WORM'S EYE

Commentary on Amy Chua by Mr. B. "Amy Chua is right on the button except that I think she reads too much ethnic conflict into Filipino crimes against Chinese. "Compared to Malaysia and Indonesia the Philippines is a haven for Chinese. In those countries, Chinese were killed for being Chinese. "In the Philippines, Chinese are killed, robbed or kidnapped because of money. "Filipino criminals do not discriminate. Like all good neo-liberals. they go to where there is money to be made regardless of race, color, creed, or sexual preference. "One can write a paper on free markets using Filipino criminal behaviour as a starting point or simply by substituting names like Kuratong Baleleng for firms like Enron, Halliburton etc."

Wal-Mart Nation: The Race to the Bottom by Floyd J. McKay Published on Wednesday, February 18 ,2004 by the Seattle Times Los Angeles is not my kind of town. But the Angelinos are about to take a stand that ought to be applauded across the country. That stand is to say "no" to a Wal-Mart "supercenter" that the retailing giant hopes to open in the city. These superstores are not your father's Wal-Mart; they are monstrous, sprawling over some 25 acres and employing up to 600 workers. Their lure, of course, is lower prices. Wal-Mart, it seems to me, epitomizes the race to the bottom that has the United States by the throat as the 21st century opens. Why do people shop at these behemoths, when they know full well that they are driving out of existence small businesses owned and operated by their neighbors, employing other neighbors? They shop because of price, and they are forced to do so by the declining standard of living we have offered working people for more than a generation. People who work for minimum wage, with little or no benefits, who cannot afford to fix their car or their kids' teeth have no choice but to search out the lowest price. Wal-Mart buys offshore, without apology and for the cheapest possible prices, from companies paying the lowest-possible wages. As jobs in America are lost to foreign sweatshops to feed the Wal- Mart engine, American workers are forced to accept jobs at lower pay, with bad working conditions. They are funneled to Wal-Mart's promise of cheap goods, in effect patronizing the very companies that caused their economic misery. This is a cruel travesty on working people in this country. Wal-Mart is currently being sued in some 40 cases charging various abuses of labor laws, and last fall it was reported the company extensively employs illegal aliens as janitors. Wal-Mart has successfully opposed unionization and frequently pays well below competing stores. All of these practices — alleged abuses of labor laws, hiring illegals, and the low rate of pay and benefits at Wal-Mart — serve to depress the labor market in communities in which the giant is located. That is a major factor in Los Angeles' opposition to the supercenter. We live in a nation in which the real-dollar income of an average family has declined for years, while corporate profits and executive pay have skyrocketed. The gap between rich and poor has widened at an alarming rate in the past 20 years. In 44 states, the gap has increased not only between rich and poor, but between rich and middle-class families. None of the six exceptions is a Northwest state. Oregon has one of the worst gaps, Washington is about average. In some states, the inequity is staggering. In three of the nation's largest states — California, New York and Ohio — families in the lowest 20 percent bracket actually lost real income from 1978 to 2000. In 1999 dollars, the loss was between 5 and 6 percent. In those same states, the real income gain for the top 20 percent of families ranged from 37 to 54 percent. Nationwide, from 1978 to 2000, the lowest 20 percent of families gained only $972 annually, or 7.1 percent; the top 5 percent gained $87,779, or 58.4 percent. These findings, by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (www.cbpp.org), were before the Bush tax cuts and the current recession, both of which will further widen the gap. You can't blame Sam Walton for this disparity, but operations like Wal-Mart feed off the impoverishment of America. Sadly, there are byproducts in quality of life, often unseen until it is too late. The greatest is the destruction of America's small and mid-sized towns, increasingly bereft of small businesses and dominated by big- box retailers — acres of barren asphalt parking lots, corporate managers on their way to the next-larger store, employees scrambling to keep low-wage jobs. My wife's recently deceased aunt could no longer shop in the small Iowa town where she and her late husband ran a feed store. The store is closed, as are the other small businesses. The elderly woman had to drive — or be driven — past the empty shops several miles to Wal- Mart, the nearest place to get the basics of life. Wal-Mart is like a neutron bomb, sucking life out of small towns, leaving buildings without the essence of civic life. Those of us fortunate to earn middle-class incomes can make a choice, and shun Wal-Mart. The tragedy is that for an ever-increasing segment of America, the despicable race to the bottom has left no other choice than to shop for cheap, regardless of the consequences. Floyd J. McKay is a journalism professor at Western Washington University. Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

Corporation as Psychopath by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman Published on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org People ask -- Rob, Russell, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. What can we do about it? We say -- read one book, see one movie. Unfortunately, the movie and the book are available now only in Canada. But wait -- before you head north of the border -- they will be available here in a month or so. And believe us, it is worth the wait. (Full disclosure -- our work -- the Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s -- is featured in the movie.) The book is titled: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. It is by Joel Bakan (Free Press, 2004). The movie is called: The Corporation. It is by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan. We've seen an advance copy of the movie. We're read an advance copy of the book. And here's our review: Scrap the civics curricula in your schools, if they exist. Cancel your cable TV subscriptions. Call your friends, your enemies and your family. Get your hands on a copy of this movie and a copy of this book. Read the book. Discuss it. Dissect it. Rip it apart. Watch the movie. Show it to your children. Show it to your right-wing relatives. Show it to everyone. Organize a party around it. Then organize another. For years, we've been reporting on critics of corporate power -- Robert Monks, Richard Grossman, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Sam Epstein, Charles Kernaghan, Michael Moore, Jeremy Rifkin. For years, we've reported on the defenders of the corporate status quo like Milton Friedman, Peter Drucker and William Niskanen. But Bakan, a professor of law at British Columbia Law School, and Achbar and Abbott have pulled these leading lights together in a 145- minute documentary that grabs the viewer by the throat and refuses to let go. The movie is selling out major theaters across Canada. And if it detonates here -- which in our view is still a long shot -- the U.S. after all is not Canada -- it could have a profound impact on politics. The filmmakers juxtapose well-shot interviews of defenders and critics with the reality on the ground – Charles Kernaghan in Central America showing how, for example, big apparel manufacturers pay workers pennies for products that sell for hundreds of dollars in the United States -- with defenders of the regime -- Milton Friedman looking frumpy as he says with as straight a face as he can -- the only moral imperative for a corporate executive is to make as much money for the corporate owners as he or she can. Others agree with Friedman. Management guru Peter Drucker tells Bakan: "If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast." And William Niskanen, chair of the libertarian Cato Institute, says that he would not invest in a company that pioneered in corporate responsibility. Of course, state corporation laws actually impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make money for shareholders. Engage in social responsibility -- pay more money to workers, stop legal pollution, lower the price to customers -- and you'll likely be sued by your shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, puts it this way: "The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine (shark seeking young woman swimming on the screen). There isn't any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed." Business insiders like Monks and Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Corporation, the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, lend needed balance to a movie that otherwise would have been dominated by outside critics like Chomsky, Moore, Grossman and Rifkin. Anderson calls the corporation a "present day instrument of destruction" because of its compulsion to "externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it externalize." "The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction," Anderson says, as pictures of biological and chemical wastes pouring into the atmosphere roll across the screen. Like Republican Kevin Phillips is doing as he criss-crosses the nation, pummeling Bush from the right, Anderson and Monks are opening a new front against corporate power from inside the belly of the beast. They are stars of this movie and book. The movie and the book drive home one fundamental point -- the corporation is a psychopath. Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare runs down a checklist of psychopathic traits and there is a close match. The corporation is irresponsible because in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk. Corporations try to manipulate everything, including public opinion. Corporations are grandiose, always insisting that "we're number one, we're the best." Corporations refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions and are unable to feel remorse. And the key to reversing the control of this psychopathic institution is to understand the nature of the beast. No better place to start than right here. Read the book. Watch the movie (www.thecorporation.tv). Organize for resistance. Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.- based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of 'Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy' (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org). (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

The Fruits of Poverty The Wealth of Supermarkets is built on Monopoly, Exploitation and Restriction of Choice by George Monbiot Every year the list is the same, but every year it still comes as a shock. Of the 10 richest people on Earth, five of them have the same surname. It's not Gates, or Murdoch, or Rockefeller, but Walton. They are the heirs and trustees of the supermarket chain Wal-Mart. And between them they are worth $100bn. Considering how the media fawns on the ultra rich, we hear remarkably little about them. Perhaps this is because their position is rather embarrassing. The company that enriches them trades on the idea that it is the friend of the common man and woman, distributing rather than concentrating wealth. Over the past 20 years, two world-shaking social transformations have taken place. The first, the effective collapse of the proletariat as a political force, has been well documented. The second, the disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie as an economic force, rather less so. The near-elimination of the small businesses supplying and running the retail trade is in some ways as consequential as the withering of organized labor in heavy industry and the coal mines. The global monopolization of the sector has destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of small proprietors and their employees. But, because this workforce was dispersed, the effects are rather harder to see. A couple of weeks ago, I went to buy some fruit trees. I traveled to the world's most unprepossessing center of biodiversity: Langley, on the outskirts of Slough. In the first half of the 20th century, most of London's fruit and vegetables were grown round there. The farms were supplied by specialist nurseries, which ensured that Britain possessed a wider variety of temperate fruit trees than any other nation. Two weeks ago, only one of these nurseries was left. In the 1940s, JC Allgrove's kept a thousand varieties of apple tree. It is still listed in the directories as one of Britain's great growers. But I was among its last customers. Since the owner died two years ago, the business has been run by a volunteer, Nick Houston. "There are bits of ground here where no one's been for 20 years," he told me. Recently, scrabbling beneath the ivy that now covers the orchards, he found an apple he had never seen before. It was a Baumann's Reinette: the horticultural equivalent of a Fabergé egg. "But I had no idea which bloody tree it had fallen off." Somewhere in the nursery there should be two varieties - King Harry and St Augustine's Orange - that even the national fruit collection doesn't possess, but he hasn't been able to find them yet. The land is to be sold. Nick will salvage what he can and run a business of his own, under the old name, to try to keep the rare breeds growing. He gave a one-word answer when I asked him what had happened to the business. "Supermarkets." Today the apples they buy are landing three miles from JC Allgrove's. Heathrow's first runway was built on strawberry farms and orchards. From the air, you can still see derelict greenhouses and the parallel lines on the land where fruit trees once grew. Richard Cox, the man who bred the world's favorite apple, is buried beside St Mary's Church in Harmondsworth, which will be flattened if a third runway is built at Heathrow. The superstores have used their buying power to force the world's farmers to compete directly with each other. Yesterday I spoke to a fruit grower in Gloucestershire, who told me that to stay in the game he must sometimes sell Coxes for as little as 57p a kilo, less than his cost of production. The superstores then sell the same apples for between £1.60 and £1.80. They can buy them for even less from Chile, New Zealand and South Africa, where labor is cheap and the farms huge. This would present no threat to the growers here, had the superstores not used their political power to ensure that fuel costs stay low, and the docks and airports keep expanding. These companies are now strolling over the battlefield, dispatching the last of the wounded. A few days ago, Verdict Research published a report on the takeover of Britain's cornershops. The big chains have moved into the suburbs, where they are closing down the competition. "Now smaller retailers can no longer hide in the neighborhood," Verdict reports. "A major shake-out is inevitable." Wal-Mart, which owns the British chain Asda, is now the biggest company on Earth. In the last financial year it took $245bn. It is successful partly because it is one of the most ruthless employers in the western world. In the US its sales clerks made an average of $13,861 in 2001, almost $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. It is reported to have told new employees how to apply for food stamps so that they don't starve to death. In November, the police found hundreds of illegal immigrants working as cleaners in its stores. Some of them claimed that they were obliged to work seven nights a week, without overtime, insurance or benefits. By forcing down the prices of the goods they buy, the superstores encourage even more repressive conditions in the companies that supply them. A recent study by Oxfam documents the systematic abuse of workers in the factories and farms that the superstores buy from. The Waltons are so rich because others are so poor. Beside this, the destruction of our horticultural diversity looks trivial. But both are manifestations of the same problem. As the superstores capture the market, they shut down all our choices: about where we shop, what we buy, who we work for. This, of course, is what all monopolies seek to do. We might have hoped that governments would treat them as such. Indeed, there was a time when they did. In 1936, a federal anti-trust act was passed in the United States to protect small shops from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. But governments were braver then. In Britain, the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission seem to spend their time devising new excuses. They continue to insist, for example, that big stores and corner shops are separate markets. Tesco might sell 25% of all Britain's groceries, but it owns "only" 6% of the convenience store market, so it should be allowed to expand in that sector as it pleases. Last month the Office of Fair Trading admitted that its voluntary code of practice, which is supposed to protect farmers from the excessive power of the superstores, is not working. By way of remedy it proposed "more research". In response, the MPs Andrew George and David Drew are launching an early day motion in parliament today, calling for a legally binding code of practice and a supermarket watchdog. But Tony Blair seems to be as frightened of the superstores as he is of the tabloid press. Nick couldn't find me any of the rarest varieties. He sold me an Adam's Pearmain, a Charles Ross, a Sturmer Pippin and a Cornish Aromatic. I would have bought the names even if the trees weren't attached to them. If they survive my clumsy handling and produce fruit, I will regard every apple they produce as a minor act of insurrection. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

On the Dark Side of Democracy January 31, 2004 By EMILY EAKIN NEW HAVEN - To most Americans, the notion that free markets and democracy are essential to curing the world's ills is an article of faith. If only Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba and North Korea, Syria and Rwanda would adopt both, their people, not to mention the world, would be safer and richer. Yet to Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, such accepted wisdom is mostly evidence of a persistent and disturbing national naïveté. All too often, she says, bringing free markets and elections to developing nations leads not to stability or prosperity but to hate-mongering, discrimination and even genocidal violence. The idea that political and economic liberty could trigger such atrocities is heretical to many Western liberals. That, Ms. Chua says, is because people here are blind to ethnicity. "I think it's kind of a taboo topic in the West," said Ms. Chua, 41, during an interview at her office on the Yale campus. America, she said, doesn't like to talk about ethnic conflict: despite a long history of racial problems, assimilation is part of the national creed. But in much of the developing world, she argues, nations are starkly divided along ethnic lines. Disproportionately wealthy ethnic minorities - Ms. Chua calls them market-dominant minorities - exist alongside poor and resentful majorities. And in such cases, she insists, adding democracy and free markets can be disastrous. As she states the case in her recent book, "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability"(Doubleday, 2003): "Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism." And this, she adds, is precisely what is happening today in Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia and the Middle East." With its volatile mix of Sunnis (the elite Muslim minority favored by Saddam Hussein), Shiites (the generally poorer Muslim majority) and Kurds, Iraq could soon join the list, Ms. Chua said. "It's a big mess," she said. "You have a 60 percent Shiite majority that has long been oppressed and has just every reason to take back the country and re-establish its identity." A Chinese-American whose family is from the Philippines, Ms. Chua says she has seen firsthand the destructive effects of free markets and democracy. Both arrived in the Philippines after its independence from the United States in 1946, benefiting the tiny, entrepreneurial Chinese community at the expense of the Filipino majority. Though they make up barely 1 percent of the population, she writes, "Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country's four major airlines and almost all of the country's banks, hotels, shopping malls and major conglomerates." Today ethnic tensions on the island are high. In November 2003, The New York Times reported that there had been 156 kidnappings so far that year - apparently a 10-year high. Most of the victims, some of whom were eventually murdered, were ethnic Chinese. In 1994, Ms. Chua's aunt was stabbed to death in her home by her Filipino chauffeur. He was never arrested. And though he stole money and jewelry from his employer, Ms. Chua writes, the motive listed in the police record was not robbery but "revenge." Longtime critics of America's markets-and-elections approach to the developing world are finding lately that the chorus of dissenting voices joining them has swelled. The optimism many analysts felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall has waned, dissipated by more than a decade of bloodshed and strife in Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. And the theoretical model that experts relied on to predict orderly transitions from dictatorship to democracy is in shambles. That may be one reason Ms. Chua's book, which was published a year ago and released in paperback earlier this month, has received respectful reviews from magazines on both sides of the political spectrum, including The Nation, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard and Business Week. Some analysts dispute her thesis, saying she exaggerates the prevalence of ethnic conflict, making, for example, too much of the fact that many of Russia's wealthiest moguls are Jewish. Still, her book has appeared briefly on The New York Times best-seller list and even garnered Ms. Chua an invitation to address a group at the Central Intelligence Agency. Today skeptics of America's democratization policies include scholars and commentators, liberals and conservatives, even if few of them agree with one another. Among the most influential are the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, one of the first to question the wisdom of rapid democratization; the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz; the journalist Robert D. Kaplan; and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International whose latest book, "The Future of Freedom" (Norton, 2003), argues that one way to curb the negative effects of too much democracy too fast is to allow countries to first pass through a period of gradually liberalizing autocracy. In a much-discussed article published in the Journal of Democracy in 2002, Thomas Carothers, a democracy specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, declared that the "transition paradigm" favored by pro-democracy advocates for the last 20 years had outlived its usefulness. "Of the nearly 100 countries considered as `transitional' in recent years, only a relatively small number - probably fewer than 20" have made some democratic progress, Mr. Carothers wrote. He listed some of the creative terms that analysts have invented to describe countries in what he called the gray zone: "semi-democracy, formal democracy, electoral democracy, facade democracy, pseudo-democracy, weak democracy, partial democracy, illiberal democracy and virtual democracy." By using such labels, he wrote, "analysts are in effect trying to apply the transition paradigm to the very countries whose evolution is calling that paradigm into question." In a telephone interview, Mr. Carothers acknowledged that the field of democracy studies was in flux. "We are coming to the end of one way of thinking about democratization," he said. "The questions that people are really agonizing about are: in countries where market reforms are not functioning very well, what's the solution to this? Was our market message wrong? Or was it just implemented wrong? It's still a matter of debate how much inequality has been produced." Even so, he added, many of the problems that foreign nations face are the legacy of European colonialism, not United States policy. "It's not true that ethnic conflict was created by the wave of democratization," he said. "Why should democracy get the blame for failed empire?" In his view, Ms. Chua's book "is based on a straw man of U.S. policy, which says that America is constantly trying to force democracy down the throats of other countries." In truth, he said: "Many of the countries want to try democracy. We're rarely in the driver's seat." Nevertheless, critics complain, America's approach is both precipitous and simplistic, encouraging political liberalization in nations that may not have the social and economic conditions necessary to sustain it. "We're not prepared to understand, assess and respond to the complexities of other societies," said the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who has served as an adviser to governments in Russia, Poland and Bolivia. Mr. Stiglitz agreed, saying that democracy experts tend to ignore social variables like ethnicity and gender. In Malaysia, for example, he said, the local government created a successful affirmative action program to benefit the indigenous Malay majority - and ward off ethnic conflict with the prosperous Chinese minority - over the objections of Western advisers. And in Rwanda, he said, the transition from customary to formal law put land formerly controlled by women under male ownership, an outcome Western experts failed to anticipate. Most critics are quick to stress that they are not against democracy, free markets or globalization per se; they merely object to the way these ideals have typically been pursued. "I'm an optimist," Ms. Chua said, summing up her position. "In the last 20 years, we have done things in many ways so badly, so foolishly, often with the best of intentions - like dropping a stock exchange in Mozambique or xeroxing copies of the U.S. Constitution. I think we can do better." In her book, she argues that one way to reduce inequality and ethnic tension in democratizing nations is for market-dominant minorities to share some of their wealth by making "significant, visible contributions to the local economies in which they are thriving," by which she means building universities, hospitals or recreational facilities, supporting local schools and employing members of the indigenous majority in their companies. It is an idea, Ms. Chua admits, that her wealthy relatives in the Philippines may not find appealing. But then, she says, she decided not to send them her book. "I do not know what my extended family thinks," she said. "And I'm terrified to find out." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/arts/31CHUA.html?ex=1076611391&ei=1&en=fc4f7d5cf09a9432

Deafening silence

Can you hear the deafening silence of the Muslim world on the Madrid terror attack? Will the good Muslims of this world please speak up?