One might imagine that Salgosa’s efforts would have made him a pinup for the environmental movement—an example to other manufacturers in developing countries. Roberto Kishinami, Greenpeace’s executive director in Brazil, gives Salgosa some good marks for transparency. But he is still adamant: The plant should be closed sooner rather than later. The problem is not how Carbocloro makes things but what it makes. Chlorine compounds are dirty and unnecessary, responsible for, among other things, ruining the ozone layer and lowering sperm counts. PVC, a chlorine product, is also hard to recycle.
The debate about whether chlorine is really that bad tends to set rich-world Greens against poor-world workers. Industrialists point out that chlorinated water saves millions of lives a year. Greenpeace prefers to concentrate on chlorine’s often disastrous use as bleach in paper mills. But the question mark it poses over Carbocloro leaves the firm as an apt symbol both of how far Cubatao has come and how far it still has to go. “The town has recovered, but it still has the disease,” says Aluizio Gomes de Souza, the leader of Cubatao’s main environmental movement. None of the dozen or so industrialists and regulators we interviewed lived in the city and most smiled politely when it was suggested.
Moreover, as more companies come to the city, pollution is gradually rising again. The somewhat harassed local regulator, Sergio Pompeia, insists p. 261 that it will be brought down, but many others are doubtful. To put it simply, the people of Cubatao need the companies to stay. As one recent academic study of the town puts it, the main argument against closing the plants is “the belief that industries have gone as far as they will in carrying out pollution control before closing their plants.”[14]
For many environmentalists, this situation is symptomatic of globalization, as is the Hobson’s choice it seems to give poor countries: pollute or be poor. “Though the market is a wonderful tool for economic progress,” one relatively moderate guide to the subject concludes, “where its edges meet the planet it is mainly as a saw, shovel or smokestack—as an instrument of destruction rather than protection.”[15] Globalization, as both the regulators and the Greens in Cubatao concede, sometimes helps restrict this damage: Multinational companies tend to be cleaner than their Brazilian counterparts and keener to abide by international standards. On the other hand, both the Greens and the regulators think that the relentless pressure from global competition forces firms to cut costs, and they suspect that corporate greenery is often one of the first things to be trimmed.
The root of the problem is nearly always that the cost of the environment is rarely accounted for correctly. Air pollution, in the dry language of economics, is a negative externality—something that companies price cheaply because they do not have to pay the cost. Meanwhile, clean air is a positive externality—something in which few people invest because the rewards are so dispersed. In China, according to the World Bank, air and water pollution incur costs of fifty-four billion dollars a year, 8 percent of the country’s GDP; the health costs of air pollution in Bangkok are proportionately just as big. But it is not the polluter that pays the cost. Occasionally, you can nail a particular company (lead pollution fell dramatically in Mexico City after Pemex was ordered to make cleaner petrol), but normally it is hard to find the offending parties.
Easily the worst example is the oceans. The high seas of the world provide a textbook case of the “tragedy of the commons.” Because nobody owns them, nobody feels responsibility for them. If a Norwegian fisherman does not pillage them, then his British rival will. In 1965, the world caught around fifty million tons of fish. Now the figure is 110 million. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, around 60 percent of available fish stocks are now being harvested at unsustainable levels. The rain forest, too, appears to confound the market. To put it crudely, Brazil provides an environmental service to the world—its rain forest helps keep the planet cool—but it never receives any payment for it.
p. 262 All this makes the environment a very difficult challenge. But it is equally obvious that many of the problems have nothing to do with unfettered capitalism. In fact, they can arise from exactly the opposite. One reason why fishing fleets continue to ravage the oceans is because governments pay them to do it: They spend twenty-one billion dollars a year supporting fish industries.
Far from preventing the destruction of the rain forest, Brazil’s government initially spurred it on. In the 1960s and 1970s, under the slogan integrar para nao entregar (loosely translated as “Grab the Amazon before the foreigners do”), various military governments encouraged people to move into the Amazon. Much of the worst spoliation occurred during this period. Even today, the main reason why an area the size of Belgium is still felled each year is largely because there are no adequate rules concerning land tenure. Like the fishermen in the North Atlantic, people harvest their crop because they are worried somebody else will claim it.
These sorts of mistakes are repeated around the world. The most prominent source of pollution in Cubatao is an old steel foundry owned by Cosipa, a privatized steel company. The government has repeatedly come up with excuses for why the factory needs to stay open. Germany spends $7.3 billion a year to keep open coal mines—about ninety dollars per German or eighty-six thousand dollars per miner. In Australia, the state of Victoria spends $170 million more per year building roads for loggers than it gets back from the wood hauled out of the forest. The Worldwatch Institute reckons that there are $650 billion worth of subsidies going to environmentally destructive activities. Merely halting them would knock two thousand dollars off the average tax bill in the United States alone. Another way to accommodate the imbalance between the market and Green priorities would be to introduce tradable pollution permits, so that clean factories could profit from their cleanliness. These have been introduced with some success in America, but they remain much easier to talk about at economics conferences than to put into practice; in Cubatao, the idea remains literally a pipe dream. The regulatory agency that could address it does not have the resources to install permanent monitoring equipment on each of the chimneys.
The Buck Is Passed
Listen intently to people talking about how globalization is destroying the environment, and you can hear the sound of a buck being passed. Nobody would deny that Cubatao—just like Bobo, Orelsky, and the inhabitants of the Villa Prudente—has gotten something of a raw deal from globalization. Yet p. 263 the town’s recent history is living testament to the fact that local actions matter. Cubatao’s cleanup happened because local politicians and businesspeople eventually took responsibility into their own hands. Salgosa’s fish are a daily reminder to his workers to watch the environment.
Pollution is always somebody else’s fault, and when there is nobody clear to blame it is just put at the feet of globalization (just as unemployment is in Flint). In fact, having some vague force on which all these things can be blamed suits everybody: the factories who would rather not have to spend more money making themselves cleaner; Greens who would rather not have to make precise cost estimates for the measures they favor; and even the people of Cubatao, who would rather not have to make a choice between the options.
This exemption from responsibility is worrying. It means that a process that should be associated with freedom often seems at odds with the concept of accountability. The losers end up hating the system rather than the people whose mistakes have left them in their predicament. In short, it prepares the way for a backlash.
Part Six – A Call to Arms
14 – The Enemies Gather: The Backlash Against Globalization
p. 267 CONSIDER THE following warning, delivered at the beginning of 1999:
If globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negative. These are, for example, the absolutizing of the economy, unemployment, the reduction and deterioration of public services, the destruction of the environment and natural resources, the growing distance between rich and poor, unfair competi
tion which puts poor nations in a situation of ever increasing inferiority. . . . More and more in many countries in America a system known as neo-liberalism prevails; based on a purely economic concept of man, this system considers profit and the laws of the market as its only parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of and the respect due to individuals and people.
You might imagine that these words sprang from the lips of Fidel Castro or a particularly eloquent European trade unionist. In fact, the speaker was one of the men who has done most to turbocharge the pace of globalization. As archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla acted as the unofficial leader of the Polish resistance to communist rule; on becoming Pope John Paul II in 1978, he took the cause global, throwing the weight of the Universal Church behind his crusade. The businessmen and bankers who subsequently flooded into the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s did not carry portraits of the pope, as striking Polish workers had done during some of the most heroic moments of the 1980s, but they had him to thank for helping to remove the greatest barrier to the universal rule of market capitalism.
p. 268 And yet, as the 1990s wore on, the pope became increasingly uneasy about what he had wrought. As he contemplated the spread of sin, selfishness, and inequality, he worried that “unbridled capitalism” was little improvement on “savage Marxism.” In his Apostolic Exhortation to the Catholic Church in the Americas in January 1999, from which the above extract was taken, he urged priests not just to administer to the poor but to persuade the rich to forsake the false idols of globalism for the one true God. Globalization began to assume the same role in his life that communism once had.
The pope is hardly alone in his worries. George Soros, a man who has benefited financially as much as anyone from globalization, likely agreed with every word of the pope’s exhortation. So did another beneficiary of tumbling international barriers, Nelson Mandela. “Is globalization only to benefit the powerful and the financiers, speculators, investors, and traders?” the South African leader demanded angrily of the gathered bigwigs at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1999. “Does it offer nothing to women and children who are ravaged by the violence of poverty?”[1]
“Our global village has caught fire, from where we do not know,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt agreed, in a speech at the same meeting. “In the emerging world there is a bitter sentiment of injustice, a sense that there must be something wrong with a system that wipes out years of hard-won development because of changes in market sentiment.”[2] Even Kofi Annan warned that the spread of markets seemed to be outpacing the ability of many societies to adjust to them, leaving the world remarkably vulnerable to all the “isms” of the post-cold war world: populism, nationalism, chauvinism, fanaticism, terrorism, and protectionism.
There are still plenty of more visible scapegoats on which the great army of the disappointed can mistakenly pin its misfortunes: the Chinese in Asia, Turks and Algerians in Europe, the Jews almost everywhere. But for a remarkable number of people and a remarkable number of reasons, globalization itself is now the bogeyman of choice. In the United States, it is summoned up to explain every job lost in the Carolinas. Britain’s Prince Charles blames it for the spread of genetically modified tomatoes. In Russia, it is held up to explain the brutality of NATO. To the Académie Française, and until recently to the Taliban, it has been synonymous with American degeneracy, albeit in slightly different ways. In 1999, the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization even decided that globalization was officially bad for your health, blaming it for the 1.1 million deaths a year caused by work-related injuries.[3]
One convenient way to dismiss this backlash is to point out that it is as old p. 269 as globalization itself. In 1774, two years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, Johann Herder worried that “all nations and all continents are under our shadow, and when a storm shakes two twigs in Europe, how the entire world trembles and bleeds!”[4] Early critics even anticipated today’s worries about the environment: “Society expands and intensifies,” lamented Adam Muller, a German economist, in 1809. “By a letter, by a bill of exchange, by a bar of silver, the London merchant reaches out his hand across the oceans to his correspondent in Madras, and helps him to wage the great war against the earth.”
Globalization and antiglobalization seem to be dialectically related: The more globalization advances, challenging established ways of doing things, the more some retreat into the certainties of their ancient cultures. The overflowing airport leads inexorably to the overflowing mosque, but the former, crucially, is more powerful. For every tribal elder who warns against the corruption of the outside world, there are usually dozens of youngsters who cannot wait to get their hands on Coca-Cola and Pamela Anderson; and so the process continues.
This argument has been put perhaps most starkly by Thomas Friedman in his recent appraisal of globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Globalization for Friedman is as inevitable as the dawn. (“Generally speaking, I think it is a good thing that the sun come up every morning. It does more good than harm. But even if I didn’t much care for the dawn, there isn’t much I could do about it.”) This view, understandable though it might have been with the Dow at record levels and the Asian contagion apparently tamed, seems naively similar to the outlook of Keynes’s “inhabitant of London” on the eve of the First World War.[5] The world economy rapidly unraveled in the years after 1914, and the past twenty-five years of global integration have been anything but smooth. The great scare in the autumn of 1998—particularly the moment when Russia went bankrupt—now seems like a momentary blip. But at the time it was a damned close-run thing.
The current supremacy of what Friedman calls the electronic herd was not just a product of technology and financial cunning. It required liberalizing politicians to step out of the way and laws to change. Those laws, however, could be changed back again. Given the carnage that globalization has caused (or is said to have caused) in much of the third world, not to mention the loathing that America often inspires, it is not inevitable that Pamela Anderson and Coca-Cola will always trump the mullahs. Meanwhile, throughout much of the developed world, the constituency for globalization seems distinctly fainthearted.
p. 270 In fact globalization’s own status is not unlike that of Catholicism. The real problem often has less to do with staunch opponents than tepid believers and the abuses of its leaders. The world did not simply lurch into protectionism after the First World War; the seeds were sown long before by people who claimed to be free traders: politicians making compromises and industrialists claiming exceptions. We will return to these faint hearts, but we will begin at the fringes with the outright heretics: the people who hate globalization and encourage others to do the same.
Rage Against the Machine
As good a place to start as any is the protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999. The Seattle riots, which attracted fifty thousand protestors, were a bizarre event, balancing the comical and the terrifying, the organized and the anarchic. Most of the organizing was done by the growing group of nongovernmental organizations dedicated to halting, or at least emasculating, globalization. Long before the WTO met, pamphlets had been posted, meetings organized, alliances formed, and, most important, e-mails sent. Around 1,500 NGOs signed an anti-WTO declaration set up by Public Citizen. The WTO was arguably stung to death by a new on-line phenomenon that researchers at the RAND Corporation have dubbed an “NGO swarm—a movement with no central leadership or command structure; it is multiheaded, impossible to decapitate.”
The comedy came from many of the protestors. Some dressed as turtles; self-described Vegan Dykes went topless; banners declared that “the WTO is a hazardous waste” and advocated the need to “make love not profits”; for a while at least, everybody seemed to enjoy the street theater. But other banners suggested a more sinister agenda on behalf of some of the protestors—“Clinton, Blair, they’re no good, hit them on the head with a piece of wood,” said one;
“Fuck the civil, let’s get disobedient,” screamed another. The protests eventually degenerated into violence (in much the same way that an initially cheerful Carnival against Capitalism had in London earlier that year). Eventually, the whole of the center of Seattle became a war zone.
Many Americans seemed perplexed by this display. Seattle—an export-oriented port city—was an odd place to protest against trade; previous urban protests in the country had touched most people in an immediate visceral way. Everybody knew somebody in Vietnam. The Los Angeles riots sprang from feelings of injustice that anybody who saw the Rodney King video could understand. But why riot over the level of tariffs on textiles from India or the p. 271 need to reconsider trade-related intellectual-property rights? For many, the issues seem quaint and arcane, even if the National Guard had to be called out. In fact, the revolt against globalization in Seattle could have been an early insight into the official politics of the next century: a continuing battle between a technocratic commercial elite with a minimal grasp of politics and a disenfranchised, angry minority with a minimal grasp of economics.
The opposition is not only from the left and its army of trade unionists, environmentalists, and students. Some of the most terrifying assaults have come from the right. In the same year as the WTO meeting, some two hundred federal agents were combing the woods of western North Carolina for somebody who had allegedly taken a much more brutal response to globalization: Eric Rudolph. An alleged member of a group called Christian Identity, Rudolph stands accused not only of shooting abortionists but also of planting a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics. Letters that the police believe Rudolph wrote promise “Death to the New World Order.” As Mark Potok, an academic who specializes in hate groups, told The New Yorker, it was not surprising that Rudolph chose the Olympics: “The Olympics is the apotheosis of race mixing, of one worldism, of everything that Christian Identity despises.”[6]
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization Page 38