[NSD 10/9/02]

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: GLOBAL DOWNSIDE

Poet and social commentator Robert Bly's perspective on business globalization is a dark view indeed:

"Many columnists recently have detailed the rapid decline in citizen participation, in fraternal orders, church sodalities, precinct caucuses, parent-teacher associations, and so on. The heat for public welfare is cooling.

"Some of the feeling of abandonment goes back to the economic fact that the transnational corporations are abandoning the United States. A vice-president of Colgate-Palmolive observed: 'The United States does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.'

"Multinational executives work to enhance the company, not the country. The market in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. Their loyalties are international rather than regional, national or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications...

"The transnational executives don't feel responsibility either, to any country—Mexico, for example—currently being 'developed.' On the contrary, if wages rise in Mexico, thousands of factories will move elsewhere. During the last thirty years an industrial force made of more than thirteen hundred plants has grown all along the Mexican border, encouraged by low wages and freedom from any social obligations such as health care or prevention of environmental pollution. Mexico will be abandoned when cheaper labor turns up elsewhere. Free trade actually means that the transnational corporations have won their battle to make working people all over the globe interchangeable. It is no surprise to anyone to say that business has effectively become our government, and now rules American life on all levels."

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679781285/newsscancom/ref=nosim for Bly's book "The Sibling Society"—or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book or other recommendations to adult literacy programs.)