CORPORATIONS ARE
GONNA GET YOUR MAMA
by Kevin Danaher
Excerpted from an intervew by Jerry Brown on the We the People
Radio Program
GLOBAL EXCHANGE is a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. We work all
over the world, but particularly in countries where the U.S. has a big impact
like Mexico, Haiti, Cuba. We do reality tours where we take people to the
country and have them meet the grassroots groups and deal with the issues.
We go to Cuba about 15 times a year. Our main role is to try to educate
people here in the United States. We want them to understand that when our
government-our big corporations-support anti-democratic elites in the Third
World, they can't allow democracy here either.
We work on issues about Latin America: the role of U.S. Foreign Policy and
global institutions like the World Bank. A lot of people in this country
don't care about what is going on in the Third World, but they care about
what is happening in their own communities. So I wrote a book about what
the globalization of the economy is doing to the quality of life in the
United States. The book is called Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama:
Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream.
Globalization is undermining democracy here, just as it's undermining democracy
abroad. It's destroying the environment. It's taking jobs away and degrading
the quality of what jobs are left. It's corrupting our children with commercialism
and the notion that what you are as a human being is based on what kind
of things you own, instead of your relations with other people. It's gotten
to a scale now where the inequality is so extreme and the political power
is so concentrated in such a small percentage of the world's population
that if we don't do something quick, we're going to see our democratic traditions
and our environment go right down the toilet.
One of the problems is an inherent growth dynamic. They are not going to
invest dime one in any community, here or abroad, unless they expect to
take out dime one, plus some kind of percentage. If you have, say, a billion
dollars, there are two different ways of investing it. You could build a
factory that's making something needed and that is not polluting; you could
build houses, schools, clinics, everything-a whole community-with that billion
dollars. Or you could take that billion dollars and, with one person at
a computer terminal on Wall Street, invest it in the global casino and probably
get a better return on it with less effort and less risk. If you build that
factory and a whole town, you've got to get permits, you've got to deal
with trade unions, and you could lose money. So capital is going increasingly
in the direction of the casino and away from the productive economy. What
do we get as a result? We get stagnation; we get unemployment; we get starvation-in
an economy that could be feeding and clothing and housing everybody.
Change is inevitable. It's just a question of who controls the change and
who defines the operating principles in the change. If the change is decided
by the community or by the global community democratically, we can say,
"Okay, cars are not good because they're putting out all this stuff
that's destroying the ozone layer and wrecking our planet, so we're going
to create solar mass transit vehicles with bike pedals in them, etc."
But as long as the dominant principle is to aggrandize material wealth for
a few big corporations, then the definition of sustainability means: "Can
you continue to get away with it?" A different definition of sustainability
would be: "Does your current economic activity compromise in any way,
however small, the economic viability of future generations?" By that
second definition all these corporations are outside the limits of the acceptable.
For example, we work with Nike workers in Indonesia who are trying to better
their conditions, but who got fired for demanding a raise to $2.20 a day-not
an hour-a day. It's not a livable wage for an individual, let alone a family.
Nike fired those people. Philip Knight, the head of Nike, is worth $5.2
billion. You can't spend $5 billion! He could have the biggest cocaine habit
in the world. He'd burn out his nose before he could use up that money,
so it's not about personal consumption. The only thing he can do with $5.2
billion is to control other human beings. And that's like slavery. It's
wrong.
Think about it! If they're paying people, say 50¢, to create a pair
of sneakers that will sell for $80, they've got a massive profit margin
there. They can give $20 million a year to Michael Jordan. They can go to
places like Kenya and buy off a runner who is going to run in the Olympics
for Kenya. You say, wait a minute, nobody even knows that runner in Kenya!
Well, the kids in Kenya do, and if that woman wins that race, her name will
become hot property, and they're on the inside track. They go to colleges,
football teams-Reebok does this too-and say, "Your entire team will
be outfitted by us, but you've got to guarantee that you will use only this
and no other product, plus you can't have anybody on your campus say anything
bad about our company." There have been some big battles up in Madison,
Wisconsin, over this issue: buying what should be public property.
At Global Exchange, whenever we publish a book or a pamphlet or any kind
of educational material, we always put stuff at the back saying, "Okay,
now that hopefully you are sufficiently angry and see this injustice and
want to do something about it, here are the organizations that are working
on it." So in the back of the book we point to different areas of activity
and include groups and their phone numbers.
An important struggle is reforming the international economic institutions.
One of the biggest, best networks I know of in the United States on the
left is called the Fifty Years Is Enough network. It's about 180 different
organizations: women's groups, environmental groups, all sorts of organizations
fighting the World Bank. We have an office in Washington with two full-time
staff people that acts as a clearing house of information on the World Bank.
All sorts of groups are working on pressuring the corporations directly,
getting shareholders to pressure the tobacco companies, Nike, Reebok, etc.
by owning shares. Global Exchange bought a share in Nike so we could go
to the shareholders' meeting. We held up a human rights report that we secured
by sending a delegation into Indonesia to interview the Nike workers. We
said, "Wait a minute, your PR department says one thing; the workers
who work for you in Indonesia say a different thing. Who should we believe?"
There are also boycotts. We list boycott newsletters and environmental groups
that are attacking the corporations.
Another arena is the minds of our children. We have commercial TV in the
schools. A group right here in Oakland, California, The Center for Commercial
Free Public Education, works against Channel One in the schools.
There are groups working on the fact that we have two tax systems in this
country, one for the mega-rich and one for the rest of us. I have data in
the book showing how the corporations have paid less and less and less as
their fair share of the tax load, and it leads to the bankrupting of government.
Globalization means they can move their capital offshore quicker. So what
do we see? The bankrupting of government at federal, state, and local levels.
If we don't want to see all our social services go down the tubes, we've
got to start forcing these corporations to carry their fair share of the
tax load.
There are two publications, Boycott Quarterly, based in Seattle, Washington,
and Coop Quarterly which publishes Boycott Action news, based in Washington
D.C. If you want to call me at (800) 497-1994 for Global Exchange, I can
give you a lot of information. There's a book called Shopping for a Better
World, which goes through all these companies and shows their record on
racism, environmental pollution, etc. One of the things we're working on
in the very early stages is to have stores that are like union shops so
that everything in that store, no matter what the product, was either produced
by union labor or was produced under conditions that were coop, where we
know the conditions of those workers, no matter what country it was made
in. A big trade network is working on developing labeling that will state
the conditions of the producers of the product-fair trade labeling.
There's no shortage of groups out there doing stuff. You've just got to
know what their phone number is and pick out what floats your boat-interest
in the tax issue, the environmental issue, whatever. We can't all do it
all. You pick what's most interesting to you, and there's a way for you
to get involved. To get Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama: Globalization
and the Downsizing of the American Dream or to ask about our reality tours,
call Global Exchange (800) 497-1994.
