People Before Profit: The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money, and Economic Crisis - Hardcover

Derber, Charles

3.82

71 ratings by Goodreads

9780312306694: People Before Profit: The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money, and Economic Crisis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312306695 ISBN 13: 9780312306694

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2002

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The issue of globalization-its promises, and more often, its shortcomings-commands worldwide attention. Recent events illuminate the dark side of globalization and underscore the urgent need to redesign its basic principles. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 are one in a series of crisis that have shaken the foundations of the global order. The rise of strong anti-globalization movements around the world, the deteriorating global economy, including America's own economic turbulence, and an ever-growing distrust of powerful multinational corporations in the face of catastrophic mismanagement, symbolized by Enron and WorldCom, dramatize the failure of globalization. For a safe and economically secure future, Charles Derber argues in People Before Profit we must de-bunk the myths about our current form of corporate-led globalization and re-orient ourselves on a more democratic path.
Popular misconceptions, what Derber terms the "globalization mystique," present globalization as new, inevitable, self-propelling, and win-win for rich and poor countries alike. By challenging each of these beliefs, Derber reveals a dynamic system that is constantly being invented and re-invented-and can be again. Globalization does not have to be a "race to the bottom" where the poverty gap grows ever wider and half the world lives on less than two dollars a day. In fact, Derber's hopeful and detailed vision of reform, including practical suggestions for every concerned citizen, shows that globalization has the potential to be an authentic agent of democracy, social justice, and economic stability. The challenges are great; the new globalization will require deep and difficult changes, as well as a new politics that shifts power away from the elite. But the seeds have already been planted and the new globalization is beginning to emerge.

In a moment rich with opportunity, People Before Profit is an essential contribution to the most important debate of our times, written in clear, straight-forward prose for everyone seeking a better world.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Charles Derber, a noted social critic, is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He is the author of eight books including Corporation Nation and The Wilding of America.

People Before Profit
CHAPTER 1GLOBALIZATION'S GHOSTS

Hegel was right when he said that man can never learn anything from history.GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.UNKNOWN
IF I ASKED YOU TO NAME THE PERSON WHO BEST SYMBOLIZES GLOBALIZATION, what would you answer? I bet you'd say, "Bill Gates." As the founder of Microsoft, the leader in the information revolution, Gates is the towering business figure of the age. Do you know of any country in the world that hasn't joined the Microsoft revolution? When I walked through the poorest streets of Bangkok, I saw Internet shops where kids paid pennies for a few precious moments of time on a PC. And now we know that terrorists hiding in hovels in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan rely heavily on Microsoft software, just as you and I do, to communicate.If you ask what person symbolizes globalization to me, I think of someone very different. She is Nisran, the Muslim Bangladeshi apparel worker I mentioned in the introduction. She is a hauntingly beautiful and fragile young woman, very thin with large dark eyes. While bombs were falling in a nearby country to kill terrorists, she and millions of workers like her started the engines of the global economy in the early morning and kept them running all day long and late into the evening. Listen to a little of her story:I am Nisran. I am twenty-two years old. When I started working, I was twelve. I had to go to work because my family wasvery poor. So I had to leave school after the fourth grade. For the last ten years, even as a child worker, l have had to work twelve to fourteen hours a day and sometimes up to twenty hours. I have been working for ten years, but I still have no savings. If I die today, my family would have no money to bury me.Now l work for Actor Garments where l produce caps for many universities in the United States. l am a sewing operator; I do the stitching on the visors of the caps.When shipments have to go out to the United States, we have to work nineteen or twenty hours until 3 or 4 A.M. There is no space to sleep, so I have to curl up next to the machine to sleep for three or four hours. Then I go home at 6 to wash and eat breakfast, and I have to be back working by 8 A.M. Because I earn so little money, I have to share a tiny room with three coworkers. We have two beds, and two of us share each bed. We have nothing else--no chairs, no table, no cooking equipment, no radio or TV or clock. Five families with a total of thirty people in the row of rooms where I live share one bathroom and one kitchen and one stove. So in the morning l have to stand in line to use the bathroom and to use the stove. Sometimes l have to go to the factory without having breakfast.1We will hear more from Nisran and other global workers because their stories remind us why globalization has become dangerous and could turn millions of people against the United States and the West. Such stories help us understand why changing these conditions may prove the best long-term strategy for reducing violence in the world.
I want you to meet two ghosts. One I will call Cecil, an arrogant and adventurous phantom, the apparition of colonialism. The second is J.D., a Scrooge-like ghost if ever there was one, the specter of the late nineteenth-century U.S. Gilded Age. Cecil, the ghost of European colonialism, and J.D., the ghost of the GildedAge, linger to remind us that we repeat history when we don't remember it. They haunt globalization and are the historical windows through which we can see it most clearly.This first chapter is devoted to ghosts because globalization does have a history, and it is essential to understand it. Many people see globalization as entirely new. In fact, it is a reinvention of earlier world economies that I call "ancient globalizations." Only by understanding these earlier developments can we see some of the roots of the poverty suffered by so many like Nisran in the world economy today. When we see how history has been a never-ending process of building new kinds of globalizations, it becomes easier to understand that we can do it again.We all have our personal ghosts. They often are important figures in our family history--relatives with a drinking problem, a womanizing weakness, a face like our own. We may try to deny their existence, but they haunt us anyway, and we can learn much about ourselves by admitting that they're around and by seeing them clearly. Therapists tell us that only by studying our ghosts carefully can we exorcise them and heal ourselves.I mention Cecil because colonialism runs deep in globalization's own history. This does not mean that globalization is colonialism, although many leaders in the Third World, including the president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki and Arthur Mbanefo, spokesperson for a group of 133 poor nations called the Group of 77, have made the comparison bluntly. And after September 11, many debate intensely whether globalization in the Middle East, as well as in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, is the twenty-first-century brand of colonialism. American power, globalization, and colonialism are now equated or blurred in the thinking of millions of people across the entire Third World.2But to many U.S. workers, globalization is like colonialism in reverse, shifting valuable investments toward the Third World and draining the United States and other First World nations of good jobs. Don't tell a displaced U.S. autoworker whose job just flew to Mexico that he or she is the beneficiary of a new American colonialism. Yet, despite the differences in perspective,colonial history shapes both the reality and perception of globalization. I believe it is useful to look at the Spanish, Dutch, and British colonial empires of centuries past as ancient globalizations that can give us surprising new insights into our very different model today.3I have named colonialism's ghost after Cecil Rhodes, the serotonin-loaded nineteenth-century British entrepreneur and adventurer who along with Rudyard Kipling virtually invented colonialism's logo, "the white man's burden." Rhodes founded the British South Africa Company and De Beers, the huge diamond corporation and the world's richest company of his time. His companies built railroads connecting Cape Town to Cairo, and they literally ruled nations such as Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Rhodes himself became the prime minister and effective dictator of Cape Colony, now South Africa. Rhodes saw colonialism as an idealistic mission spreading prosperity and civilization to the newly conquered colonies; he fiercely believed that the English were a superior race and had a moral responsibility to spread British companies and values across the whole continent. Today, he would be leading the chorus of those who see globalization as the West's latest and perhaps best effort to deliver growth, opportunity, and civilization to the world. The persistence of global poverty among people such as Nisran would not discourage him, because it did not make him rethink his business in Africa. The extremist Islamic reaction against the West that exploded on September 11 would also probably not change his views, since tribal resistance to his own African adventures only strengthened his resolve.4My second phantom, J.D., is the ghost of the Gilded Age, the era that virtually invented the large modern corporation. It will not surprise you that I have named this lean and hungry ghost after John D. Rockefeller, the greatest and greediest of all the robber barons and the quintessence of the Gilded Age itself. While many historians have connected dots linking colonialism and globalization, fewer have seen the Gilded Age as a historical window into globalization's soul. This seems hardly surprisingsince the robber barons in the Gilded Age were busy taking control in the United States itself and were not ready to take on a global mission.5Nonetheless, the Gilded Age is a source of surprising insight. The robber barons ran sweatshops in the United States that were a sad preview of today's factories. One small snippet of Jenrain's story could come right out of J.D.'s factory:6On the production line there are thirty machines with thirty operators and ten helpers. The supervisors give us a production target of 370 caps per hour, but we can barely complete 320 caps per hour, so we have to work as fast as we can. But because of this, we sometimes make mistakes, and then the supervisors shout at us and call us bad names, or they slap us, or hit us with a stick or a cap, or jab us with scissors. Sometimes we cry because of this rough treatment, and then they threaten us not to cry.I have to ask permission to use the bathroom, and they give you only two minutes. The supervisor checks the time. If I need more than two minutes, the supervisor yells at you and calls you bad names.We only have tap water to drink, which is filthy and makes us sick. The workers often have diarrhea, jaundice, and kidney problems. Because we have to sit on stools with no backs working so many hours, the workers also suffer from backaches.The factory is cloudy with dust. It is not well ventilated; it is without enough air and light. The air of the factory is polluted with dust from the cloth. This dust goes into our noses and makes us sick with coughs and respiratory problems.In listening to Jenrain's story, one begins to believe that globalization is bringing a new version of Gilded Age conditions to millions of global workers.7The Gilded Age was a coming attraction, in a more literal sense, to a kind of economic "globalizing" in the United Statesitself. The robber barons were immersed in a stunning project of market expansion and integration, moving the country from local commerce to a great interconnected national corporate economy. In a few short decades, the robber barons knit together a huge new market, a feat of extraordinary imagination and boldness. In this sense, the robber barons were "globalizers" within a single nation, and the Gilded Age can be seen as a key historical story about economic integration.A few caveats here before we proceed with our ghost story. First, Cecil and J.D. may seem like old gloomy ghosts who are not up to the job of giving us the real scoop about globalization. Colonialism and the Gilded Age, you might be thinking, are the past. Globalization is the future, one full of adventure, excitement, and hope--or so it seemed before September 11. Let me try to reassure you. Cecil and J.D. are just globalization's ghosts--they don't tell us everything we need to know about the world today. History never repeats itself in quite the same form. Although the ghosts are telling us about a side of globalization that we might not be hearing about as much as we need to, they can't tell us the whole story.Let me also acknowledge that these ghosts appear to unfairly stack the deck against globalization. Colonialism and the Gilded Age are not the proudest moments of Western history. Both were built on forms of brute labor exploitation and political corruption that we like to hope no longer exist. But the ghosts as I see them tell us several things. One is that we haven't progressed as far as we thought. Although it is unfashionable to dwell on it in the United States, global exploitation, as people in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East keep loudly protesting, is still a reality for billions around the world.Second, Cecil and J.D. have their sunny sides. Few eras in history are all bad, and even colonialism and the Gilded Age had some redeeming qualities. Both were periods of bold growth and change, and both were associated with dramatic technological advances that made the world a better place. Both upset existing systems of power that had exploitative features of their own, andboth set into motion new movements for freedom and social justice.Third, globalization differs in important ways from its historic ghosts. Its legal, technological, and political foundations are all unique. As you will see, my ghost story does not try to reduce globalization to a sad or one-sided historical stereotype. Instead, I will be discussing the parts of globalization that are unpredictable and positive. As noted before, I see globalization as a progressive force in many ways, and I hope to show that those challenging it make a great mistake by demonizing it or creating a nostalgia for the world that came before.
Many of my friends think of globalization as "the Internet thing." They find it nearly impossible to separate the computer e-mail, and the Internet from the process of globalization. They understand that high tech liberates money to fly across national borders, and allows markets and companies to go global faster than the Concorde can rev up its engines. My friends see frightening new dangers after the terrorist attacks but feel that globalization is upbeat because they associate it so closely with exciting new technology. They also believe that high tech makes globalization inevitable, because nobody, not even Osama bin Laden or future terrorists, can undo the information revolution. New, faster, and hotter technology will shrink the world further and rewrite national boundaries in disappearing ink.I believe that people in the United States and many other Western countries have bought into the technology-centered globalization mystique. Thomas Friedman, who has shaped the public's view of globalization as much as anyone, is a contributor to the technology mystique. He says if his child were to ask, "Daddy, where does globalization come from?" he would respond that it is all about a 1980s and 1990s technological "whirlwind" that blew down the old walls of the preglobalization world. It involved minirevolutions of "computerization, telecomunications, miniaturization, compression technology and digitization." It is about you and me being able to communicatewith anyone anywhere at the speed of light, not in the First World or the Third World, which are things of the past, but the one new "Fast World." For Friedman, globalization means you "can call to anywhere cheaply, you can call from anywhere cheaply, including from your laptop, your mountaintop, your airplane seat or the top of Mount Everest."8I can appreciate his point. Not long ago in the Bangkok airport I was peering into the waiting section reserved for monks. I remember seeing many of the monks, in their saffron robes and bare feet, seemingly deep in ninth-century meditation, suddenly reaching into their robes and taking out their cellphones. The image of the monks chatting merrily away on their wireless devices caught me up short and made me think, yes, this is globalization in action, the world of the Buddha married to the postmodern era of electronic gadgets.Osama bin Laden's high-tech command posts in the caves of Afghanistan brought home the point. From one of the world's poorest nations, terrorists sent e-mails and satellite communications to "sleeper cells" around the globe. And in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Islamic clergy in nearly every village now use their own Web sites to argue the religious merits of bin Laden's jihad. "Whoever helps America and its fellow infidels against our brothers in Afghanistan is apostate," writes Saudi cleric Sheik Hammoud on his own personal Web site. Hammoud is part of a buzzing Internet dial...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.