Page 3 of 5 Excerpt
from Pepe Escobar's Globalistan The following is an excerpt from
Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is
Dissolving into Liquid War by Asia Times
Online's Pepe Escobar. For a review of the book,
click here.
GLOBALISTAN
almost 2% each, and China a staggering 10%
all by itself. In 2004, the whole of Africa
captured 4% of global FDI. China captured 22%.
Savings usually do not remain in Africa; they
migrate to wealthy members of the Triad and
assorted fiscal
paradises and are not
reinvested in Africa.
Wallerstein has been
one among many showing how the South remains dis-
united politically, pullulating with client
regimes of the North in contrast to the few - like
the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia,
India, China), plus Indonesia and South Korea -
with real or potential geopolitical power.
The bottom line remains polarization
"expanding geometrically," as Wallerstein puts it.
"The North maintains this structure by means of
its monopoly of advanced productive processes,
control over the world financial institutions,
dominance over knowledge and information media at
a global level, and what is most important, by
means of military power." Essentially, the North
still brandishes an Iron Fist even though
sometimes enveloped by a sexy, red velvet glove.
So the mantra that everyone equally
profits from globalization is a myth. Further
fragmentation flows through internal borders -
like between coastal China and the countryside;
south India and the rest of the country; Mexico
and the southern Indian states; or southeast
Brazil and the rest of the country. Niches prevail
- like Silicon Valley, with 2 million people and a
GNP bigger than Chile's. The internet may
represent the most glaring metaphor of inequality.
By 2005, 1 billion people were connected - less
than 15% of the world's population, a figure that
confronted with 3 billion people barely surviving
on less than US$ 2 a day, and 5 out of 6 billion
people living on only 20% of global GDP, spells
out that the world economy can function just fine
serving only 20% of the world's population, that
is, virtually the ones who are connected. As for
the others, the harsh conclusion is inevitable:
they are expendable. Forever.
While 3
billion people barely survive on less than US$ 2 a
day; at least 850 million - roughly 1 in every 7 -
suffer from chronic malnutrition ingesting less
than 2300 calories a day (in the wealthy North the
average is 3400); hundreds of millions have never
made a phone call; and thousands of children die
every day from diarrhea due to the absence of
clean water, the number of global air passengers,
according to IATA, has shot up to over 2 billion
since 2005. Hong Kong-Taipei is the busiest air
link in the world, followed by New York-London and
London- Amsterdam. Once again, all Triad links.
An absolutely key phenomenon for the next
few decades will be South-to-North immigration.
Wallerstein alerts us to the fact that in the long
run "the North is creating an ample strata of
resident persons which don't have all the
political, economic or social rights" of the
citizens of any particular country. There may be
differences of gradation, but it's the same
picture from the U.S. to France and Spain. This
spells endless internal political turbulence.
The daily apocalypse of the excluded is
what we see when we travel deep in the heart of
Africa, China, South Asia, Southeast Asia and
Latin America. But what most people don't see is
that the key cause of hunger is war. Superposing
hunger during the 1990s - because of drought or
floods - with the geography of war, the result is
that hunger is less due to climate than to
politics. Examples abound - in Somalia, Angola,
Mozambique, plus the undisguised ethnic cleansing
in Liberia, Ethiopia and in Darfur, not to mention
the 4 million Afghan refugees to Pakistan and Iran
who fled the Taliban during the 1990s. That is
hunger as a political weapon. Wars will still be
fought for access to power - like in Afghanistan,
Sudan and the Ivory Coast; for territorial control
- like in Israel/Palestine; for separation - like
in Chechnya, Georgia, Kashmir and Aceh; or for a
minority to express their grievances - like in
southern Thailand. The privatization of war and
its asymmetrical, trans-State mutations will only
increase the influence of hunger as a political
weapon.
Technically, the world will remain
able to feed itself for generations. Demographic
growth won't affect it. But how could agriculture
win over malnutrition? There are only two
possibilities: sustainable development or genetic
manipulation. Two poles of the Triad - the U.S.
and the E.U. - produce 40% of the wheat exported
globally. 50% of their cereals are exported to
developing countries. Both the U.S. and the E.U.
practice heavy subsidies to exports. This massive
unloading at cut price rates of the rich
countries' excess production will continue to lead
- in the rest of the world - to massive
destruction of rural jobs and irreversible
dependence on imported agricultural products.
That's trade as lethal weapon. The Sahel is a
fitting example. In the Sahel, traditional
cultures such as manioc have receded at a rate of
1% a year for the past 20 years compared to export
cultures - like cotton, coffee and cacao - which
are the source of precious foreign exchange.
Meanwhile imports of wheat have been growing by 8%
a year. According to the U.N.'s Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) at least 50
countries are threatened by this process. In less
than 15 years Russia and most of the former Soviet
republics became net importers of food.
According to Eric Hobsbawm, for
multinational corporations - we call it
Corporatistan - "the 'ideal world' is a world
without States, or at least with small States."
(And perhaps a Super-State to enforce
Corporatistan's worldview?) By 2004 there were
more than 63,000 multinational corporations. When
unreachable by national or international law,
ecological preoccupations, social responsibility
and all of the above simultaneously, they can
become more destructive than hurricanes. According
to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), 57% of the
Corporatistan Top 500 has absolutely no plans to
fight global warming. 140 companies didn't even
bother to answer questions by CDP's research team.
BAE Systems - a top U.K. weapons producer - happen
to be among the worst in environmental protection.
Well, Corporatistan rules. ExxonMobil is bigger
than Turkey, Wal-Mart is bigger than Austria, GM
is bigger than Indonesia, DaimlerChrysler is
bigger than Norway, BP is bigger than Thailand,
Toyota is bigger than Venezuela, Citigroup is
bigger than Israel and TotalFinalElf is bigger
than Iran. Ninety percent of the Corporatistan Top
500 is in the Triad. The Top 1000 accounts for no
less than 80% of the world's industrial output.
Figures attest to a demential cornucopia
of chaos - capitalism as a wrecker's ball where a
happy few profit infinitely more than all the
others: no equilibrium here. By 2007 there will be
roughly 1.5 billion computers around the world;
38% of business software is already pirated (98%
in Vietnam, 95% in China). The motor vehicle
industry will remain the world's largest
manufacturing business - 75% of the world's total
output coming from only 6 companies (GM, Ford,
Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and Honda).
12% of all U.S. manufacturing jobs are
concentrated in the chemical industry.
Mammoth construction companies are
concentrated between France and Japan. 63% of all
wood harvested in the world is consumed as fuel.
The four world leaders in forest and paper
products are all based in the U.S. The 5 largest
trading companies are all Japanese; of the largest
17, 16 are in Asia (10 in Japan, 2 in South Korea,
one in China). The Japanese sogo shosha -
the 3 biggest are Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Itochu -
deal with up to 30,000 products per company.
Fifty-six percent of the Fortune 500 is composed
by commercial and savings banks. American, German
and Japanese bank payments turn over the
equivalent of their country's GDP every few days.
More than US$ 1.5 trillion move around the world
every day in foreign exchange transactions; the
bulk is to profit off of fluctuation between
currencies. The world spends US$ 2 trillion a year
in food - 10% of all economic activity. 75% of the
world's advertising is purchased in the Triad (as
far as Asia is concerned this means Japan only).
Only seven companies dominate the global film
market, and only 5 companies dominate the music
industry. Major U.S. TV and film studios collect
up to 60% of their revenues overseas, the music
business 70%. Corporatistan - or the consumption
of products made by Corporatistan - accounts for
50% of the gases responsible for global warming,
source of much of the world's toxic waste. Two-
thirds of hazardous waste produced in the U.S.
comes from chemical corporations. Corporatistan
controls 50% of the world's oil, gas and coal
mining and refining. Since the early 1990s the
Clinton and Bush administrations, U.S. big
business and U.S. big media have sold
globalization the world over as benign
Americanization. It's really an either/or epic
battle.
For apostles of Wild West free
trade, Corporatistan stars are engines for
progress, efficency and economic development. They
produce an extensive range of products, find
markets and employ people all over the world; this
means a globally connected capitalist marketplace
promoting positive competition, innovation and
progress.
For the alterglobalization
movement, and a myriad of groups worried about the
social, economic and environmental consequences of
globalization, Corporatistan stars symbolize a
system of global capitalism run amok. The enormous
size and unrestricted power of multinationals and
their transnationality lead to corporate profits
being the ultimate priority over everything: the
welfare of workers, the environment and the
economies - sometimes very fragile - of numerous
countries. Especially when the magic mantra is
delocalization. If everyone lived like a citizen
of Triad member France, we would need two planets
Earth. If everyone consumed like an American, we
would need five.
In his Power and
Counter-power, published in Germany in 2002,
Ulrich Beck notes that "the neo-liberal agenda is
to institutionalize the benefits of capital,
benefits that are historically fleeting…The
perspective of capital, radically taken to its
limits, postulates itself as absolute and
autonomous…The result is that what is good for
capital is good for everyone. The promise is that
we will be all wealthier and finally even the poor
would benefit. Thus the capacity for seduction of
this neo- liberal ideology is not in stressing
egoisms or maximizing competition but in promoting
global justice. The proposition is: the
maximization of the power of capital is finally
the best way to socialism." That's how the
(social) State is rendered superfluous.
That may also explain why former
Trotskyites have a penchant to become neo- cons -
or in fact bourgeois neo-revolutionaries. It may
have to do with the concept of permanent
revolution. Permanent revolution would eventually
solidify the victory of socialism. Well, real
socialism of the USSR kind collapsed - thus
demonstrating the superiority of Capital. So why
not apply Trotsky to the superior virtues of
Capital? Hence we're back to Ulrich Beck - "the
maximization of the power of capital is the best
way to socialism," and that includes of course
capital imposing its will at the barrel of a gun,
preemptive or not.
In Western Europe and
Latin America societies are extremely alert to the
ravages of Maximum Capital. Not necessarily the
U.S. According to Egyptian economist Samir Amin,
director of the Third World Forum in Dakar,
Senegal and one of the great transcultural
intellectual minds of the developing world, "not
benefiting from the tradition by which the social
democratic worker's parties and the communists
marked the formation of modern European political
culture, American society does not have the
ideological instruments at its disposal to allow
it to resist the dictatorship of capital. On the
contrary, capital shapes every aspect of this
society's way of thinking." But we should also
remember that the U.S. is the most religious
member of the Triad; although capital permeates
religion in every way, there is still a healthy
undercurrent of resistance that has more spiritual
authority than elsewhere in the Triad.
A
delightful example of the "capital is good for
everyone" syndrome was an August 2006 Financial
Times story announcing the demise of the financial
journalist. Computers are now so fast that an
earnings story is uploaded within 0.3 second of a
corporation making results public. No financial
journalist can possibly compete with that. A
Thomson Financial executive, quoted by the FT,
summed it all up: "This means we can free up
reporters so they have more time to think." Mark
Tran of The Guardian wisely preferred to connect
past and future, alerting readers about "what
happened in [2001: A] Space Odyssey when
HAL took over the spaceship. Or worse still, think
of Terminator 3, when the Skynet network of
computers unleashes nuclear war."
By the
mid-2000s the absolute majority of the developing
world had noticed that the "globalized" geography
of wealth had basically remained the same since
the 30 World Bank-denominated "East Asian miracle"
of the late 1980s-early 1990s - and it looked
positively calcified as an immutable order. This
was
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