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Jerry Mander and Vandana Shiva with Amy Goodman

Transcript of JERRY MANDER and VANDANA SHIVA with AMY GOODMAN
29 June 2001
Santa Fe, New Mexico

JERRY MANDER:
I was remembering one of the last times I was in this area 25 years ago – well, I’ve been here more recently than that – the last long trip I took in this area 25 years ago with my old friend Dan Bomberry. I know some of you in the audience knew Dan and probably remember him as well as I do. He was a Cayuga Salish from the Vancouver area and he ran a great project called the Youth Project. His life was dedicated to indigenous sovereignty rights and economic self-sufficiency and he strongly believed that traditional Native economic and political forms were far more viable today than what we have now. And that meant fighting in every way to protect Native lands, Native governance systems, resources, traditional cultural forms. He published a tremendous, great newspaper in the ’70s and ’80s called Native Self-Sufficiency which had an enormous influence on the Native movement of that time and on me personally, and on my book, In the Absence of the Sacred, which actually was dedicated to him. So, I’m very happy to be here and remember him from the last long trip I had here and our long, slow ride through the Southwest and stopping at all the pueblos and the Hopi and Navajo reservation and meeting so many leaders of that period.

Of course, at that time, the big battle was against the Peabody coal mine at Black Mesa and the push for coal, and oil, uranium, and gold on Indian lands throughout the West. And the push by the military who wanted Native lands for bombing or testing or dumping. The issues are not really very different today except they play out on a much larger terrain and are centrally organized by an economic globalization model that actually codifies its approval of this destruction and supports it with enforcement powers of various kinds. But really the same kinds of things are going on: Native people from throughout the forests of the Amazon, the Pacific, and Latin America, Asia, and in thousands of native communities are still doing battle. Then and now the goals of the system are to separate people from their own lands, their own cultures, their traditions, and political forms; to weaken their opposition to land grabbing and resource exploitation. But they fight on.

To give you an idea, today you have the U’wa fighting oil development in the Columbian Amazon, and the Ogoni people fighting Shell Oil in Nigeria, and the Gwich’in fighting George Bush’s oil scheme in northern Alaska. You have the Dayaks of Sarawak battling logging and the Cree of northern Quebec battling logging – logging which is directly in violation of the Cree treaties with the Canadian government which are now being overcome by NAFTA and the U.S.- Canada Free Trade Agreement. And you have the Agta Negritos of the Philippines also battling against logging on their homelands for export timber. You have the Haida of British Columbia and the Tlingits of Alaska and tribes in Washington state and in India among other places battling commercial over-fishing off their coasts, like global fish companies, leaving depleted native fishing grounds in most cases. There are the Bantoks of the Philippines, the Menominee in the U.S., the Tuareg in the Sahara, the Digo in Kenya, and many others who are fighting gigantic mining operations on their lands that are also polluting and destroying rivers. The Pehuenche in Chile, the Mayans in Guatemala, the Himba of Namibia, the Xingu of Brazil, and hundreds of others are all fighting gigantic dams and forced removal. So are many tribal groups in India – fighting the gigantic Namada dam. Dozens of groups in Panama, Hawaii, Angola, Kenya, and elsewhere, are resisting tourist invasions and infrastructures, like golf courses, that deprive them of their traditional rights and lands. The Xavante are fighting a new waterway canal to serve the soybean exports in Brazil. The Imara in Bolivia and Kuna in Panama are fighting highways through their lands. The Pygmies are fighting a pipeline and on and on and on and on, including fights against the military and the military adventurism in Columbia, the Plan Columbia – chemical spraying of forests; against air force bases in various places and bombing runs, among hundreds, if not thousands of examples, everywhere on this planet. I could use this whole half-hour listing these things and not be done.

Native people are on the front lines of battles against resource exploitation everywhere, and the governments, and the corporations, and the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, all of whom make this possible. So I wanted to note that as I began.

In each of these cases, a Native people is seeking to be allowed to retain its own community and rights and cultures in place against the advancing, global onslaught. It’s tragic, but Native peoples live on the last lands on earth that actually contain great resource reserves – the resources that might serve the voracious corporate growth machine for a little while longer, aided by these globalization bureaucracies which give corporations access to these places over the rights and bodies of indigenous people. The infuriating irony, of course, is that the reason these forests and wild lands are still intact is that Native people have not had a culture or a world- view or technology or desire which promoted the destruction of these places. Thus they have preserved these places up to the present moment as the planet’s resources are otherwise approaching depletion.

But Mr. Cheney-Bush has indicated that conservation is for sissies. So now we’re going to go in these rare places and get what’s left. In some ways, the whole thrust of economic globalization can be reduced to the desperate desire of global corporations to seize the planet’s last resources without anybody stopping them and by any means necessary, including redesigning the entire economic system of the planet – which is well underway.

This evening we’re speaking about globalization and cultural freedom and I suppose the central question is whether the two can possibly coexist? Whether cultural freedom or cultural diversity or biological diversity can possibly exist on the same planet as economic globalization. The answer, of course, is no. Globalization is the opposite of diversity, its nemesis. It’s designed to bring the death of diversity, the death of community, the local and the indigenous. We can choose to have cultural and biological diversity or we can choose globalization, not both. So, how to discuss this further? Let’s start with more on the structures of homogenization and globalization.

Advocates of globalization love to say that it’s really just a long-term, evolutionary process, the result of economic forces that have simply evolved over centuries. They love to describe globalization like it was some kind of uncontrollable force of nature and that it’s Utopianism to believe any other thing. Of course, if we accepted that description of the inevitability of it all, as most media, governments, and universities do, then obviously there would be no resistance possible and no point in talking about it. That’s why they describe it like that. Our only option would be to lie there, watch T.V., and submit. Obviously, this is not acceptable to a whole lot of people judging by the evidence of 50,000 people on the streets in Seattle, hundreds of thousands in various European capitals, more than a million farmers in India – with Vandana in the lead – tens of thousands in Japan, and various continuous uprisings in Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, New Zealand, and England. Lots of people are upset. This is a big movement and it’s growing, and without any central leadership which makes it even more remarkable.

Of course, global trade activity has existed for centuries in various forms but earlier versions were different from modern versions in scale, speed, form, impact, and most importantly, intent. The…

Yes. Oh, [laughs] thank you Janet. Coffee. Coffee. [laughs]. It’s from a small, locally owned café, I’m sure. [Laughter] Right? [Right]

Of course, global trade activity has existed for centuries as I’ve said, but the modern version of globalization definitely did not simply evolve in nature like some kind of naturally dominant plant – like an economic kudzu vine. Globalization is no accident of evolution. It was designed and created by human beings on purpose with a specific goal: to give primary power to economic, I should say, corporate values above all other values and to codify and enforce those values globally. Modern globalization began, had a birthday, a birth date, at the infamous Bretton Woods, New Hampshire meetings in 1944. That was when the world’s leading corporate figures – economists, politicians, and bankers – got together to figure out how to mitigate the devastation of that war, of World War II. They decided on a new, centralized, globally codified economic system to promote global economic development. The confreres at Bretton Woods saw themselves as do-gooders and they decided the best instrument to keep the pieces together would be global corporations supported by powerful new bureaucracies and strict new rules of trade. And so was born the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund – with other names at that time – and then later, a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which gave birth to the World Trade Organization. Recent clones of the model include NAFTA, the up-coming Free Trade Area of the Americas Agreement and quite a few others.

Together these instruments have been fulfilling their mandate which is to bring the most fundamental redesign of the planet’s social, economic, and political arrangements, at least since the Industrial Revolution. They’re engineering a power shift of stunning proportions. They’re moving real economic and political power away from national, state, and local governments and communities, toward this new, centralized model that directly serves global corporations, banks and global bureaucracies. Let’s look at some of the main ingredients of this model. It will help us see what is going on.

Since the primary purpose of globalization is to help global corporations expand and grow, the rules try to encourage expanded, unimpeded, corporate access to new resource supplies wherever on the planet they still exist. Thus the tremendous pressure to open the last wilderness places and beat back the Indians and other communities who are in the way. Secondly, they need new and cheaper labor sources which is why we’re now in love with China and will soon be with Cuba, and possibly Haiti if it ever stops resisting the World Bank’s impositions – which I hope it doesn’t. And third, there must be unimpeded access to markets throughout the world.

The model also requires maximized global trading activity and the forced conversion of all countries to export-oriented production. I’ll come back to this – it’s a very important issue. Of course, increased trade activity must be free trade, an attractive term which actually means increased freedom for corporations but direct suppression of the efforts of communities, states, or countries who try to regulate corporate behavior with environmental rules, labor rights, investment standards, and so on. In other words, deregulation to the max, codified and enforced globally. All of this is accompanied by pressure to commodify every last remaining nook and cranny of existence and to privatize them so, to increase the opportunity for corporate profits. This now means areas of the commons that we never thought could be privatized or commodified – the genetic structures of all life, biotechnology, and now the planet’s remaining fresh water – being heavily pushed toward global trade conditions. That’s extremely important as well. One more thing, possibly most relevant to today’s discussion: everybody has to play the game. All countries must buy into the system and must integrate and merge their economic activities. The idea is to create a single, seamless, centralized, super-system that covers the whole earth.

Now, a few of you in the audience, I think, are my age, or nearly my age. I think I saw a couple of people who actually may be older. And you may remember the times traveling to other places on the earth when they were actually different from each other, different architects, different languages, lifestyles, dress, values. There once was a time we could speak of cultural and political diversity. But now countries which have cultures, economies, and traditions as varied as say, Thailand, Kenya, Sweden, Canada, Bhutan, Bolivia, Russia, China, are all meant to adopt the same standards, tastes, values, and lifestyles, allow free entry to the same, few, giant, global corporations, to eat the same fast food, have the same hotel chains and clothing chains, to wear the same or similar kinds of jeans and shoes, to experience similar music, films, and T.V., to live in the same kind of urban landscapes with the same traffic jams and pollution, engage in the same kind of industrial agricultural and development schemes, carry the same personal, cultural, and spiritual values, ones that are compatible with the overall commodified direction of things.

Monoculture. Global monoculture. If you have traveled lately, you have surely noticed this, entirely visible before your eyes. Every place is becoming like every place else. Cultural diversity is going the way of biodiversity. Soon there may be little reason to go anywhere at all. That’s the essence of globalization. Everybody rows the boat together.

Diversity among nations or peoples is anathema to the model. It is globalization’s enemy. It’s far more efficient for corporate activity if all countries operate by exactly the same rules, no barriers. Most efficient of all would be if all cultures were identical in tastes, values, lifestyle, aspirations, etc. That’s what helps corporations operate efficiently on a global plane, duplicating production and marketing efforts and achieving efficiencies of scale that go with borderlessness and lack of rules. It’s like the old standard-gauge railway of another century and in today’s terms, computer compatibility. Well, so much for cultural diversity on the national plane in the era of globalization.

Of course, it’s the job of the Bretton Woods instruments – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, NAFTA, the FTAA – to be the enforcer for all this, and to serve as the governing mechanism of the whole shebang; to create the rules that enable corporations to have unlimited access to resources wherever they are, and also to have unlimited access to labor and markets, and so on; to be sure that all nations conform to those goals; that there are no blockages in the arteries of the process, no impediments within individual nations that might slow down the freedoms that giant corporations are being given.

In practice, most of these impediments to the WTO system are actually laws created by democratic governments that seek to protect nature, or public health, or local culture and values, or food safety, or worker rights, or small business, or domestic publishing, film, and other artistic enterprise, or laws that try to control which foreign investments can take place on their soil, and what investment rules must be followed, and who can buy and sell currencies, and at what speed, and under what conditions, or laws that require some semblance of local representation on foreign investment. All of these are normal activities of nation states and they are quickly being subverted by global trade agreements. All of them are subject to challenge if they can be deemed to inhibit free trade.

The WTO already has an impressive record for overturning national laws, especially in the environmental realm. The WTO has forced the U.S. to diminish its protections under the Clean Air Act governing auto emissions, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, especially its protection of dolphins, and the Endangered Species Act. We may soon expect challenges against both state and federal pesticide control laws, raw log export bans, eco-labeling and eco-certification, among other things. And as for the sovereignty treaties with Indian Nations, they will fare no better than the sovereignty of the national governments with whom they negotiate. If these treaties are deemed to slow down trade, which, for example, might apply to any treaty that allows natives to sustain any kind of economic preference to protect their fishing rights or hunting rights or whatever, even if it’s enforced by a treaty, the WTO can turn that to toast. There are already several cases where that’s underway. Of course, not only U.S. laws and values are threatened. Japan was found non-compliant with WTO for refusing fruit imports that might carry invasive species. The European Union was warned that it could not ban biotech beef products that contain biotech growth hormone. India’s been under tremendous pressure to conform its rules on intellectual property rights to comply with WTO rules that give giant food corporations like Monsanto the right to buy up seeds that have been developed by local farmers over centuries, patent them, and monopolize them forever. This has been a gigantic issue in India and maybe Vandana, I suppose, will talk about that. It’s brought millions of farmers onto the streets. And the WTO threatens the world’s multilateral environmental agreements on climate change; also on depletion and so on. I wont go into that for now.

Anyway, there are hundreds of examples but you get the point. These trade bodies, like the WTO, exist to provide global corporations insurance against any efforts of any nation or group to try and regulate them. That’s what they call free trade, but it’s really centrally controlled trade. Instead of controlling corporations, it controls governments and ensures global conformity and homogenization. But, these global bureaucracies operate by structures and rules that control the external landscape, the physical and economic landscape. I’m going to shift gears now and look at the internal landscape.

In any truly efficient social design, the job is also to make over the internal landscape, to remake human beings themselves: our minds, our ideas, our values, behaviors, desires, to create a monoculture of humans that is compatible with the redesigned external landscape. The idea is that our minds and values should match the technologies and systems around us, like that standard-gauge railway. The assignment for this internal homogenization process goes to the global telecommunication system. Television and advertising particularly, but we should also include film, much of radio, music, some education, and maybe the Internet. These are instruments that can speak directly into the brains of billions of people everywhere on earth, imprinting them with unified patterns of thought and unified sets of images and ideas, thus carrying homogenization and commodification directly inside the minds and feelings of a global population. In the end, what results, is a homogenized mental landscape that nicely matches the franchises, chain restaurants, freeways, suburbs, high-rises, clear-cut landscapes, and sped-up physical life of the external universe. Global television is, if course, the most efficient instrument for the job, for the cloning of global consciousness with a homogenized set of values. And I’m going to describe a little bit of the scale and reach of that instrument right now.

I’m going to start with some statistics from the United States and then go global. You may have heard some of these stats before, but none of us have thought about them enough. They should be repeated daily, like a mantra. In the U.S., 99 _% of all homes have television sets and 95% of the population watches at least some television every day. The average home has the TV going for more than 8 hours. The average adult viewer watches about 4 hours daily. The average child, age 8 – 13, watches about 4 hours. At age 2-4, they’re watching nearly 3 hours per day. These are amazing statistics. It means that roughly half the population is watching more than 4 hours per day. How is it even possible? In the U.S., people watch more television than they do anything else besides sleep or work or go to school. You have to say that television is the main thing Americans do. It has replaced community life, family life, culture. It has replaced the environment. It has become the environment that people interact with daily. It has become the culture, too, and I’m not talking so-called popular culture, which sounds somehow democratic. This is corporate culture and very few corporations at that, as we’ll see. Actually, about 100 corporations control about 85% of American broadcast television, and a whole lot of public television now, too. That’s not a very large number but the numbers get worse.

To have replaced direct contact with people and nature with simulated, edited, recreated versions, TV was the original virtual reality. Here’s another set of numbers: the average viewer in the U.S. ingests about 23,000 commercials per year. That’s 23,000 repetitions of exactly the same message. One may say toothpaste, one may say car, but they’re all saying, buy something, do it now, commodities are life, get with it. Globally, about 80% of the global population now has access to TV. Most industrial countries report viewing habits about the same as ours: Canada, Europe, Italy, Russia, Greece, Poland, and lots of countries in South America, the average person watches 3-4 hours daily, mostly with commercials. In Japan and Mexico, they watch a lot more than here.

Because of satellite television, even places on earth where there’s still no roads -tiny tropical islands, icy tundras of the north, mountains of the Himalayas – people are sitting in grass houses or in log cabins, night after night, watching a bunch of white people in “Dallas”, driving sleek cars, or standing around swimming pools drinking martinis, while plotting to do each other in. [Laughter] When they’re not seeing reruns of “Dallas”, they’re seeing “Baywatch”, the most popular show in the world. Life in Texas, California, and New York is made to seem the ultimate in life’s achievements, while local and indigenous culture, even where it’s still extremely vibrant and alive, which is true for a fair amount of the world, is made to seem backward, unworthy, not good.

The act of watching TV is quickly replacing other ways of life and other value systems. I’ve personally visited places and seen how kids are giving up local games, they’re refusing the local language, they’re beginning to hate the old people, and seen the story-telling process disappear, and so on. People everywhere are beginning to carry the same images that we do, and are starting to crave the same commodities that we crave, from cars to hair sprays to Barbie dolls to Palm Pilots. TV is turning everyone into everyone else. It’s cloning cultures to be like us. It’s cloning them to match their landscape. In Brave New World Aldous Huxley envisioned this commercial cloning process via drugs and genetic engineering. We have those too. But TV does it just as well because, increasingly, life in this country and everywhere, offers few decent alternatives.

Now, the next question: who is sending these images? Is somebody in control? Here’s the most shocking thing you’ll hear today, at least from me. Global television transmission, as well as most of film, radio, publishing, entertainment, and even Internet facilities, are owned and operated by an unbelievably small number of gigantic global corporations, all of whom are getting bigger daily, through mergers and acquisitions which are directly assisted by the rules of global bureaucracies that grease the path for such investment and takeover. Fewer than 10 global corporations now control roughly 75% of all global TV as well as publishing, film, radio, etc. I’m talking about Time-Warner/AOL, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Viacom, and a handful of others. Here’s a partial list of Time-Warner holdings, this is just partial because it would take a whole page: Time-Warner owns Warner Bros. Films and Television, CNN, TNT, TBS, Court TV, HBO, Cartoon Network, Cinemax, New Line Films, Time Magazine, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated. They own the Atlanta Hawks and the Atlanta Braves, the Hanna-Barbera Animation Studio as well as major shares in movie theater companies, hundreds of TV stations, satellites, cable systems and so on, in Asia, Europe, Africa and elsewhere. I strongly recommend a book by Robert McChesney called Rich Media, Poor Democracy. He’s kind of leading the way on these subjects.

These mega-media giants have been able to grow like this because global rules now make it virtually impossible to keep out foreign media investment over domestic media, leaving pathetically little chance for local values and cultures to be there. Amy Goodman is not broadcast by Time-Warner, I don’t think. Say it isn’t so. [Laughter] The net result is that this pathetic handful of media billionaires in New York, Hollywood, London, and one or two other places, are able to implant the brains of nearly the entire global population with a fantastically concentrated, non-stop dose of highly powerful imagery that tell people to hate where they live, to be ashamed of their own cultures, to worship McDonalds and Coca-Cola, and to believe that corporations are the answers to their problems.

Is this good for cultural diversity? I don’t think so. So why are we not out on the street in front of Disney or Time-Warner? Do we love these corporations? What’s the explanation? I’m asking myself that question really. If television represents the instrument of cloning for the global economy and is itself an example of a staggering degree of homogenization, the Internet is the nervous system for the whole thing. Now, I don’t have the time today to really make the case about this, unfortunately, so I’ll just assert something about global electronic networks that most of us love so much and hope I can get away with it.

We love to believe that the computer revolution, the Internet, and global telecommunications are empowering us as individuals and as organizers. And let me make perfectly clear they have been very helpful in building the anti-globalization movement. But, in ten years time, I think we’ll be saying, we’re not in control; that these very systems that we love so much are more centralizing than de-centralizing and that the people and institutions who are most empowered by them is not you and me and the IFG but global corporations. Without these global telecommunication systems it would be literally impossible for these global corporations to operate at anything like the speed or scale they do now. These instruments are able to help them keep their multi-armed enterprises in touch with each other 24 hours a day, 365 days, all running in sync. While we’re all using our Web pages and sending our emails, they’re able to move billions of dollars from a bank in London to a bank in Sarawak and a forest gets cut down the next day.

When billions of currency enters a local economy, and messes up the currency prices, in that market, it causes all kinds of crises. And they do all that instantaneously, at the touch of a key, and without any observance by any governing or regulatory power, and free. The global corporation today could not function without the kind of dominant power it now displays with these systems – they couldn’t function without these systems. While we’re sending our emails and expressing, sharing information, they’re expressing real power with these same instruments. There’s a difference. Here’s the homily that I ask you to remember: it’s not just who benefits from a technology, from this technology or any other, it’s who benefits most. It’s like President Bush’s tax plan. He says everybody benefits. And everybody does. But who benefits most? You get a $300 rebate, maybe. He and his friends get millions. And so it is with, I’m beginning to think, with the computer revolution. It’s not the small players that will finally benefit, it’s the big players.

I predict that we’ll some day conclude the global computer networks that we’ve celebrated for their democratic potential, that we call empowering, are helping facilitate the greatest centralization of unregulated, unaccountable, global corporate power ever. I think it’s crucial for democracy and for our own effectiveness that we think this through. I’m not saying to anybody don’t use computers. I’m just saying that this is something we need to address and organize around. But please, in the meanwhile, we should try not to call them empowering. Okay. Oh my God. [Laughter] I didn’t get to the main subject… Well, it’s always like that. [laughs]

I wanted to talk about export-oriented economies. Maybe Vandana will do that and commodification. Maybe what I’ll do is just take one minute and read one short thing, very short, from In the Absence of the Sacred because here I have poured out a whole lot of bad news and I’ve got a little section in this book called “Against Pessimism”. [Laughter] And I didn’t have time… I had upbeat stuff to talk about later but we’ll talk about it later, or else tomorrow.

“I’m going to conclude with comments about despair. I have begun to hear from people, even some who have been active campaigners for years that it may be too late to save the last wildernesses, to protect the oceans, to insure the survival of native cultures, to make the life-style changes that are required and so on. Worst of all, I’ve begun to hear such talk from young people. The situation was made worse, of course, by the U.S.-Iraq war” (this book came out shortly after that) “which dealt a metal-fisted blow to everyone’s psyche, revealing as it did such a deadly, out-of-date paradigm for human behavior.

I am personally sensitive to this issue since I’m sometimes accused of encouraging despair. Some people say that my television book created such a negative picture that they felt depressed and disempowered. They believed what I wrote but were disappointed that I offered no plan for action. Since this book also discusses what’s gone wrong I’ve been concerned about reactions.

Nonetheless, I was surprised that people reacted as they did, since I’m personally not pessimistic at all. My feeling has always been that describing the reality of a problem encourages activism, not withdrawal. In any case, that’s my wish. If I didn’t believe that the present negative trends could be reversed I probably wouldn’t have put so much effort into writing about them.

As my late partner in the advertising business, Howard Gossage, used to say, however, ‘It’s not enough to make people feel bad; you’ve also got to offer them something to do.’ And that’s really important and that’s why we also organize. As for being faced with overwhelming odds, Gossage used to say, ‘It maybe that everything we do will be futile, but we’ll do everything anyway.’

But surely the best examples, again, are native peoples. Here we are speaking of tens of millions of people around the world who, within only the last few centuries – and in some case the last few years – have seen their successful societies brutally assaulted by ugly, destructive forces. Some native societies have been obliterated. Some peoples have suffered separation from the source of their survival, wisdom, power, and identity: their land. Some have fallen from the pressure, compromised, moved to urban landscapes, or disappeared. But millions of natives, and tens of thousands here in the U.S., have gained strength in the face of all that. Their strength is fed by the knowledge that what they are doing is rooted in the earth and deserves to succeed. But aside from that, they fight their battles without really thought of failure. They do it on behalf of their values, as well as their children and grandchildren. They also do it – though perhaps I have not given it sufficient emphasis – with a humor and kindliness that is itself inspiring.

So in that context, I feel that talk of failure is short-sighted, unwise, indulgent, inaccurate, and most of all, useless.”

And so if I’ve contributed to that in any way, I apologize. Anyway, thank you very much.

[Applause]

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