Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  2. The population of Greece is about 10 million, of Ireland 3.5, and of Switzerland 6.5 million. McDonald’s currently has nearly 15,000 restaurants in over seventy countries, and earns 45 percent of its profits outside the United States. Andrew E. Serwer, “McDonald’s Conquers the World,” Fortune, October 17, 1994, pp. 101–116.

  3. GM employed 775,000 in 1989, down from a high of 876,000 in 1986. Its workforce today is still in the 700,000 range even after the cost-cutting job cutbacks of recent years.

  4. Government expenditures from the latest available figures (1985–88) were, for Senegal, $686 million, for Uganda, $327 million, for Bolivia $619 million, and for Iceland $867 million, for a total of 2.5 billion. The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics (New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 136. Domino’s figures are from Gary Hoover, Hoover’s Handbook of American Business (Austin: Reference Press, 1994), p. 243. Portugal’s government expenditures were $17.4 billion and Indonesia’s were $17.2 billion.

  5. For 1985–88, Argentina’s spending averaged $27.5 billion; Vital World Statistics, p. 137.

  6. Reebok, 1992 Annual Report. With international headquarters in Bolton, England, selling shoes manufactured in six Asian countries including Thailand, China, and the Philippines and sold in 140 countries around the globe, this formerly British company is only as American as its U.S. shoe sales make it in any given year (just $1.3 billion of over $3 billion in global sales in 1992).

  7. The engine and drive trains are still Japanese. The same trends are visible throughout the industry: in 1993, the Japanese car-maker Honda reported that where its first-generation 1977 model Accord (made in Marysville, Ohio) had no American parts, the 1982 model already was 50 percent American while the new fifth-generation Accord currently in production will have more than 80 percent American parts. Doron P. Levin, “Honda Star Gets Another Sequel,” The New York Times, August 27, 1993, p. D 1.

  8. James Bennet, “Want a U.S. Car? Read the Label,” The New York Times, September 18, 1994, p. E 6. In its American advertising campaign, Mitsubishi boasts that its cars are “made in America,” and sold through “a full-fledged American corporation—Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America, Inc.,” and that it employs thirty-seven hundred Americans at its U.S. Diamond-Star plant—all part of its “tradition of Americanization”!

  9. Robert Reich points out that when an American buys a $20,000 Pontiac Le Mans from General Motors, $6,000 goes to South Korea for labor and assembly operations; $3,500 to Japan for engine and transaxle; $1,500 to Germany for design engineering; $800 to Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan for small parts; and $600 to Britain, Ireland, and Barbados for services. This leaves just $8,000 for GM stockholders and the American lawyers, insurance, and health services involved. See Robert Reich, Work of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 113–114.

  Other industries have had the same experience: Boeing, perhaps the American corporation of which Americans are proudest, is currently planning production of its 777 Twinjet with which it aspires to dominate the mid-sized aircraft market into the twenty-first century. Yet 20 percent of the aircraft will be built by Japanese firms in Japan (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, and Fuji Heavy Industries), engines will come from Rolls-Royce (as well as two American companies), wing flaps are to be manufactured by Alenia in Italy, Brazil’s Embraer will make the fin and wingtip assemblies, while literally hundreds of other companies in Korea, Singapore, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere will be involved in smaller ways. Harvey Elliot, “Flying Foreign,” The Economist: The World in 1993, special edition of The Economist, London, December 25, 1993/January 7, 1994, pp. 6–7.

  10. Asahi Glass of Japan owns 49 percent of the Corning subsidiary, and Nippon Electric Glass owns Owens-Illinois; these are the two American firms that produce the majority of television tubes. Keith Bradsher, “In Twist, Protectionism Used to Sell Trade Pact,” The New York Times, November 7, 1993, Section I, p. 26.

  11. More parochially, however, those who prophesied doom for the American car industry in the 1970s and 1980s—closely tracked by historians like Paul Kennedy anticipating the decline of the United States as an economic power—have had to eat their words. Detroit is back and Japan is now the complacent “leader” being compelled to play catch-up. See Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  12. The place of the car in America has been recently monumentalized in Alliance, Nebraska, where a replica of Stonehenge executed in junked cars and called “Carhenge” is now drawing tourists; Carhenge postcards are available at the local McDonald’s. See “Fossil Fuels,” in U. Magazine, September 1994.

  13. “Mondialisation et ségrégations,” Le Monde diplomatique: Les frontières de l’économie globale, May 1993, p. 7.

  14. Robert Kuttner, “Brave New Corporate ‘Workplace of the Future,’” The Berkshire Eagle, August 1, 1993, Section E, p. I. Kuttner was reporting on an Aspen Institute Conference on “Tomorrow’s Corporation.”

  In Liberation Management, an example of new age corporate utopianism, Tom Peters writes “the definition of every product and service is changing. Going soft, softer, softest. Going fickle, ephemeral, fashion[A]n explosion of new competitors … and the everpresent new technologies are leading the way.” Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nano-second Nineties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 6.

  15. William Gibson, with his trilogy of works in the early eighties (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), introduced the notion of cyberspace (from Norbert Wiener’s classic study of interactive communications technology and cybernetics in the late forties) into general parlance. Technically, the term refers to the invisible electronic information space between the computer keyboard (input) and the computer screen (output). The New York Times devoted nearly an entire issue of its Book Review to computer-generated books and the literary culture of cyberspace in 1994, and since then it has reviewed CD-ROM “books” as well.

  16. Julie Edelson Halpert, “Technology: One Car, Worldwide, with Strings Pulled from Michigan,” The New York Times, August 29, 1993, Section 3, p. F 7.

  17. IBM plans on a massive restructuring that will liquidate over sixty thousand jobs; although it will cost nearly $9 billion, it is supposed to save over $4 billion a year in the long run. IBM was hemorrhaging (a second-quarter 1993 loss of $40 million on revenues of 15.5 billion), but Procter & Gamble was perfectly healthy when roughly at the same time in the summer of 1993 it announced the elimination of thirteen thousand jobs or 12 percent of its workforce (a third of them in the United States). Other corporations including General Electric, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, the Chubb Group, Eastman Kodak, and Raytheon have made job elimination a key to future competitiveness. An end to maritime subsidies in 1997, planned by the Clinton administration, will if it occurs mean the loss of twenty thousand maritime jobs. Don Phillips, “Pulling the Plug on American-Flag Ships,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, May 24–30, 1993, p. 33.

  18. Iraq acquired its capacity from countries such as the United States, Germany, France, Britain, and Saudi Arabia, all of which presumably had a vital national interest in preventing nuclear proliferation. Robert J. Samuelson, “The Global Village Revisited,” in Vital World Statistics, p. 4.

  19. West Germany with 102 deals was the chief culprit, but the U.S., Switzerland, and Britain had nearly two dozen deals each, while Brazil, Italy, Austria, France, and Japan had five to fourteen deals each. Douglas Jehl, “The World: Who Armed Iraq? Answers the West Didn’t Want to Hear,” The New York Times, July 18, 1993, p. E 5. However, it is not the countries but the firms nominally flying country flags that are doing business; and as Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman has observed, “One major foreign order is incentive enough for some of these firms to turn a blind eye to the law,” as well as, one surmises, to the conflicting security interests of their “mother” nations. Ibid.

  20. See Uchitelle, “Gillette’s Worl
d View.”

  21. Lester Brown et al., eds., Vital Signs 1993: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1993), pp. 74–75.

  22. Andrew Pollack, “Honda Set to Increase U.S. Output,” The New York Times, September 20, 1993, p. D I.

  23. Andrew Pollack, “Today’s Corporate Game Plans Know No Boundaries: Mabuchi Motors; an Un-Japanese Model for Japan,” The New York Times, January 3, 1994, p. C I.

  Chapter 2. The Resource Imperative: The Passing of Autarky and the Fall of the West

  1. Outside of the OECD nations and South Korea (whose Samsung Group is number 18 in the world), there are only a tiny handful of other nations with top 500 corporations on the list, and the 17 corporations in question in those countries (as ranked in 1992) are almost all petroleum companies like Venezuela’s PDVSA (at number 56), Mexico’s PEMEX (at number 57), Indian Oil (at number 188), and Malaysia’s Petronas (at number 226); or mining outfits, which comprise the only sub-Saharan companies on the list—a couple of South African companies and Zambia’s Industrial & Mining (the only black African company on the list at number 457). Fortune, July 26, 1993, pp. 191–204.

  2. Starting in 1950, fertilizer rather than land has increasingly been the indispensable factor in feeding the world’s burgeoning population. While per capita grainland shrank as population grew, per capita use of fertilizer has grown steadily, staying well ahead of population growth until just a few years ago. These trends have favored advanced agricultural economies and disadvantaged those economies in the nations where population was growing.

  The role of agriculture in the overall economy and the number of workers in the agrarian sector are not correlated with gross agricultural output. The OECD devotes less than 3 percent of its GNP to agriculture yet manages to produce 28 percent of the world’s cereals. The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics (New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 56.

  American farms employ less than 2.5 percent of the workforce, but America remained in 1988 the world’s number two grain producer (behind China with nearly 70 percent of its labor force in agriculture), the number two fruit producer (behind Brazil with a quarter of its labor force in agriculture), and number four vegetable producer (behind China, India, and the former USSR). Vital World Statistics, ibid., pp. 62–66. The key statistic here is “agricultural efficiency, as measured by fertilizer and tractor use”: ibid., pp. 58–59; and Vital Signs 1993: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future, (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1993), p. 19.

  3. Vital World Statistics, pp. 36–38.

  4. There are a few odd cases like Albania, which have fallen from Second to Third World status as a consequence of the collapse of communism.

  5. Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 193.

  6. Christopher J. Schmitz, World Nonferrous Metal Production and Prices: 1700–1976 (Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1979), pp. 48–53. France had been the number one producer in the early years of industrialization, and more recently Jamaica, Surinam, and Guyana, and then Australia, took the lead.

  7. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Parts 1 and 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census), 1975.

  8. Post-1970 statistics are from Metal Statistics Annual Reports (19933–1960), (Frankfurt: Metallgesellschaft AG, 1993), and are calculated not in metric tons but in tI’s, units of one thousand tons.

  9. Schmitz, World Nonferrous Metal, p. 53. Three American firms are thus still among the six dominant global aluminum companies. However, environmental concerns and high labor costs are slowly driving processing plants abroad as well, increasing American dependency still further. For more on American companies, see Steven Kendall Holloway, The Aluminum Multinationals and the Bauxite Cartel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); for more detailed statistical information on American production, see U.S. Bureau of Mines, Aluminum, Alumina and Bauxite Annual Reports (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1994).

  10. The story is the same for most metallurgical refining; e.g., “The cost of complying with federal environmental regulations is about six cents per pound of lead and between nine and fifteen cents per pound of copper—about 20 percent of the price of each metal in 1986, although rising metal prices have reduced this fraction to more like 10 percent today.” National Research Council, Committee on the Competitiveness of the Minerals and Metals Industry, 1990, p. 14.

  Recycling can make a difference. Over half the trash in many community dumps can be incinerated (after sorting) and used to produce energy (see Barry Meier, “Finding Gold, of a Sort, in Landfills,” The New York Times, September 7, 1993, p. A 14). In their use of minerals, Americans have in recent years secured as much as 25 percent of consumption from recycled materials. But in many cases, as with lead, environmental and safety considerations make recycling difficult. See Lead Annual Review: 1993 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1994).

  11. Rocco Michael Paone, Strategic Nonfuel Minerals and Eastern Security (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992), p. 57.

  12. Clyde S. Brooks, Metal Recovery from Industrial Wastes (Chelsea: Lewis Publishers, 1991), p. 5. There are limits, however. Manganese, for example, essential to iron and steel production, cannot be recovered from waste; nor have viable substitutes been found. See Manganese Annual Report: 1991 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1992), p. 3.

  13. Where once only precious metals were recycled, today we recycle copper and copper alloys, chromium, cobalt, cadmium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, lead, titanium, and zinc, though in vastly different amounts. With cadmium, manganese, and molybdenum, for example, the amounts are negligible, while for titanium (crucial for major aerospace structural elements such as wing skins and supports, compresser blades, and rotor parts for helicopters) up to 80 percent of the metal form is recycled. In its mineral form, where it is used to produce pigments that appear in a wide diversity of goods including paints, papers, plastics, textiles, and such common commodities as Twinkies and toothpaste, no recycling is possible and as a result we are totally import-dependent. See Paone, Nonfuel Minerals.

  14. Aluminum, whose story of diminishing returns we told above, has in recent decades become something of a recycling success. As recently as 1975, we derived significantly less than 10 percent of our consumption from recycling. Today the figure is up to 42 percent of consumption, mainly as a consequence of garbage recycling. It turns out that 2 million tons of aluminum show up annually in municipal waste so that the excessive consumption habits that produced our dependency are happily producing byproduct wastes that are reducing the costs of that dependency. See Brooks, Metal Recovery.

  15. Paone, Nonfuel Minerals, p. 227. Of course, substitution is not always a simple matter. Chromium and cobalt, for example, are metals absolutely essential to modern technology. Stainless steel (corrosion-resistant steel) can be made without nickel, but not without chromium, and efforts for chromium have yet to produce results. Although it takes “years of intensive research and development to discover replacements and produce them on meaningful levels,” research and development efforts in the United States, Japan, and other advanced industrial nations are producing synthetic metals, high-performance plastics and ceramics, and advanced alloys and other composites that may eventually replace traditional natural metals in the world’s new technologies.

  16. Estimates suggest the nodules lying on the Pacific Ocean floor alone contain 359 times more cobalt, 83 times more nickel, and 9 times more copper than the world’s other known reserves. Deep-sea diving, high-pressure-withstanding submersibles are being developed by several national teams, and a consortium of Japanese companies including Hitachi, Sumitomo, and Mitsubishi expects to have its deep-sea robotic vacuums in place by 1996. Tony Emerson with H. Takayama, “Into the Challenger Deep,” Newsweek, July 5, 1993, pp. 62–63.

  17. The precise
figures are offered with a useful narrative in Vital Signs, pp. 46–63.

  18. The United States, for example, derives nearly 75 percent of its electricity from coal, oil, and gas, 17 percent from nuclear, 9.5 percent from hydroelectric, and only 0.5 percent from geothermal. Only a handful of nations derive the majority of their electricity from nonfossil fuels. France and Belgium are heavily dependent on nuclear (over 60 percent each), while New Zealand, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland all derive a majority from hydroelectric. Meanwhile, literally dozens of countries (especially in Africa and the Middle East) derive virtually 100 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels (see Vital World Statistics, pp. 80–81).

  19. Until recently, bikes outnumbered cars in China 250 to 1; however, although it continues to use bicycles as a primary transportation vehicle, reducing dependency on petroleum, steel, rubber, aluminum, and matériel and at the same time sparing the planet additional environmental pollution, it is now planning to expand automobile production radically. Vital Signs, p. 21.

  20. C. A. S. Hall, C. J. Cleveland, and R. Kaufmann, Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1986), p. 161.

  21. The Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review: 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1991).

  22. Figures from R. Samuelson, “The Global Village,” introductory essay to Vital World Statistics, no page.

  23. The Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Reports (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1992).

  24. In 1989, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman ranked, respectively, numbers one, two, three, eight, and nine in per capita energy consumption in the world; whatever else their bad consumption habits bred, dependency was not among them.

  25. Some Western nations without fossil fuels have moved to alternative sources: alpine nations like Switzerland and Austria get most of the energy they use (other than in their autos) from hydroelectric and the rest from nuclear (37.7 percent). France, with the most developed nuclear industry in Europe, derives 64.2 percent of its domestic energy production from nuclear fuels, and Belgium is not far behind. South Korea (49 percent) and Japan (27.2 percent) are also significantly nuclear. Vital World Statistics, p. 81.