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MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #51-98 Globalization Highlights 1998
December 23, 1998

Program description at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9851.html

Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. This week on Making Contact:

Richard Grossman: Today the majority of the people in the world are oppressed by the few. And the oppressive vehicle of choice is--guess what--the global corporation.

Juliette Beck: Have you been down to the border regions lately? Pollution is out of control; babies are being born without brains.

Phillip Babich: Throughout 1998 Making Contact has covered economic globalization and how the consolidation of wealth and power is affecting communities around the world. On this program you'll hear some of those highlights. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact.

A far-reaching trade deal that would grant transnational corporations unprecedented power has been in the works for several years now. Member-nations of the elite Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, had hoped to pass the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in October. But its progress has been slowed, partially due to grassroots pressure, and the agreement might be shifted to the World Trade Organization.

As corporations have been organizing--primarily behind closed doors--grassroots activists have revved up a mobilization effort for fair trade, not so-called free trade, reminiscent of the NAFTA debate a few years ago and more recently the debate over fast track legislation that has been thwarted in Congress. In March 1998, dozens of demonstrators rallied outside a World Trade Organization event held in San Jose, California. The key note speaker was Director General of the WTO Renato Rugierro, an ardent supporter of the MAI and whose organization is closely associated with the agreement talks and eventual outcome.

Critics of the MAI charge that the trade agreement will continue an erosion of labor and human rights, and environmental standards begun under the first globalization policies of the WTO. But Rugierro defended the WTO, saying that it is not the place of a trade organization to deal with such issues.

Renato Rugierro: You cannot have a trade rule to solve a social problem. You must have a social rule that solve a social problem. Protectionist measures, as to put in question the so-called comparative advantage, are not the solution to the problem. Because you have to be very clear with yourself. What do you want? Do you want really to improve the condition of life of the poor children of the Third World, or do you want to safeguard some uncompetitive jobs in some rich countries? Because the solutions are very different. If you want to save the uncompetitive jobs, then you close your border. But if you want to help the poor children of the world, then you have to follow what in the high law they are doing in trying to promote the labor standards, to make verification and to help also with some international financement, to give an alternative to the chaldern’s, who instead of working, they could have some professional vocational training. Trade sanctions are only aggravating the conditions of life of the poor children of the Third World, and we have to be honest, and clearly say what is the reality, not what we would like.

Phillip Babich: Rugierro recommended that advocates for labor rights take their concerns to the ILO, the International Labor Organization. But Juliette Beck of the California Fair Trade Campaign pointed out to him that the ILO has little enforcement authority.

Juliette Beck: Well, ILO has no enforcement mechanisms. So until labor standards and environmental protections can be treated equally, to the interest of businesses, such as intellectual property rights and patents--equally, on equal footing, with the same amount of sanctions, and might and power behind them, then we will still be demanding fair trade, not free trade. Look what's happened under NAFTA--has Mexico invested more in their environment? Have you been down to the border regions lately? Pollution is out of control; babies are being born without brains.

Phillip Babich: Another activist, Steve Brooks of the Bill Motto Veterans of Foreign Wars post, connected economic globalization with an increase in military actions in some countries where resistance against so-called free trade policies has been growing. In Mexico last December 45 unarmed peasants were gunned down by paramilitary troops.

Now you have with you a cross and, with the globe being crucified, I believe. Can you describe what we're looking at here?

Steve Brooks: Well, what I put down on this cross was: "1998: Fear of the Globalization." And essentially is that: everybody needs to be very awake this year with what globalization's going to do. And what's going to happen is more of what I've got on the other side of the cross, which was NAFTA being responsible for the massacre December 22,'97 of 45 people that were shot and brutalized. There's going to be just more of the same on a global scale, and it's quite the opposite of waving the earth flag of ecology.

Phillip Babich: So what you're saying is that as globalization continues, people fight back to keep the status quo, there's an increased militarization which results in deaths like you described on December 22 in Mexico.

Steve Brooks: That's correct, and it will continue; it will get worse. People will get caught in the grip of this because it will chew up . . . right now the laws are being put in place so that you cannot actually sue or impede a corporation's profits, if you try to demonstrate--and actually kind of what Oprah Winfrey was up against in Texas with suing her on the meat thing, you know.

Shereen Meraji: You are listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. This program can now be heard across the United States, in Canada, in Haiti, South Africa, and around the world on Radio for Peace International Short Wave. You can also hear us on the internet. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, or you would like to learn how you can get involved with Making Contact, please give us a call. It's toll free, 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcript orders. That's 800-529-5736. We also welcome comments and suggestions for future programs.

Phillip Babich: We hear a lot about the need to improve the lives of people in the United States and around the world. News coverage tells of progress in some countries, and setbacks in others. But what is progress? And what are the possibilities and choices for development? Whether in Chicago or Capetown, whether in Canada or Zimbabwe?

To explore these questions, syndicated columnist Norman Solomon spoke with Kevin Danaher and Debra Toler. Danaher is co-founder of Global Exchange in San Francisco, and editor of the book titled, "Corporations are Going To Get Your Mamma: Globalization and Downsizing the American Dream." And, Toler is a senior research analyst at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. Her article, "Secrets and Lies: Debunking the Myth About Africa," appears in the April 1998 issue of Essence magazine. In that article, Toler says that, quote: "Today western economic exploitation continues through unfair trade practices and enforcement of crushing debt burdens." Solomon asked Toler why the mass media didn't present that point of view while covering President Clinton's trip to Africa in 1998.

Debra Toler: People who had any access to listening to reporters, or people from grassroots organizations in those countries--they continually brought up the disappointment that President Clinton didn't say anything about debt relief. At Food First we actually call for debt forgiveness to write off the debts. But there was a continual level of expression of disappointment that he didn't bring that up at all. And certainly the trade regime that the United States would like to put on Africa is very onerous--it's very unfair, and the key example I would like to mention is that for example, the United States is flooding African markets with U.S. subsidized--government subsidized--food surpluses from our country, and at the same time we're demanding that in order for African countries to gain access to U.S. markets, they remove subsidies for their farmers, and that they remove price supports for their farmers. So the effect basically is for the United States to become the supplier of food for Africa and for African farmers to be driven out of business. So that's an example of what I meant by unfair trade practices.

Norman Solomon: Meanwhile, though, we're told that Africans can't feed themselves.

Debra Toler: Yes, and that's one of the key myths that I take on in my article. The first thing that people need to understand is that right now, as of this moment, food, there's more than enough food produced to feed every man, woman and child in Africa, and in many instances to export. The cause--there is hunger in Africa, but that is a separate issue from the level of production in Africa, and the cause for hunger in Africa is the same as the cause for hunger for 30 million Americans, which is that: people have inequitable access to economic and political power and resources, and the same obtains for the United States or Africa, but it is not an issue of food production.

Norman Solomon: Kevin Danaher, you also have been involved for a long time in dealing with issues that are directly related to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As a matter of fact, you edited a book which I have not mentioned yet, called "Fifty Years is Enough: the Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund." Whether we're taking about Africa, or Latin America, or Asia, what are the roles that you see being played by these huge, financial, global institutions?

Kevin Danaher: At Global Exchange, we focus on educating people here in the United States because what we learned (I did my doctoral dissertation research in Africa) what we learned traveling around Africa, Asia, Latin America is--people would say to us--"Gee, it's really nice you come here and want to help us, if you really want to help us, go back and change your society. Because it's your government, your corporations and agencies like the IMF and the World Bank that your government and the United States dominates that are keeping repressive dictators in power in our countries. They say, Look, if it weren't for the finance, and the military assistance, and all sorts of strengthening that comes from Washington and Wall Street, we could deal with our local dictators, but they are literally propped up by support from Washington and Wall Street, so your job as people in the United States, is to change your society, and democratize it. Think of this paradox: you go around the United States--this is the most powerful country ever on the face of the earth--you would assume that a country that is so globally powerful would have citizens that are knowledgeable about world affairs. And it's laughable; we're not knowledgeable about world affairs. The only way to understand that paradox is to understand that it is not in the interest of U.S. leaders and the U.S. officials who sit on the World Bank and IMF governing boards to have the population of the United States understand what's going on, because if the people of the United States understood what was going on, they'd rebel against it. It's immoral, it's wrong, and as Debra pointed out, inequality in the world is getting worse, not better.

Norman Solomon: Just in the last few weeks, there's been a great deal of publicity about the situation in Indonesia. We've heard a lot of coverage about the so-called meltdown of Asian economies and a lot of the spin is that, for instance, Mr. Suharto in Indonesia is basically part of a crony system. That's why there's an economic problem in Indonesia. Do you buy that?

Kevin Danaher: Well, it's very interesting to see the timing on this, right? When Suharto came to power on the back of a CIA coup in 1965, and 500,000 people were killed, there was no big problem with him. There was no screaming about a crisis in Indonesia or a dictatorship or crony capitalism. When he invaded East Timor early and killed 200,000 people there, there was no big outcry in the corporate press here about crony capitalism and the need to get rid of this dictator. It's when the financing gets threatened, when the profitability, when the money-making by the international bankers and financial casino gets threatened, then they start to question, Well, maybe this isn't the best guy to be in power.

So I think what we need to do is we need to get away from all this focus on the market--which is just money; market rules means money rules--and the people with the most money are going to have the most power, to human values and meeting social needs. Are the workers in Indonesia who work for Nike, for example, are they able on that wage, that dollar a day--not an hour, but a dollar a day that Nike pays their workers in their factories in Indonesia--are they able to raise a family and afford running water and electricity and books and school uniforms for their kids? Or are they able to. . . the wage that Nike pays in Vietnam doesn't even pay for three meals for the individual worker, it's so low. So we have to understand that these products that we're buying, and that we're wearing and consuming, are oftentimes based on unbelievable exploitation by people who are living under dictatorships--and those dictatorships are propped by U.S. corporations and U.S. foreign policy. That means it's our responsibility to fix it.

Norman Solomon: Let's talk a little bit more about Nike, a huge multi-billion dollar corporation based in the United States. Time magazine in their March 30, 1998 issue did a big spread on Nike. And I'd like to quote from it, and get your comment Kevin, especially since the organization you work for, Global Exchange, is mentioned in the piece. Time discusses the working conditions at Nike factories in Asia, and then adds that another huge issue is the question of a fair wage, and the magazine goes on to note that Americans pay $100 for a pair of shoes that a worker gets $3 a day to make, and then the magazine quotes Kimberly Miyoshi of your organization, Global Exchange, saying that they pay Michael Jordan many millions of dollars a year to endorse Nike shoes, and then she poses the question, "Can't they find more money to pay the workers?" And Time magazine responds in print, "The answer is no. Corporations pay the going rate for labor, wherever they are."

Kevin Danaher: Well, "the going rate." What is the going rate? The going rate a few hundred years ago in Africa was zero. It was slavery; it was guns, and rum, and some other commodities to tribal chiefs, who would then go raid other people and sell them into slavery. And there was a multi-million dollar thriving global market in human beings. So where do we draw the line with this? If you, as a corporation, can go into a country that has a dictatorship that rules oppressively over its people, and you can get away with paying a dollar a day or two dollars a day, does that make it right? No I don't think that makes it right. Not if we believe that democracy and equality and people being able to feed their children is right. I have two daughters, and if they were threatened with hunger because of some political structure or some economic inequality, I'd be pretty fighting mad, and I think what we need to feel here in this society, is a little bit of connection, a little bit of solidarity to those people who cannot feed their children. There is a child dying from the effects of hunger on average every four and a half seconds in this global market economy, and it's because there's too many people who are poor. And one of the reasons why they're poor is because these companies will not pay a decent wage. So if you look at the development of any national economy, you get to a point where you've got a demand for minimum wage. If we're going to have a global economy, let's have a global minimum wage--say a thousand dollars a year, or something like that, a floor underneath people, whatever's a livable wage. While we're at it, we could have a global maximum wage, say a million dollars a year. Does anybody need to make more than a million dollars a year?

Norman Solomon: I don't think Mr. Knight at Nike would appreciate that idea.

Kevin Danaher: He's worth over five billion dollars.

Norman Solomon: I'm wondering, getting back to looking at Africa, and Debra, you lived in Africa for very long periods of time; you're a scholar of the continent's history. It seems quite often that people in the United States don't see the history as being very important. In other words, you'll hear stuff like, "Well, the colonial times--that was then and this is now. What does the history of Africa in this century have to do with the current circumstances?

Debra Toler: Yes, that's a very important point, Norman. I think that people need to understand that, and I would like to point out there's a similar situation with African Americans and slavery. People say, "Oh that was over a long time ago, or, you know, what does it matter now?" In the case of Africa, both the fundamental economic structure of most African countries' economies, which is namely that they are absolutely dependent upon their ability to export in order to earn foreign exchange to buy just about everything they need, and the fact that they export primarily primary products, which are agricultural, mining resources, and the fact that the infrastructures of their countries were developed to facilitate getting those raw materials out of Africa and to the West, primarily to Europe, that is a situation that began in colonialism, and that has continued until today--what is currently the recolonization of Africa--because guess what? The World Bank says, "You all have to pay off this debt, and in order to do that, you need to export. So that's one . . . the structure of the economy has not changed, and that dependency on the West is still in place and that goes back to colonialism.

Politically, there's also a continuity. There's a continuity in the sense that the Europeans carved up Africa irrespective of the way people had traditionally related to one another territorially, according to their ethnic groups, and so on. And that put in place . . . and also the fact that the colonials, to rule, used the divide and conquer kind of strategy, in which, almost in every single country they favor certain ethnic groups over other ethnic groups, and that's classic in the case of for example, Rwanda, where they favor the Tutsi over the Hutu. So that those kinds of group--ethnic--inequalities, and differences were also in many instances put in place under colonialism continued during the Cold War, in which case you had the United States and the former Soviet Union arming different sides. And so there's a legacy of that as well. You cannot understand Africa's economic or political situation if you do not understand the changes that took place under colonialism.

Phillip Babich: Debra Toler speaking with Norman Solomon. They were joined by Kevin Danaher.

High-level negotiations have been underway for three years to expand the reach of transnational corporations in the so-called global economy. According to activists and scholars, this trade treaty--known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment--is the latest development in a centuries-old quest to solidify corporate control over the planet's resources.

The history of corporations dates back to the 15th century, according to Richard Grossman, co-director of the Program on Corporations, Law, & Democracy. In 1407 King Henry IV of England chartered the Company of Merchants and Adventurers, granting it monopoly control over certain exports. The Russian Company, the Spanish Company, and The East India Company followed, acquiring control over trade routes and resources. Grossman says that these companies were the predecessors to today's corporations.

Richard Grossman: What was the purpose of these and other global corporations of those days? Well, in hindsight, we can be very clear that their mission was to buy cheap; to sell dear; to limit or prevent competition; to vacuum out resources; to display fierce violence, and to perpetuate violence to people, species, and places; to destroy existing cultures and social relationships; to replace independence with dependence; to eradicate peoples' sense of their own histories; to get people to internalize the corporations' values, myths, and world views; to create a class of bureaucrats and civil servants to serve their needs; to define people as subjects, objects, property, invisible, or anything else they wanted to define them as; to control all dispute resolution; to raise armies and navies, and wage war; to write laws, including laws and doctrines that legalize and institutionalize the corporations' destructive and dominating acts; to enforce laws; to impose punishments including executions. In other words: to govern. And to govern dictatorially, but with guile. From these hundreds of years of experiences, can't we deduce the nature of the corporate fiction? These corporations didn't just create some excessive harms, they didn't just occasionally exploit, they didn't just drive bargains. They were by definition, by their nature, oppressors.

Phillip Babich: Richard Grossman, speaking at a conference sponsored by the International Forum on Globalization.

The spread of economic globalization is aided by a host of international and national agencies and institutions. Among them are the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations and a web of so-called development agencies which work to lower trade barriers and attract foreign investment.

David Korten, author of "When Corporations Rule the World," is president and founder of the People-Centered Development Forum, an organization that advocates sustainable and equitable development. He is also a former advisor to the United States Agency for International Development, a key government office that promotes globalization.

David Korten: For some thirty years, I worked as a member of the Foreign Aid Establishment, and yes indeed, we brought economic growth to the Third World. In most poor countries now, you can fly in a big jumbo jet into a modern international airport, drive into the city in a Mercedes-Benz limousine on crowded superhighways, stay in a five-star hotel and shop in elegant, air-conditioned shopping malls that carry all of the latest consumer, designer models. Yet for those of us who chance to look beyond the facades of development, we saw a very different and deeply troubling picture. We see millions of people living in dehumanizing destitution, environments being stripped bare of life, and the social fabric of once rich cultures being ripped asunder. Something seemed to be going badly wrong. As I reflected on this and began to try to put the picture into perspective, and my unease turned to horror when I realized it was happening not only in the poor--and presumably backward countries--that my western arrogance had compelled me to go forth to save, it was also happening in the western countries as well, including in the country that I had long assumed was the model for the rest of the world to emulate: even here in America.

Phillip Babich: According to Richard Grossman, the U.S. Constitution originally limited corporate power, but as time marched on, that changed.

Richard Grossman: By the end of the 19th century, the corporation had waged a counterrevolution, had transformed the laws, and was on its way to becoming--to being--what corporations had been revealed as for the previous 300 years. With their wealth and power, they constitutionalize corporate rights and authority, over property, and over the decision making of what counts. In other words, they became able to act as legal persons, and created the fiction of the market, wherein investment production and work decision making, the basic decision making that shape our lives and our communities, were declared beyond the authority of the people. So that even when the excluded classes of people--African Americans, native people, women, men without property--after a century of struggle had become people, had won their rights, the corporations and the culture were powerful enough, the corporate culture was powerful enough, to transform all of us into consumers.

I go through this because it's vital in our road to consciousness, and in our engaging in authentic action. To understand that what corporations are now doing around the world, they accomplished in the United States of America a hundred years ago. And what they have been perfecting all through this century, in this country, is what they are seeking to do globally today. What else is GATT or NAFTA, or the multi-lateral agreement on investments, but the logical next step to constitutionalize the corporation everywhere? Through guile, to legalize the property rights of corporations over everything that really counts. Given this reality, and given this history, we need to ask ourselves critically, what is the nature of our alleged democracy in this country today? Can we say that we have a democracy? Can we say that we the people are politically free? That we govern ourselves, when corporate fictions not only wield power and authority on the law, but they also have oppressed so many people into unconsciousness?

Helena Norberg-Hodge: Three-year-old children cry when they go to school because they don't have the right label running shoes, or because they don't have blue jeans.

Phillip Babich: Helena Norberg-Hodge is director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture. She spent 20 years living among the Ladaki people on the Tibetan plateau, a culture that had been virtually untouched by the global economy before she arrived.

Helena Norberg-Hodge: I've also seen that in China, the same blue-eyed, blond Barbie dolls are being introduced, again for three-year-old girls to play with--as they are in Ladaki, as they are in Africa, as they are in Sweden. So everywhere around the world, children are being subjected to the same role models: blue-eyed, blond Barbie dolls for the girls, Rambos with machine guns for the boys. And what this is leading to is a dramatic polarization of sexual roles and the imposition of a monocultural identity. That means that no one is right. In China, we know that women who can afford it, many of them are operating on their eyes to make them look more Western. All around the world, women are using blue contact lenses and bleach to make their hair blond. This is not just some trivial issue; it's a very deep issue to do with loving and accepting ourselves the way we are.

Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact . . . highlights from our Globalization Desk. Thanks for listening. We had production help from Susan Celli and Shereen Meraji. I'm Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts, or if you'd like to make a comment or suggestion for future programs. That's 800-529-5736.

Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions from people who are not often heard in mass media. Our national producer is David Barsamian. Phillip Babich is our managing producer. Our senior advisor is Norman Solomon. Shereen Meraji is our production assistant. Peggy Law is our executive director. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. For everyone at Making Contact, thanks for listening.