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May 28, 2002
Norman Madarasz
France,
Brazil, the Politics
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May 27, 2002
Dave Marsh
Why I Voted for Nader:
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A Hero
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May 24, 2002
Edward Hammond
Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
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Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
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Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
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Big Changes Needed in
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May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
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Susan Abulhawa
Israel
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Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
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May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
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Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
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Bernard Weiner
Kenny
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Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
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Gary Leupp
"War
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May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
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Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
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Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
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May
28, 2002
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the United States
Part 2: The U.S. Drive for Corporate Globalization: A Partial
Primer on Why So Many Hate It
by Bill Christison
former political analyst
for the CIA
The all-out campaign of the U.S. to impose on
the world its own version of big-corporation, free-trade globalization
is every bit as damaging to international peace and justice as
Washington's unquestioning support for Israel's policies on Palestine
and the ill-conceived U.S. wars against terrorism and nuclear
proliferation. (See my article of May 9, 2002, Part 1 of The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the United States.) Globalization has many complex facets. This
article covers only those aspects that seem to me most important
in contributing to widespread animosity against the U.S.
The first thing everyone should understand
is that globalization does not have to be based on big corporations
and unregulated free markets. Webster's Dictionary definition
of the word is totally non-political and simply defines globalization
as the process of "making something worldwide in scope."
When we use the word today, we're usually talking about the economy.
The definition does not say that globalization must incorporate
any specific economic or political system, be it free-market
and free trade-capitalism, Soviet-style Communism, Scandinavian-style
Socialism, or any other "ism" or combination of "isms."
On the other hand, Webster's definition in no way prohibits you
from arguing, to take one view, that free-market capitalism and
free trade should be an integral part of globalization.
Nor would it prevent you from arguing, to take a different tack,
that universal health care or a right to a "living"
wage, as aspects of a human rights program, should be a part
of globalization. The only absolute necessities for globalization
are the technological advances in transportation, communications,
and information technology that make the movements of goods,
people, money, and data around the world faster, easier, and
cheaper.
Most politicians, and many experts and
pundits, constantly proclaim that globalization is inevitable
--that it is unstoppable and therefore nobody should try to stop
it. Without much doubt, the non-political globalization defined
by the dictionary probably is inevitable. It is wholly based
on technological advances that seem, as far as anyone can tell,
likely to continue. But most of those who talk incessantly about
the inevitability of globalization really want us to believe
that their own, highly political versions of globalization are
unstoppable, and therefore the rest of us should roll over and
lie back in acceptance. To me, it's pure fallacy to argue that
the political aspects of anyone's version of globalization are
as inevitable as the technological aspects.
Although it has faced opposition, the
U.S. in recent years has worked constantly to spread its version
of globalization into new areas of the world. Successive administrations
have pressed home five main points in their drive for a form
of globalization modeled after our own economy, political system,
and culture:
1. Advocacy of free-enterprise, market
capitalism; free trade; free and unrestricted movement of capital;
and privatization of economic activity throughout the world.
2. Strong support for global corporations
and hostility toward governmental regulation of them.
3. Extension to all countries of a "rule
of law" patterned to the extent possible after the U.S.
legal system.
4. Encouragement of human rights in all
countries.
5. Encouragement of democracy in all
countries.
On points 1 and 2 above, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have become Washington's
main implementers and enforcers throughout the third world. Both
the IMF and the Bank refuse to provide debt relief or to fund
projects, and at the same time discourage private investment,
in most of the world's poor nations unless the governments of
these nations carry out austerity measures and other "reforms"
intended to bring them into compliance with the precepts of free
markets and trade, privatization, and deregulation. The reforms
may sometimes have laudable long-term objectives, but they almost
always lead to an immediate drop in living standards of the already
poor. The final three points above (3, 4, and 5) seem unexceptionable
as goals of the U.S. version of globalization. In each case,
however, there are specifics in the U.S. interpretation of these
goals that actually intensify opposition among much of the world's
poor.
On point 3, hardly anyone opposes greater
global support for a "rule of law" in the abstract.
But when average people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America see
great profits being extracted from their own hides by U.S. or
other corporations, many do not regard the U.S. legal system
with high favor. They think it is appropriate to ask why those
corporations receive excessively favorable treatment under U.S.
law, and why that law unfairly gives inanimate corporations most
of the rights of human beings --which is exactly what the U.S.
legal system has done for more than a century. I'd guess that
the poor people in most poor nations would see the establishment
in their countries of a rule of law based on the U.S. legal system
as benefiting the rich and the corporations, not themselves.
Point 4, the encouragement of human rights,
is also not the apple-pie issue it appears to be. Just as the
U.S. only supports a particular, politicized version of globalization,
it also only supports a particular, politicized version of human
rights. When the U.S. government encourages human rights, it
always and exclusively talks about greater individual
human rights vis-à-vis governments. That is, when
the U.S. encourages human rights, we want governments to allow
their peoples greater freedom of speech, greater freedom from
capricious arrests, and other rights like that. And these things
are beyond question extremely important human rights
But the U.S. tends not to regard
as human rights such matters as universal healthcare, guaranteed
"living" wages, or a guaranteed right to form labor
unions. The U.S. government instead sees issues like jobs, housing
and healthcare as "questions of policy, not principle,
which cannot realistically be guaranteed as universal rights."
Many of the world's people, however, and not just people in
developing countries, do want such economic and social matters
to be recognized as basic human rights. In the poorest areas
of the world, some people undoubtedly see these unmet economic
and social "rights" as more important even than
free speech.
Making such a change in the definition
of human rights, and enforcing that change in a globalized economy
would, of course, make it more difficult for corporations to
find cheap labor. And a principal method of enforcing such rights
would almost certainly be to increase governmental regulation
as well as controls on trade among nations. All of this would
be anathema to supporters of the U.S. version of globalization,
and workers around the world understand this well. They also
understand that, despite its propaganda, support by the United
States even for its favored type of human rights has had a checkered
past in many parts of the world. Examples from both the past
and the present are almost too numerous to mention: Iran, Saudi
Arabia, Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Central
and South America, the Israeli-occupied territories, and the
Palestinian Authority, among others).
And finally we come to point 5, the encouragement
of democracy as a fundamental characteristic of the U.S. version
of globalization. Here we need to ask ourselves, what kind of
democracy are we talking about? When corporate spokesmen and
even some U.S. government officials have talked about democracy
in recent years, they have increasingly talked about the "democracy"
of the free market rather than political democracy. There's
a recent book, entitled One Market Under God, that I want
to quote on this subject. The author is an American, Thomas Frank,
who opposes U.S. globalization policies. Here are a few lines
from it.
"From paleoconservatives to New
Democrats, American leaders in the 1990s came to believe that
markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of
organization than (democratically elected) governments[T]he central
premise[was]that in addition to being mediums of exchange, marketsexpressed
popular will more articulately and more meaningfully than did
mere elections. Markets conferred democratic legitimacy; markets
were a friend of the little guy; markets looked out for our
interests. Today, American opinion leaders seem generally convinced
that democracy and the free market are simply identical. What
is new is this idea's triumph over all its rivals [and] the determination
of American leaders to extend it all over the world ."
Views like these --and similar views
in other recent books --are read by people in other countries
as well as in the U.S. And such views vitiate American pronouncements
in support of global democracy. People in other countries by
no means glorify free markets to the degree many Americans do,
and they are far more skeptical about the supposed democratic
values imparted by markets. Many around the world in fact despise
the hypocrisy of American leaders who seek to substitute free
markets for political democracy. In historical terms, of course,
U.S. credentials for supporting political democracy are none
too good; and just recently, the Bush administration's actions
in Venezuela have further tarnished those credentials.
Are The World's
Poor Really Doing Better?
During the last 20 years of this U.S.
version of globalization, the gap between rich and poor people
in most countries has grown wider. And animosities against America
have grown as the poor have watched the U.S. expand its wealth
and its hegemony, while they themselves have received scarcely
any benefit.
Supporters of globalization in this country
and elsewhere loudly disagree with the view expressed in the
last paragraph. Most of them don't try to argue against the fact
--and it is a fact --that the gap between rich
and poor has widened. But they argue that the average absolute
level of income of the poor around the world has actually increased
over the past 20 years. And from this they conclude that the
U.S. version of globalization, while it has allowed the rich-poor
gap to widen, has still been beneficial to the poor.
The problem with this analysis is that
it uses an average, of all the so-called underdeveloped
countries, weighted by population. But using an average can be
misleading. The two countries of China and India, with an immense
combined population of over one-third of all the world's total,
have a correspondingly immense impact on any average. And beyond
question, these two countries have done better under globalization
than most other countries. Why have they done better? They've
done better because, although they are still "underdeveloped,"
they are powerful enough and offer such large markets, that they
can pick and choose the particular parts of globalization that
they want to accept. They both protect and regulate their own
industries in various ways that are against the precepts of the
free market. So they are not examples that prove in any
way that the U.S. version of globalization has been good for
the poor of the world. The more than 100 other underdeveloped
nations, on the other hand, are generally small and weak, and
have to accept all parts of the U.S. globalization program;
otherwise the World Bank and the IMF simply refuse to provide
loans or debt relief to them. If you take China and India out
of the "averages" for all underdeveloped countries,
you'll see that the average for all the rest has shown no
improvement in the level of absolute poverty. Yet many of these
100-plus countries are the very ones which, unlike China and
India, have had to suffer under the full weight of U.S. globalization
programs.
In any case, the worldwide income gap
between the rich and poor truly is immense. Global statistics
are far from perfect, but they show that the world's population
recently hit 6 billion. Almost half of this total, 2.8 billion
people, have incomes of less than two dollars a day, and one
billion people have incomes of less than one dollar a day. Furthermore,
U.S. propaganda supporting globalization has accelerated the
rising but still unfulfilled expectations of the poor. The relatively
new presence of satellite television almost everywhere has helped
spread this propaganda more widely than ever. These things taken
together intensify the sense throughout the third world of being
oppressed by the U.S. I've made this comparison before, but I'm
going to do it again. Similar feelings, of being oppressed by
the Allies after World War I, made it possible for Hitler to
arouse the fear and hatred among Germans that led to World War
II and the Holocaust.
By the way, a recent issue of The
Nation magazine contains a splendid article on the huge international
conference recently held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, by 50,000 "anti-globalization"
people, including economists, social scientists, progressive
politicians, and many just plain "activists." I'd particularly
like to endorse one of the proposals made at the conference and
described in The Nation magazine article. This proposal
calls for "the reorientation of local economies toward domestic
and not foreign markets; significant land and income redistribution;
policies de-emphasizing growth and maximizing equity; and implementation
of a strategy that subordinates markets to social justice."
These are the kinds of guidelines that should be used in implementing
a global "Marshall Plan" that would be absolutely essential
if the U.S. should ever make a serious effort to overcome the
deficiencies in its current version of globalization. (For more
details on the scope of such a Marshall Plan, see my article
of March 4, 2002, referenced above.)
Free Trade:
Fine for Some
There is one final aspect of globalization
I've already touched on but want to discuss in more detail --the
insistent demands for free trade all over the world by recent
U.S. administrations. Other governments know full well that historically
just about every nation, while advancing from underdeveloped
to advanced status, has found it necessary to shun free trade
and employ protectionism for the decades needed to make the transition.
In Europe, England, France, and Germany all followed this course,
even though colonialism may have accelerated the transition,
at least in the British and French cases. The U.S. used high
and manipulative tariffs up to the 1930s. Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan used various anti-free-trade measures for many years
after World War II. It is becoming clearer than it used to be
that free trade is much more beneficial for already advanced
nations than it is for nations still underdeveloped or in transition.
Yet both Presidents Clinton and Bush, in speech after speech,
have advocated open markets and free trade for everybody. Except,
of course, for some in the U.S., where if you are a steel manufacturer,
President Bush has decided that you are certainly entitled to
protective tariffs. And also for farmers big and little, who
have received new and higher subsidies that cushion them from,
among other things, foreign competition, at least in election
years.
*
* * * * *
US Globalization
Now At Its Zenith?
Three recent developments --Enron's collapse,
Argentina's economic failure, and the aforementioned new grants
of anti-free-trade protection to America's steel and farming
interests --provide at least a glimmer of hope that the U.S.
version of globalization may soon reach its high-water mark and
begin to recede. Enron almost certainly provides an early example
of fraud and corruption that is more widespread than we know
in minimally regulated global corporations. Its collapse should
lead to pressures for more effective international regulation.
Argentina, after being glorified as the poster-boy of globalization
in the 1990s, is now an economic basket-case, seemingly receiving
"tough love" but little more from its former mentor,
the United States. Other nations, seeing Argentina's problems,
may henceforth become less pliant about accepting U.S. prescriptions.
And the examples of U.S. protection for steel and farmers might
slow the push for global free trade, at least for a while. But
the resilience of the extreme, and extremely selfish, U.S.-dominated
global capitalism that we are stuck with for the moment should
not be underestimated.
I think there are two series of questions
we all ought to be asking ourselves:
ONE. Are most people in the United States likely
to derive any real benefit from Washington's continuing drive
for global political hegemony and an economic globalization that
would mirror the economy of the U.S.? Will the military, economic,
and internal security costs of such U.S. foreign policies benefit
or damage our own society, living standards, and culture? Or
will most of the benefits/profits from this version of globalization
accrue to international corporations and to the thin layer of
wealthy people who support them in the many nations where they
operate?
TWO. Will the global income gap between rich and
poor widen or narrow over time, if the U.S. continues to pursue
its own version of globalization? If the answer to this question
is unknowable, except, say, after ten more years of experience
with the present version of globalization, can we afford to wait
those ten years as expectations throughout the third world continue
to rise but inevitably will not be fully met?
My own opinion is that the present U.S.
version of globalization will most probably result over the next
ten years in a continuing widening of the income gap between
rich and poor in most of the world's countries, and a worsening
of the animosities against the United States. Therefore the U.S.
should (1) stop trying to implement the present U.S.-dominated
globalization program, (2) launch immediately a vast aid program
to reduce income gaps around the world, (3) encourage individual
nations to accept or reject, more or less as China and India
do now, whatever aspects of globalization they themselves choose,
and (4) encourage individual nations to accept or reject the
precepts of free trade to the extent they themselves choose.
Finally, the U.S. in its foreign policies should encourage greater
political democracy in other nations, especially those now ruled
by dictatorial and corrupt minorities, but only through means
other than military action and covert operations.
You don't have to buy all or any of this.
Just think about it and come up with your own ideas of what would
be sensible foreign policies for the U.S. to pursue in the future.
Then get out there and make all the noise you can in support
of your ideas.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of
Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times,
Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979
he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political
Analysis, a 250-person unit.. His wife Kathy also worked in
the CIA, retiring in 1979.Since then she has been mainly preoccupied
by the issue of Palestine.
Other CounterPunch articles by Bill and
Kathleen Christison:
Bill Christison, Reforming the
CIA, May 23, 2002
Kathleen Christison,
Israel,
A Light Unto Nations?,
May 11, 2002
Bill Christison: The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States,
May 10, 2002
Kathleen Christison: Before There
Was Terrorism, May 2, 2002
Bill
Christison: Oil and the Middle East, April
6, 2002
Bill
Christison:
Why
the War on Terror Won't Work,
March 5, 2002
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