The Political and Business Institutions as Obstacles to Civilization's Resilience: Part VI

Wealth flows upward in every conceivable way. Even American foreign charity serves to feed the rich. American food aid to Third World countries comes with it a number of certain provisions; mainly that it is used to buy America’s surplus food. “In other words,” Francis Lappe reports in the journal New Scientist, “food was not an altruistic donation program for the world’s poor, but a clever subsidy system for American farmers.”[i] 

Boxes of food aid from USAID. Photo credit: Josh Lozman/ONE

This dysfunction has been further incised into the lives of planetary citizens with the “free trade” agreements being made among the world’s elites. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Until then, Mexican corn growers had been protected from cheap American imports. Afterward, they could not compete. By 2008, two-thirds of Mexico’s corn production had been “either shut down or reduced.”[ii]

The genetic diversity of maize, or corn, is declining in Mexico, where the world’s largest food crop originated, report researchers in Mexico and at the University of California, Davis. (https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/study-reveals-troubling-loss-mexico%E2%80%99s-maize-genetic-diversity/

More than a million small farmers lost their farms, flooding the cities with cheap labor and increasing illegal immigration into the United States.[iii] Contrary to promises of the business, political, and media elite who had pushed for NAFTA,[iv] consumer prices rose while farmer pay plummeted, jobs were lost, and wages for workers dropped—for all three countries.[v] Poverty and malnutrition also rose significantly in Mexico.[vi] And countries either abandoned some of their environmental laws or paid polluting business restitution for enforcing them.[vii] For the United States, particularly, a country that is fully food self-sufficient, importing food makes no ecological or economic sense.  And for any country that wants to maintain a long-term strategy of food self-sufficiency and environmental health, undercutting domestic production (particularly of local and regional strains) is unwise. When a region can no longer feed itself, its citizens become dependent on the global system, which suffers continual economic volatility, declining crop diversity, an unknown brew of toxic chemicals, and an unsure climatic future.   Already, some 800 million people go to bed hungry every day although we globally produce roughly ten percent more food than we can eat.[viii] By depressing the price of food, First World subsidies serve to further hurt the small local farmers who will more likely feed the poor and hungry. Globalism perpetuates world hunger.

With increasing globalism, the power over one’s own life and individual affairs are becoming ever more removed and abstract. Citizens exert little enough power within the legal confines of their own nations, but international treaties remove them from the process all together. The 1948 ratification of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the WTO (World Trade Organization) that replaced it in 1995, and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 have become, as Joel Bakan put it, “a fetter on [the] economic sovereignty of nations.”[ix] With their ratification, citizens have even less influence on the products that are available to them and the way these products affect the environment.[x] Noam Chomsky adds, “…the general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”[xi] The rules are made in international meetings among the world’s elite members—the elite of the elite. Or as Joseph Stiglitz acknowledged, “…we have a system that might be called global governance without global government, one in which a few institutions—the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO—and a few players—the finance, commerce, and trade ministries, closely linked to certain financial and commercial interests—dominate the scene, but in which many of those affected by their decisions are left almost voiceless.”[xii] Besides being a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Stiglitz served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. From his years of working on the inside, he found that in these international institutions, the finance and trade ministers are “closely aligned” with the oligarchy and elites from their countries. “The finance ministers and central bank governors typically are closely tied to their financial community; they come from financial firms, and after their period of government service, that is where they return.”[xiii]  No surprise then that revolving door whiz Robert Rubin’s name comes up here as an exemplar in the very next sentence of Stiglitz’s discussion.

 Indonesian farmers protest against the World Trade Organization meeting on December 3, 2013 in Denpasar, Indonesia. Lowering tariffs that protect farmers make joining the WTO difficult for many countries. Photo by Agung Parameswara/Getty Images

Agreements signed by the more than 150 WTO member nations trump national laws. Nations must abide by the WTO decisions.[xiv] Here, again, corporate interests trump all. According to Joel Bakan, “On numerous occasions the organization has required nations, under threat of punishing penalties, to change or repeal laws designed to protect environment, consumer, or other public interests.”[xv] In this way, corporations further vitiate citizen power. So, for example, national decisions regarding such issues as the banning of genetically engineered foods, animal fur, animal testing for cosmetics, shrimp caught in nets without turtle excluder devices (so that sea turtles are not caught in these nets), and products from cruel dictatorships have been overturned in favor of corporate interests.[xvi] The significance of this disempowerment of the individual cannot be overstressed. Using McWorld as a metaphor for global corporations, analyst Benjamin Barber suggests that, “The usurping dominion of McWorld has, however, shifted sovereignty to the domain of global corporations and the world markets they control, and has threatened the autonomy of civil society and its cultural and spiritual domains, as well as of politics.”[xvii]  

Container boxes are seen at the Yangshan Deep Water Port, part of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, in Shanghai, China September 24, 2016. Picture taken September 24, 2016. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo

In keeping with this logic, when it comes to international decisions that can actually benefit its world citizens, it is then the national (meaning corporate again) interests that trump. So, both the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2009 Copenhagen Accord failed to achieve meaningful results, mainly because its saner, ambitious proposals were thwarted when some of the most powerful nations—particularly, the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and China—refused to make concessions.[xviii] Short-term economic interests, not the long-term environmental interests of our planetary system, were their concern.

During the 1997 negotiations for the Kyoto treaty, the fossil fuel industry led a thirteen million dollar ad campaign in the United States against the treaty and lobbied the U.S. Senate to sabotage it.[xix] The Senate complied by cleverly passing a 95-0 non-binding resolution that urged president Clinton to insist on targets and timetables that neither the developing nor industrial countries would accept.[xx] Since any treaty requires Senate ratification, Clinton’s hands were tied. After the 2009 the Copenhagen Accord, a commentary in the journal Nature found the Copenhagen Accord pledges to be “paltry,” estimating that they will increase (not decrease) 2020 emissions by 10-20% over 2010 levels.[xxi] Not even trying to slow the rise in atmospheric temperature, these nations accepted an outrageously inauspicious three degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100 with all the scary attendant climate implications. “It is amazing how unambitious these pledges are,” the authors of this most venerable of science journals concluded. Then again in 2011, for what became, according to the New York Times, “the 17th in a series of habitually quarrelsome and mostly unproductive gatherings,” the nearly two hundred nations met in Durban, South Africa. And then despite all the fanfare, the 2016 Paris accords still did not promise anything better than a potentially catastrophic 3˚ Celsius rise by 2100.[xxii] The activist George Monbiot has noted:

“When you remember that only a smallish proportion of the cost of dealing with climate change will be borne by governments, it becomes clear that this is not a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on foreign aid and essential public services. It is a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on coal, oil, roads, farm subsidies, environmental destruction and unprovoked wars. We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.”[xxiii]

Corporations and financial institutions did not always dominate the global landscape, nor even the American landscape, for that matter.  In the United States, corporations were initially formed to provide a public service, build a bridge, road, or canal.[xxiv] They were often dissolved after performing their function. First formed in the late sixteenth century, it has been only in the past 150 years that corporations have “gone from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution.”[xxv] And this rise did not “just happen.” It is not the result of some Darwinian natural selection process in an Adam Smith free market system, whereby the most effective and efficient wins out against less competent economic structures. The American state actively promoted the rise of corporations by subsidizing their railways, telegraphs, roads, and highways, coal, oil and agriculture.[xxvi] In the process, capitalism has gone from being an “instrument” that produces unequaled progress and innovation to an “institution” that subordinates everything to itself. And, in those one hundred fifty years, it has changed the United States from the marvel described in Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—the vibrant land of local entrepreneurial spirit and innovation, independence, and fierce adherence to local activism—to a sterile landscape of shopping malls and highways inhabited by overweight, sedentary consumers.[xxvii]

And yet it is much worse in many other countries. In China, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, to mention but a few, citizens have almost no representational power. Authority is centralized. And, even worse, for those whose revenue comes not from its citizens, but from foreign aid or from the selling of its mineral resources, wealth funnels directly to the elites, and the citizens have little recourse to affect change.[xxviii]   Nigeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo come to mind.

In the United States and in any country with representational government, citizens still have the institutional means to reverse the gross imbalances of wealth and power.  The corporation is not a person, however much the American judiciary has ruled. The corporation is basically a contract on a piece of paper.[xxix] It is a creation of the government that issues its charter.[xxx] And so, if and whenever the government so decides, the corporation must follow the laws made by that government. Given that the American citizen still has the basic power of the vote, citizens theoretically have the authority at any point to claim the government and to determine the rules by which corporations must abide. The Gordian knot can be cut in one swipe by illegalizing corporate financing of political campaigns (at all levels). And again, this latent power in the citizen is what motivates the corporation to press full court against any such intrusions into its affairs. Their strongest ally in this effort is the media, our next subject of inquiry.

REFERENCES

[i] Lappé, F.M., Collins, J., and Rosset, P. (1998) World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Grove Press, New York. This is a common strategy with American businesses, particularly military industries (see for example, Harvey, D.  (2003:18) The New Imperialism. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.

[ii]  Roberts, P. (2008:170) The End of Food. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

[iii] Public Citizen (2010) The Ten Year Track Record of the North American Free Trade Agreement: U.S., Mexican and Canadian Farmers and Agriculture, NAFTA at Ten Series.  NAFTA (as well as subsidies to large agribusiness in the United States) hurt the small farmers in all three North American countries.

[iv] Morris, S.D., and Passé-Smith, J. (2001) What a Difference a Crisis Makes: NAFTA, Mexico, and the United States, Latin American Perspectives, v. 28(3), pp. 124-149.

Dugger, C.W. (2003, November 19) Report Finds Few Benefits for Mexico in Nafta, New York Times..

[v] Public Citizen (2001, 2010), Campbell, Salas and Scott (2001), Morris and Passé-Smith (2001), Dugger (2003).

Campbell, B., Salas, C., and Scott, R.E. (2001)  NAFTA at Seven: Its Impact on Workers in All Three Nations, Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper.  

[vi] Anderson (2001), Campbell, Salas and Scott (2001), Morris and Passé-Smith (2001).

[vii] Anderson, S. (2001) Seven Years Under NAFTA, Institute for Policy Studies.  

[viii] Nature (2010a, 2010b).

Nature (2010a) Editorial: How to Feed a Hungry World, Nature, v. 466, p. 531-532.

Nature (2010b) Food: The Growing Problem, Nature, v. 466, pp. 546.

[ix] Bakan (2054:22), WTO (2011).

Bakan, J. (2005) The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, New York.

WTO (World Trade Organization) (2011)) What is the WTO? 

[x] Korten (2001:147), Harper (2004:416-423). 

Korten, D.C. (2001) When Corporations Rule the World, Second Edition, Kumarian Press, & Barrett-Koehler Publishers.

[xi]  Chomsky, N. (1994:7) The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Odonian Press, Berkeley, CA.  Also available at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_GlobEcon.html.  Accessed June 25, 2012.

[xii] Stiglitz, J.E. (2003:22) Globalization and its Discontents, W.W. Norton and Co., New York.

[xiii] Stiglitz (2003:19).

[xiv] BBC News (2011, December 20) Profile: World Trade Organization.

[xv] Bakan (2004:24).

[xvi] Bakan (2004:24), Harper, C.L. (2004:416-423) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

[xvii] Barber, B.R. (1995:296) Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, Ballantine Books, New York.

[xviii] Anderson (2002), Beder (2002), Vidal (2005), Harper (2004:155-156), Harkinson (2010).  The Chamber of Commerce—perhaps the single largest lobby of business and whose board is 94% composed of large corporations—was particularly vehement in its opposition of the Kyoto Protocol (Harkinson, 2010).

Anderson, J.W. (2002) U.S. Has No Role in U.N. Treaty Process: Senate Reluctant to Ratify, Resources, issue 14, pp. 12-17. 

Beder, S. (2002) Casting Doubt and Undermining Action, Pacific Ecologist, v. 1, pp. 42-49.

Vidal, J. (2005, October 9) China Leads Accusation that Rich Nations are Trying to Sabotage Climate Treaty. The Guardian (UK). 

Harkinson, J. (2010, Jan/Feb) Tom Donohue and the Chamber of Secrets, Mother Jones, pp. 22-25.

[xix] Gelbspan (1998), Beder (2002), McCright and Dunlap (2003), Skjaerseth and Skodvin (2004:190).

Gelbspan (1998, June) A Good Climate for Investment, The Atlantic Monthly.   

[xx] Dewar and Sullivan (2007), Gelbspan,R. (1998, 2005), McCright and Dunlap (2003), McKibben (2010:78-79).

Dewar, H., and Sullivan, K. (1997) Senate Republicans Call Kyoto Pact Dead, Washington Post, A37. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/clim121197b.htm.  Accessed December 25, 2011.

McCright, A.M., and Dunlap, R.E. (2003) Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement’s Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy, Social Problems, v. 50(3), pp. 348-373.

McKibben, B. (2010) eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

[xxi] Rogelj, J., Nabel, J., Chen, C., Hare, W., Markmann, K., and Meinshausen, M. (2010) Copenhagen Accord Pledges are Paltry, Nature, v. 464, pp. 1126-1128..

[xxii] Rogelj, J. et al. (2016) Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a Boost to Keep Warming well Below 2C˚. Nature, v. 534, pp. 631-639.

[xxiii] Monbiot (2007:56). Monbiot, G. (2007) Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. South End Press, Cambridge MA.

[xxiv] Bakan (2004); Carson, K. (2010) The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Booksurge.

[xxv] Bakan (2004:5).

[xxvi] Stiglitz (2003:21), Bakan (2004), Carson (2010).

[xxvii] De Tocqueville, A. (1835/1956) Democracy in America. Mentor Book, New York.

[xxviii] Qudir, I. (2010) Empowerment is Key, Nature, v. 465, p. 550-551.

[xxix] Reich, R.B. (2007) Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

[xxx] Bakan (2004), Reich (2007).