THE DOWNSIDE OF GLOBALIZATION
What the Media Doesn't Report

Editors Note: This a speech by Jerry Mander given at the opening of the Global Teach-In 2, held May 10-12, 1996 in Washington, D.C. and sponsored by the International Forum on Globalization (IFG). See the related articles about the IFG and a speech by David Morris at the November 1995 Global Teach-In.

Good evening and welcome to the second teach in on the social, ecological, cultural, and political effects of economic globalization presented by the International Forum on Globalization. It's great to see so many people here. We had been warned that Washington D.C. is one place where people might not waste their weekend listening to speakers and going to workshops, but I see that some do!

My name is Jerry Mander. I am the acting chair of the IFG and it's my job tonight to take 10-12 minutes at the beginning here to speak a few words about the IFG and to help set the context and give my view of why we are here.

The International Forum on Globalization is a group of some sixty activists, scholars, writers and educators. We come from 20 countries. We started getting together in the wake of the international votes on NAFTA and Uruguay GATT to share our ideas and to speak out about the tremendous growing threats of what has come to be called the "global economy." Threats to our democracy, our communities, to biological diversity, cultural diversity, our livelihoods, to small farmers and businesses, to human rights and labor rights, and to the survival of the natural world.

This event is only one in a series of large and smaller events we are undertaking in this country and in other countries over the next three years to awaken awareness and discussion of the multitude of profound issues surrounding the subject of a globalized economy, and to start thinking about what we can do. So thank you for joining us tonight as we begin. Over these three days we will have five full panels like this one, and a very lively debate tomorrow evening, and more than 34 workshops on as many dimensions of the issue as we can have time for. So, we hope you will find the weekends richly rewarding and finally revealing some paths we may take.

The roots of this event and the IFG itself go back to the 1993 North American Free Trader Agreement (NAFTA) vote. Many of us were bitterly disappointed by its passage, but the next morning, when I showed up at my office, I found a surprising fax on my desk. It came from Mark Ritchie of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. It was a fax he sent to hundreds of people before they had awaken so that it would be the first thing that people saw in the morning (a great example of good organizing). The fax, which I can only paraphrase now, said:

"Good morning. Don't feel bad. We almost won, amazingly, against the largest corporations in the world. The only way we were beat was because Bill Clinton bought some congressional votes with hard cash. But it's not the end of the line, it's the beginning. We have a new opportunity now. We have a new consciousness of what's happening. But, we need to refocus our attention! We are facing something larger and far more awesome than we ever thought. We are beginning to see that what's underway is a complete redesign of the global economic system to put it directly under corporate rule. This will affect every aspect of people's lives--from their jobs to their genes, to the way they think about life---and every corner of the globe. The problem we need to address is now economic globalization itself."

He said it better than my paraphrase, but two years later we are here in this room together to shed light on what has been created and to help get organized and educated about it.

Of course, the tragedy is that organizations such as ours are even necessary, but they are. Because of the enormity of change that we now face, there is very little effort by elected officials, educational institutions, or mass media to give the public the true descriptions of the problem, or to reveal the root ideologies that lie behind it. In fact, by such techniques as Congressional fast track voting, the concerted effort in this country is to hide what's happening, because schemes like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or the World Trade Organization (WTO) can only survive in the dark, when no light is shed on them.

The rare descriptions of the global economy that are found in the media usually come from the lead advocates and beneficiaries of the process --transnational corporations and their surrogates in government. The visions they present are unfailingly positive--I would say they are utopian! "Economic globalization will be a panacea for all problems." "The rising tide will lift all boats." These are the new dominant political homilies.

Meanwhile, all opposition to globalization is lumped together in one ball whether it's from environmentalists, or human rights advocates, small businesses, small and indigenous farmers here and in the Third World, people trying to protect the rights of democratic governance, to Perotites, Naderites, Buchananites, some of whom vary across categories in a very wide political spectra, yet all are lumped together in a single category--"protectionist"--and therefore summarily dismissed. So, we are left with an informational climate that is exceedingly one-sided and shallow. We are also left with a kind of global corporate protectionism that does not seek to safeguard communities, democracies, or the natural world. Instead, it seeks to protect its own freedoms to circumvent the efforts to prevent further destruction from corporate excesses. Do we really want to sacrifice our democratic laws, and our controls over resources, and livelihoods so that distant transnational corporations can be free of us.

In addition, the recent passage of GATT and the WTO has been hailed in the media and by the world political and corporate leaders who think alike on this point; it's as though there was some kind of global Messianic rebirth. They have proclaimed, and it has gone largely unchallenged, that GATT will bring a $250 billion expansion of world economic activity with benefits trickling down to us all. But is this true? Does such an economic arrangement actually work? Will this economic expansion even happen? And if it does, how can it possibly sustain itself? Where will the resources--the energy, the wood, the minerals, the water--come from to feed such exponential economic growth? The fierce exploitation of Third World resources cannot go on forever, no matter how much advertising to the contrary the World Bank presents. And where will the effluents of the hyped process---the solids and the toxics--be dumped? Who finally benefits from this? Will it be working people who, in America at least, seem mainly to be losing jobs to machines and to corporate flight, and who've been placed in a downward wage competition with their co-workers in other countries? Will it be farmers who, whether in Asia, Africa, or North America are being shoved off their lands by World Bank export development schemes to make way for giant corporate farms that no longer grow food for local people to eat, but instead grow coffee, beef, or grain for export. Will it be city dwellers, now faced with millions of newly landless refugees, seeking some place to live, seeking the rare and poorly paid job?

And what of the ecological results? Can ever increasing consumption be sustained? How many cars can be built and bought? How many roads can cover the land? When will the forests be gone? What will become of the animals and birds, is life better from this? Are we, as individuals, as families, as communities, made more secure, less anxious, more in control of our destinies? How could we possibly benefit from a system that destroys local, regional, and national economies and governments while handling real power to faceless bureaucracies in Geneva?

German ecologist Wolfgang Sachs says that the only thing worse than the failure of this massive global experiment would be its success. For even at its optimum level, the long-term benefits of a global economy go only to a tiny minority of people who sit at the hub of the process, while the rest of humanity is left fighting for fewer jobs, increasingly landless and homeless, living in violent societies on a ravaged planet. The only boats that will be lifted, it would seem are those of the owners and managers of the process: the rest of us will be stuck on the beach, facing the rising tide.

Given all this, one would think this would be the number one subject of the day, debated everywhere in events like this and in the mass media. Right now, however, when mass media finally does report on some aspect of globalization , rarely does the report express the connections between the specific crisis they describe and the root causes in the globalization process.

Take environment. We sometimes read of changes in global climate, melting polar ice or habitat destruction. We read of ozone depletion, ocean pollution or wars over oil, and perhaps soon, water. But rarely are these matters linked to the imperatives of global economic expansion now accelerated under free trade, the overuse of raw materials, or the consumer lifestyle that's being hyped worldwide on television, and its parent--advertising. The net result: confusion.

We read in the newspapers of the Berings Bank debacle, and the Mexican financial crisis. But rarely has any medium clarified the role of the new global computer networks that make possible the instantaneous transfer, anywhere on the planet, of unimaginably huge amounts of money; or the consequences of the deregulation of financial speculation; or the role that the World Bank and the IMF played in creating the conditions that encourage that speculation leading to what John Cavanagh and David Korten call "The Casino Economy." As for the Mexican bailout story, it was carried in the U.S. press as if the United States' bailout of Mexico was a kind of do-gooder act on our part: Good neighbors coming to the aid of our Mexican friends. In fact, the only people bailed out were the financial investors who largely brought on the crisis in the first place.

The media does tell us about an immigration crisis as people flee across borders in search of jobs only to be met with Buchanite xenophobia, violence, and demagoguery. But the role of the international trade agreements in making life impossible at home for these people is not discussed. NAFTA, for example, was a knockout blow to the remaining self-sufficient corn-farming economy of Mexico's Mayan peoples---as the Zapatistas tried to explain--making native lands vulnerable to corporate buyouts and foreign competition. Meanwhile in India, Africa, South America, mega-development schemes displace millions of indigenous people and small farmers to make way for gigantic dams. The result is that more people join the landless, jobless urban mass.

Sometimes we see reports on food shortages, but rarely is the connection drawn between hunger and the control of the world food supply by giant corporations like Cargill, they effectively determine where food will grow and what ultimate price consumers will pay. Food formerly eaten by the people who grew it is now exported---shipped thousands of miles across oceans at great environmental costs to be eaten by the already well-feed.

Lately we have read about the strike of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers in France. The media reports these workers as protectionists, selfishly trying to protect their privileges and benefits. What the reports do not tell us is that they are trying to prevent being sacrificed to the efforts of France to live up to the conditions of Maasstricht European single currency agreement that requires harmonizing downward of worker benefits in all of Europe so as to smooth out the pathways for transnational corporations to operate--sort of like a standard gauge railway for the global economy.

Horrible new disease outbreaks such as Ebola and Mad Cow disease are thoroughly reported with ghoulish relish in our press, but omitted is the connection between those outbreaks and the invasion of rainforests and other habitats and the new mobility that provided disease vectors by global transport and development. And in the case of the cows--the role of industrialization of agriculture for mass export production to serve global economies are causing rainforest destruction. You will hear more about that this weekend.

And we read sad stories about the assaults on the last indigenous tribes in the Amazon, Borneo, or the Philippines. But insufficiently reported are the root causes of this: the demands for more water or forest, and the equally desperate need to convert self-sufficient peoples into consumers. This too is part of the globalization process, the homogenization of conceptual framework, the monoculturalization of peoples and lands. The utter uniformity of the development model--everywhere on earth. Countries as varied as India, Brazil, or Sweden are finding they must join the same global market system. The net result is becoming obvious--global homogenization of culture and lifestyle, and the final destruction of local cultures and economies. Soon every place on Earth will look and feel like every place else, with the same restaurants and hotels, the same music, the same clothiers, the same malls and superstores, the same streets crowded with the same cars. There will scarcely be reason to leave home. Wherever you go it will be the same. I expect we will learn more of that from Helena Norberg-Hodge.

Meanwhile new technologies like biotechnology bring the globalization process to new terrain, enabling the commercialization of the building blocks of life--the internal wilderness of our genetic structures. Global corporate patenting of life forms is having profound effects on Third World agriculture, ecology, and human rights as Vandana Shiva, Andy Kimbrell and Nilo Cayuqueo will mention in the upcoming days. Why don't we find this in the press? Why is there such little reporting--off the business pages--about the fact that 500,000 farmers in India have mobilized to fight U.S. intellectuals property rights laws?--It's not about video and DCs, it's about the monopolization of seeds! Why don't we understand this?

As far as reporting on the corporations that are running this new show, the media tend to treat the big players, the Iacoccas or Moritas, mainly as subjects of gossip, glamorous like movie stars or athletes. Vanity Fair takes us to their poolside telephones and gives us the inside scoop about their megadeals. The media tend to speak respectfully in the new language of downsizing and efficiency without revealing that such terminology is euphemistic. Efficiency really means replacing workers with machines: competitiveness means keeping wages and benefits down. Flattening the corporate structure means eliminating middle managerial jobs, spreading anxiety from the inner cities out to the suburbs. Except for one brief burst--stimulated, to the credit of Buchanan, the media have been silent.

Finally, the point is this: all of these subjects are treated by the media as if they were unrelated. This is not helpful to an insecure public trying to figure out what is going on. We are not helped to understand that each of these issues--overcrowded cities, unusual new weather, the growth of global poverty, the spread of disease, the lowering of wages as profits and stock prices are soaring, the elimination of social services, the destruction of wilderness. These are all part of the same global process. They are of one piece--a fabric of connections--all in reaction to the world's economic arrangement in the cause of a development ideology. This restructuring, privatization, deregulation, and dismantling of democratic governance has followed an ideological design created by economists and corporations, encouraged by subservient governments and soon, under the WTO, to be made mandatory by international bureaucrats beyond democratic control.

They all claim we will benefit from what they are doing! But we don't think so. So, this event tonight is intended to help us all get news of and to clarify what's going on, explain why it cannot possibly work, and begin to speak of new directions. I thank you very much for your attention.