Page 4 of 5 Excerpt
from Pepe Escobar's Globalistan The following is an excerpt from
Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is
Dissolving into Liquid War by Asia Times
Online's Pepe Escobar. For a review of the book,
click here.
GLOBALISTAN
compounded with the worldwide suspicion
that globalization was a game where Corporatistan
- especially from the U.S. - wins and almost
everyone else loses.
New York-based
investment banker Henry Liu framed some of
these "wins" when he wrote in
Asia Times that "with the U.S. relocating all
manufacturing offshore under globalization, high
tech and military systems are the main U.S.
exports outside of agriculture and financial
services."
War and globalization cannot
escape each other's seductive embrace. "Borders"
and "markets" can be "liberated" as much via the
WTO/ IMF/World Bank trio of enforcers as with
B-52s and Abrams tanks. As far as Wall Street,
Anglo-American and European Big Oil and the
interlinked U.S.-U.K. industrial-military complex
are concerned, the ends justify the means. The key
example of the "war on terror" smashing sovereign,
recalcitrant nations into submission to "free
markets" has got to be Iraq.
Bauman points
to the "new type of war in the era of liquid
modernity: not the conquest of new territory, but
the destruction of walls which blocked the flux of
new and fluid global power" (old-fashioned,
physical walls now serve the exclusive purpose of
blocking undesirable masses, like Mexicans and
Latin Americans confronting the southern U.S.
Wall, Palestinians facing the Israeli Wall and
Iraqis facing the upcoming - in 2012 - Saudi
Arabian Wall).
Bauman formulates the new
war, paraphrasing Clausewitz, as "the promotion of
free trade by other means," stressing that "the
power of the global elite resides in its capacity
to escape local commitments, and globalization is
geared to prevent this necessity so local
authorities have to bear the responsibility of
being the guardians of law and order (local)." No
wonder, adds Bauman, "globalization seems to be
more successful in raising the vigor of enmity and
inter-communal strife than in promoting the
peaceful coexistence of communities." That's
globalization dissolving the world into Liquid
War.
Investing in war is essential
business for key nodes in the U.S.-E.U. poles of
the Triad. In the summer of 2006 BAE Systems Plc
(the former British Aerospace, privatized in the
early 1980s), one of Europe's top weapons
corporations, confirmed the sale to Saudi Arabia
of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets - a deal worth as
much as US$ 19 billion, a pittance considering
that at the time Saudi Arabia was bagging around
US$ 17 billion a month on crude oil sales.
Eurofighter is a Munich-based joint
venture between BAE, Finmeccanica SpA and European
Aeronautic Defense & Space Co (EADS). Of
course, the deal had absolutely nothing to do with
a US$33.4 million slush fund to finance fun and
games to the Saudi royal family, including "sex
and bondage with Saudi princes", as Indymedia UK
had reported in November 2003, based on
accusations by a former BAE employee. BAE Systems
in North America has long been associated with
Boeing and Lockheed Martin and is totally
integrated with the Pentagon - as if it was part
of US Corporatistan. When BAE Systems bought
United Defense Industries in 2005 - the makers of
Bradley fighting vehicles, those intimate friends
of Iraqi guerrillas - the British became the No 7
Pentagon contractor. Accusations against BAE
Systems are of the "business as usual" variety -
corruption, pollution of the environment, dirty
deals and dictatorships. BAE Systems CEO Mike
Turner of course has dismissed all allegations as
"history".
The two Western poles of the
Triad are in fierce competition for supplying not
only any unsavory regime on hold but every former
USSR satellite in Eastern Europe as well. In this
dogfight between Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General
Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman plus BAE
Systems on one side and EADS - a fusion of Deutsch
Aerospace (DASA), Aerospatiale Matra and
Construcciones Aeronauticas from Spain - on the
other, peace is just another word for everything
to lose. The Anglo-American industrial-military
complex alliance, plus the Wall Street-City of
London financial alliance, plus Big Oil alliance,
explain why the British pound may never be dropped
in favor of the euro.
The U.S.'s top
industrial policy is to sell weapons. What kind of
globalization is this? Samir Amin points out that
"the U.S. only benefits from comparative
advantages in the armaments sector, precisely
because this sector largely operates outside the
rules of the market and benefits from state
support." The business of selling weapons is
roughly 80% more profitable than shipping
Hollywood movies, straight- to-DVD masterpieces
and Shakira CDs to the rest of the world.
Hence the marketing strategy of Military
Corporatistan has got to be Long - Infinite - War.
In the summer of 2006 Frida Berrigan, Senior
Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's
Arms Trade Resource Center, issued a very detailed
report - "Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom
or Fueling Conflict" - relayed by Tomdispatch, on
this discreet business where the stars are
Lockheed Martin F-16s, Raytheon Advanced
Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles or Maverick
Air-to-Ground Missiles, a business conducted via
"the Pentagon's predilection for less than
magnetic Power Point presentations, unbearably
unexpressive acronyms, and slightly paunchy, older
white men in business suits."
The
playground is every dictatorship's dream: as BAE
Systems sell their 72 Eurofighters to
Taliban-friendly Saudi Arabia - perhaps to bomb
the next Shiite insurrection in Hasa - Lockheed
Martin sells 36 F-16s to Taliban-friendly Pakistan
- perhaps to be engulfed in the next scramble for
Kashmir. For P.R. purposes all this awesome
firepower will be channeled towards the "war on
terror." Berrigan notes, in quite understated
terms, that 20 out of the U.S.' Top 25 weapons
clients are "undemocratic regimes and/or
governments with records as major human-rights
abusers." According to her report, "U.S. arms
exports accounted for more than half of total
global arms deliveries - US$ 34,8 billion - in
2004, and we export more of them ourselves than
the next six largest exporters combined."
While the Western poles of the Triad
export loads of weapons, the South is busy
developing its own version of Corporatistan. A key
2006 report of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
titled The New Global Challengers: How 100 Top
Companies from Rapidly Developing Economies Are
Going Global - and Changing the World has
detailed how the future of Corporatistan is in the
so called RDEs: China, India, Brazil, Russia,
Malaysia, Thailand and Turkey. The report is
convinced the so-called "RDE 100" will "radically
transform industries and markets around the
world." Only corporations with a turnover of more
than US$ 1 billion in 2004 were taken into
account. Economic analyst Kunal Kumar Kundu,
writing for Asia Times from Bangalore, stressed
that "taken together, these companies accounted
for US$ 715 billion in revenue" in 2004, and
"boasted US$ 145 billion in operating profits, a
half- trillion dollars in assets, and a combined
US$ 9 billion in R&D spending. Plus, they have
grown at an average rate of 24% for the past four
years." They may be unknown to many, but then
nobody knew Toyota, Honda, Samsung or LG 40 or 30
years ago. Who knows Johnson Electric from China,
which is the world's leading manufacturer of small
electric motors?
Not surprisingly the Top
100 is dominated in 70% by Asia - China with 43
companies and India with 21. The wave of the
future players include Lenovo - which bought IBM's
notebook PC business; China National Offshore Oil
Corp. (CNOOC); Indian
information-technology-services giants Infosys,
Tata and Wipro; Embraer from Brazil - the world's
biggest producer of regional jets; Brazilian oil
giant Petrobras and food processor giants Sadia
and Perdigao; and Gazprom and LUKoil from Russia.
All these represent fierce competition to the
U.S.-E.U. pole of the Triad. As Kumar Kundu notes,
they "are in nearly all sectors: industrial goods
(auto equipment, basic materials, engineered
products); consumer durables (household appliances
and consumer electronics); resource extraction;
technology and business services."
Samir
Amin insists that "faced by European and Japanese
competition in high- technology products, and by
Chinese, Korean and other Asian and Latin American
industrialized countries in competition for
manufactured products, as well as by Europe and
the southern cone of Latin America in agriculture,
the United States probably would not be able to
win were it not for the recourse to
'extra-economic' means, violating the principles
of liberalism imposed on its competitors." Amin
sees the interlocking causes of the decline of
U.S. production system as "complex and structural.
The poor quality of general education and training
in the U.S., the product of a deep-rooted
prejudice in favour of the 'private' to the
detriment of the public sector, is one of the main
reasons." His verdict: "There will never be a
'authentically liberal' globalized economy."
Anyway the rules of the game may be slowly
changing. Kumar Kundu details how the RDE 100 are
gaining ground. They may use armies of skilled
factory workers costing US$ 5 an hour, compared to
US$ 25 an hour in the North. Raw materials and
equipment are cheaper. They offer excellent value
for money products. And crucially, "by 2010 China
and India combined will graduate 12 times the
number of engineers, mathematicians, scientists
and technicians as the U.S." This may be the
second phase of globalization. Call it The Revenge
of the South.
But what about the Deep
South?
Almost everything we need to know
about the causes of most of the Arab world's
grievances surfaced in the 2002 Arab Report on
Human Development in Arab Countries, commissioned
by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
and carefully prepared by Arab college professors
and researchers. Not surprisingly the report found
deadly connections between poverty and health and
education indicators - not to mention a stark
contrast between the rulers and the ruled. Wealth
concentration is the name of the game in an array
of countries comprising 280 million people - 5% of
the world's population, and much younger than the
world average (38% are less than 14 years old).
The Arab states were behind the West and
Asia on every possible index - from literacy, job
creation and technology to life expectancy,
intellectual prowess and human development.
Orientalist Bernard Lewis, asking What Went
Wrong?, answered that institutionalized
irrationalism was to blame. Wrong: blame it as
much on rapacious, corrupt comprador elites who
were more interested in shopping at Harrods and
shopping for fighter jets than investing in
health, education and productive industry.
Since the early 1980s the rate of income
growth per head in the Arab world has been the
lowest anywhere - if we except Sub-Saharan Africa.
This growth rate was only 0.5% a year by the early
2000s. If persisting, the report said, an Arab
citizen "will need 140 years to double his income,
against a little less than 10 years in other
regions." Median GNP per head by 2002 was half of
South Korea, for instance. 40 years earlier, it
used to be almost double when compared to the
future Asian tigers. The report also provided
numbers to the feeling that Arab culture is closed
to interaction with the outside world. The Arab
world translates only 300 books a year - five
times less than in Greece, for instance. Since
Caliph Mamoon in the 7th Century, only 100,000
books were translated. That's what Spain
translates in a single year.
And still one
person in five keeps living with less than two
dollars a day. Labor mobility is practically
non-existent - fueling the current number one
European nightmare: 51% of Arab teenagers are
obsessed about immigrating to the affluent West.
The report points to three main reasons
for the overall tragedy in the Arab world: "no
freedom of choice, feeble promotion of the rights
of women, and a knowledge deficit." At the end of
the 1990s the level of freedom - also meaning
participation and responsibility - in the 22
member countries of the Arab League was the lowest
in the world.
The conclusion was
inescapable: Arab governments and human
development remain a mutually incompatible
proposition. LDCs are in even worse shape than the
Arab world. The E.U., on paper, considers itself
to be a policy model for the North - because it
actually removed tariff barriers against LDCs. But
anybody bothering to read the labyrinth of "annex"
rules in Brussels would verify that three
absolutely essential items exported by poor
countries - rice, sugar and bananas - are liable
to be taxed to up to 98%. A theoretically
unrestricted opening of rich countries'
agricultural, textile and shoe markets to
developing countries would mean a staggering US$
700 billion a year. This is more than 13 times the
aid to development budget practiced by the OECD
countries by the mid-2000s: this budget is only
0.22% of
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