Make our small space a better place to live

Make our small space a better place to live

Yanuar Nugroho, Researcher & General Secretary, Uni Sosial Demokrat,
Jakarta, yanuar-n@unisosdem.org

Welcome to the world of the multinational corporation (MNC).
This is the world where a cultural and economic tsunami has been
roaring across the globe and replacing the spectacular diversity
of human society with a Westernized version of the good life.

Whether you walk the streets of Paris, New York, Beijing, New
Delhi, Canberra, Singapore or even here in Jakarta or Denpasar,
the advancement of global economics practiced by most MNCs has
introduced a level of commercial culture which is being
McDonald's-ized, in a distinctly homogeneous way.

Young people drink the same soft drinks and smoke the same
cigarettes, wear identical brands of clothes and shoes, play the
same computer games, which run on the same system and platform,
watch the same Hollywood films and listen to the same Western pop
music. The fast-food restaurants persuade everybody to buy the
same high carbohydrate food with less compromises for local
tastes. The gleaming, air-conditioned shopping malls and hotels
are interchangeable. Karl Marx would call this situation "crude
cash nexus", where familial, communal and environmental bonds are
disintegrating as social relationships are "commodified" and
reduced.

In this regard, the questions about human rights and
sustainable development are relevant to be addressed; where will
all these global advancements -- with all its consequences --
take us?

Propelled by the policies of privatization, deregulation and
trade liberalization and powered by the vast innovations in
communication and information technology over the past twenty
years, a power shift seems to have taken place. Examine carefully
these following facts.

The 100 largest MNCs now control about 20 percent of global
foreign assets; 51 of the 100 biggest economies in the world are
now corporations, only 49 are nation states (Anderson & Cavanagh,
1999). The sales of General Motors and Ford is greater than the
gross domestic product of the whole sub-Saharan Africa. The
assets of IBM, British Petroleum and General Electric surpass the
budgets of most small nations. Wal-Mart earns higher revenues
than most central and eastern European states.

Moreover, the size of corporations is increasing. Early this
millennium, communications "goliath" Vodafone merged with
Mannesmann, giant pharmaceutical company Smith Kline Beecham with
Glaxo Wellcome and the largest Internet service provider America
Online (AOL) with media company Time Warner in which each merger
seems bigger than the one before. And governments rarely stand in
the way.

Here we are. All the goods we buy or use -- fuel, medicine,
water, transport, health and education, even the computer
software and the crops growing in the fields in our surroundings
-- are increasingly controlled by corporations which may, at
their whims, choose to nurture, support or choke us.

It is clear that powerful businesses are now in the driver's
seat, where instead of governments, corporations determine the
rules of the game and let the former become referees, enforcing
rules decided upon by the companies.

Since 1950 global economic output has soared from US$3.8
trillion to US$18.9 trillion, a five-fold increase. What does it
mean? We have consumed more of the world's natural capital in
this brief period than during the entire history of humankind.

According to World Bank (2001), in 1960, GDP in the richest 20
countries was 18 times that of the poorest countries. By 1995,
this gap had widened to 37 times. About 12 economies in Asia and
Latin America account for 70 percent of exports from the
developing world and absorb almost 80 percent of investment flows
to the developing world and receive more than 90 percent of the
portfolio investment flows to the developing world.

However, Sub Saharan Africa, West, Central and South Asia and
many economies in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific have been
left out of the global economy and are not favored by
international investors. Clearly, free trade-centered
globalization distribution of benefits and costs are unequal.

Most Northern countries and many urban regions in the South
already consume more than their fair share -- they depend on
trade, which means using someone else's natural resources, or on
exhausting their own natural capital. Such regions run an
unaccountable ecological deficit. Their population is either
appropriating carrying capacity from elsewhere or from future
generations. The losers are the people of the South -- as well as
the global environment.

This is the world of the silent take over, says Noreena Hertz,
where the world is at the dawn of the new millennium where
governments' hands are tied and we are increasingly dependent on
corporations. Giant private companies have become the driving
force behind economic globalization, wielding more power than
many nation states.

Business values of efficiency, calculability, predictability,
control to non-human technology and competition at all costs now
dominate the debate on social policy, the public interest and the
role of government. The tendency to monopolize, combined with
decreasing rates of profit drives and structures corporate
decision-making -- without regard for the social, environmental
or economic consequences of those decisions.

What can be clearly seen here is the fact that the power is no
longer centralized in the governments' or state's sphere of power
because business power has emerged to become much stronger. It is
obvious that the consequence of talking about the dark side of
neo-liberalism is that we cannot but also touch upon the issue of
business power.

When people bring to mind democracy or power control, what
stays in mind is usually the parliamentary character, in the form
of many representative bodies (parliaments, unions, etc) and any
discussion on this issue is likely to hit a wall, for indeed we
are all captured by the traditional conception of "democracy"
which only considers the state's power. We have, certainly, to go
beyond this conception.

Welcome to Bali, welcome to the PrepCom IV and IPF meetings.
Welcome to the real challenge: As corporations in this
globalization euphoria promote and sell their dreams to consumers
of wealth and glamor, local cultures around the world are eroded,
people are killed and the environment is destroyed.

This is the time we, hand-in-hand, have to speak out with our
concerns -- the weak have to be empowered, the losers have to be
treated, and the destroyed environment has to be recovered.
Together, we sustain our hopes for a better world.