: This article was adaptedfiorn the book,
July 15/22,1996
in uqison. The net result, as Helena Norberg-Hodge argues on
page 20, is a global monoculture-the homogenization of culture, lifestyle and level of technologicalimmersion, 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
the same streets
choked with cars and the same universal materialistic values.
‘There’llscarcely be a reason ever to leave home.
ut 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 processthe 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 losingjobs to machines and corporate flight?
Will it be farmers, who thus far, whether in Asia, Afiica or
North America, are being maneuvered 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 Sack 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 1ong: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
illbe on the beach, facing the rising tide.
process; the rest ofus w
hen 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 globalizationprocess itself.
In the area of environment, for example, we read of changes in
global climate and occasionallyof 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~thesematters are linked
directly to the imperatives of global economic expansion, the
tremendous increase in ecologically devastating global transport
(caused by universal conversion to export-orientedproduction),
the overuse of raw materials or the commodity-intensivelifestyle
that corporationsare selling worldwide via the culturally homogenizing technolow of television and its parent, advertising. Obfuscation is the net result.
I personally have had some harsh experience of this obfuscation. While working with Public Media Center in the run-up to
the vote on GAm, 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 ProtectionAct
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
campaignwas importantprecisely because the media had carried
‘sofew stories about environmental opposition to GATT, and did
not take it seriously.
Shortly after our first ad appeared in TheNew York Times, a report in Newweek advised its readers that the advertisement was
not really from the environmentalcommunity at all; it was secretly funded by labor union “protectioni~ts.~~
Public Media Center
protested loudly, and finally Newweek ran a small corrective notice. But the damage was done. A good opportunityto broaden the
public’s thinking about economic globalization was undermined.
Other notable examples of media misunderstanding include
thecoverage 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 conkequences 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 neighbors 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 imrpigration 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 video and participatory workshop/game
I
AVIEW FROM THE BOTTOM UP
1
id
Designed for unionists, environmentalists, community groups and
others, this four-hour workshoplgame (including a 23-minute video)
examines transnational corporations, “free trade,” and the role of
the World Bank and IME Participantssimulate a true-to-life struggle
.
that erupts when a firm announces it will close a U.S. factory and move to Mexico.
Scenarios address structural adjustment, immigration and pesticide regulation. Game
.kit: $85 plus $1 0 shipping/handling. Facilitated workshop: $300 plus travel.
Resource Center of the Americas, 317 Seventeenth Ave. SE, Minneapolis, MN
55414 !E 612/627-9445,612/627-W5Q (fax) @ rctamn~Bmaroen.tc.umn.edu
Michael Dougherty’s To Steal A Kingdom
covers a time frame as broad as the Pacific
itself: 250,000 BC to 1924 AD. Like the trade
winds blowing…this book brings a breath of
fresh air t o Hawaiian studies, where missionary filial piety has been conspicuous. Voices
harmonizing with Dougherty include Herman
Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain
and Queen Lilioukalani.They. ..are the heroes.
The villains are Americans who nearly wiped
out Hawaiians while stealing their kingdom.
To cover their tracks…thieving Americans
largely controlled the writing of Hawaiian
history. [In] i t s factual and logical questioning
of the process by which much of Hawaiian
history has been written lies the signal contribution of this important probing work.
– The Journal of American History-
ISLAND STYLE PRESS
Autographed copies by return mail $15.
. P.O.Box 296, Waimanalo, HI 96795
July 15/22,1996
13
The Nation.
directly into the brains of 75 percent of the world’s population.
a knockout blow to the largely self-sufficient, small-scale comfarming economy of Mexico’s indigenous peoples-as the ZapaThe globalization of media imagery is surely the most effective
tista rebels said in 1994-making previously inviolate indigenous
means ever for cloning cultures to make them compatible with
the Western corporate vision.
lands vulnerable to corporate buyouts and foreign competition.
In India, Africa and Central and South America, World Bank
But if the media have failed to connect the dots and show how
schemes have displaced whole populations of relatively prospermany of the global crises of today have their roots in the globalization process, they have been still worse in analyzing the ecoous peoples to make way for giant dams and other mega-projects.
Millions of small farmers have thereby been turned into landless
nomic theories that underly it, and their expression in practice.
We may find references to World Bank loans to Third World
refugees seeking nonexistent urban jobs.
countries, but there is scant effort to reveal the draconian ‘‘strucAs for the role of technology, we now have global computer
tural adjustment”rules forced
networks that enable global
corporations to keep their
The media have failed to connect the dots on recipients, leaving their
thousand-armed enterprises
local economies decimated
in constant touch. Biotech- and show how many of today’s international and.their
under
–
nology brings the corporate
the dominion of transnationcrises.have their roots in globalization.
patenting of new life forms
a1 corporations and banks.
And when have mass media ever challengedthe preposterous
and the voracious global search for indigenous seeds and
plants to patent and market, with devastating effects on Third
idea that, on a finite earth, an economic arrangement based on
World agriculture, ecology and human rights. Where are the
limitless growth can possibly be sustained?
reports .on this?
The point is this: The media do not help us to understand that
As for reportage about corporations themselves, the media
all these issues-overcrowded cities, unusual and disturbingnew
treat corporatefigures mainly as glamorous celebrities and speak
weather patterns, the growth of global poverty, the lowering of
respectfully in the new language of consolidation-efficiency,
wages while stock prices soar, the elimination of social services,
the destruction of wilderness and wildlife, the protests of Maya
structural engineering and downsizing-rarely attempting to
Indians in Mexicc-are products of the same global policies.They
present such activities within their economic and social context.
The media liave still less to say about global media corporations
are all connected to the economic-political restructuring now
that place Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and very few others in a
under way in the name of accelerated free trade and globalization.
position to transmit their Western images and commercial values
This restructuring has .been designed by economists and corpora-
14
The Nation.
tions, 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.
n such a deprived information environment it is truly a wonder
that significant numbers of people are already conscious of
what economic globalizationmeans to them, and to the planet,
an$ 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
b‘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 demonstrationsby 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 Kentuclq Fried Chicken
outlet for its role in undermining India’s very diversepoultry farm
,
~
Julj 15/2?, 1996
economy, to replace it with factory farms for exporting chickens.
ThroughoutAsia and South America, indigenouspeople 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 organizationsthat
worked to oppose NAFTA and GATT have spent the past two
years broadening their sights to encompass globalization itself.
Environmental, consumer, .human rights, labor, 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. Organizationslike 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.
~
PARADIGMS LOST: THE BRE?TON WOODS VISION O F ENDLESS GROWTH IS OBSOLETE.
Li
ar
DAVID C. KORTEN
arely one year ago, President Clinton described the NAFTA and GATT treaties as
the cornerstones of his economic and foreign policy and touted them as major accomplishments of his Administration. No
more. In his 1996 State of the Union Message
he made no mention of either of them.
That tacit acknowledgment of the growing
public backlash against economic globalization was echoed only days later at the World
Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos,
Switzerland.There, severalthousand power brokers of corporate
capitalism met under the theme of “Sustaining Globalization.”
Apparently, the consequences of globalization are proving so
devastatingthat its leading proponents are suddenly deeply worried about public reactions.
The concerns of the Davos participants were amplified in a
February 1, 1996, International Herald Tribune article written
David C…
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