From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: CHOMSKY -- "Vile Maxim of the Masters" (II)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 02:52:05 GMT

    The senior economist at the Environment Department of the World
    Bank, Herman Daly, points out that the vast and growing supply of
    underemployed people in the Third World will "keep the supply of
    labor very large, and will make it impossible for wages worldwide
    to be bid up very much." The effect will be huge profits and
    elimination of high wages and social gains, including laws against
    child labor, limits on working hours, and protection of the
    environment.  "Anything that raises costs [is] going to tend to be
    competed down to the lowest common denominator in free
    international trade" -- precisely the intended outcome.
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    "The media, while climbing aboard the "drug war" bandwagon with
    appropriate enthusiasm and fanfare, obliged the Administration
    further by completely suppressing the major drug story of the day.
    There were no headlines reading "US Demands to be World's Leading
    Narcotrafficker," or even a line in the back pages.
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The following article by Noam Chomsky appeared in: 
     Z Magazine, July-August 1992 
and is reprinted here with the magazine's permission. 
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Year 501: World Orders Old and New: Part II (PART 3 OF 8; 8.5KB) 
================================================================ 

Perhaps the most dramatic current examples of the cynical pursuit 
of the "vile maxim" in international trade are the US government 
and GATT actions to force Third World countries to accept US 
exports and advertising for lethal narcotics -- the world 
champion being tobacco, by a huge margin.  The Bush 
Administration launched its hypocritical "drug war" (timed nicely 
to produce the proper mood for the invasion of Panama) 
simultaneously with steps to force Third World countries to 
import this leading killer, with advertising aimed at new 
markets, women and children particularly.  GATT backed these 
murderous efforts.  The media, while climbing aboard the "drug 
war" bandwagon with appropriate enthusiasm and fanfare, obliged 
the Administration further by completely suppressing the major 
drug story of the day. There were no headlines reading "US 
Demands to be World's Leading Narcotrafficker," or even a line in 
the back pages.  The discipline was impressive. 

With Eastern Europe returning to its approved Third World status, 
drug pushers are leading the way in investment. "Cigarette makers 
flock to E. Europe," an upbeat front-page story is headlined in 
the _Boston Globe_: "While many American companies have been 
criticized for not being aggressive in investing in Eastern 
Europe, American cigarette companies have been trail-blazers." 
Doubtless revelling in the new-found applause for aggressively 
responding to US government efforts to encourage investment in 
Eastern Europe, a tobacco executive explains: "There is little 
awareness of health and environmental problems in Hungary.  We 
have about 10 years of an open playing field." We have about ten 
years of profits, before the PC left fascists impose conditions 
on lucrative mass murder. "Of 30 developed countries," the news 
report reads, "life expectancy is shortest in Eastern Europe." 
Guided by the "vile maxim," US corporations will try to improve 
the statistics further, "trail-blazers for capitalism," free from 
criticism. 

Note that Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, the former Yugoslavia, etc., 
are "developed countries," to be compared with Western Europe so 
as to demonstrate the evils of Communism -- but not with Brazil, 
Guatemala, the Philippines, and other quasi-colonial domains that 
they resembled before they separated from the traditional Third 
World.  That practice is an ineradicable feature of contemporary 
ideological fanaticism.  Honesty on this crucial issue is 
strictly _verboten_. <<<NB: On the "drug war" and the display of 
media servility, see _Deterring Democracy_, chap. 4; chap. 7, 
on the unspeakable truths about meaningful comparative study. 
Jonathan Kaufman, _BG_, May 26, 1992.>>> 

In the same issue of the _Boston Globe_, another story 
illustrates how supple an instrument economic doctrine can be. 
It celebrates the achievements of New Hampshire in dealing with 
its fiscal problems.  The method was to encourage a successful 
enterprise that has become "the largest retail volume outlet for 
wine and liquor in the world, according to state officials," with 
$62 million in profits from sales of over $200 million in 1991, a 
$5 million increase in profit in a year.  The increase is 
attributed in part to doubling of the advertising budget for 
alcohol, which ranks just below tobacco as a killer.  The 
enterprise is a state monopoly.  Hence its profits allow the most 
conservative state in the union to keep to the free market 
doctrines its leaders revere and to avoid taxes that would rob 
the wealthy to enrich welfare mothers.  Another free market 
triumph, unnoticed. <<<NB: Bob Hohler, _BG_, May 26, 1992.>>> 

In theory, free trade arrangements should lower wages in 
high-wage countries and raise them in the poorer areas to which 
capital shifts, increasing global equity.  But in prevailing 
conditions, a different outcome is likely.  The senior economist 
at the Environment Department of the World Bank, Herman Daly, 
points out that the vast and growing supply of underemployed 
people in the Third World will "keep the supply of labor very 
large, and will make it impossible for wages worldwide to be bid 
up very much." The effect will be huge profits and elimination of 
high wages and social gains, including laws against child labor, 
limits on working hours, and protection of the environment. 
"Anything that raises costs [is] going to tend to be competed 
down to the lowest common denominator in free international 
trade" -- precisely the intended outcome. <<<NB: "Interview," 
_Multinational Monitor_, May 1992.>>> 

Under prevailing conditions of power and control, free trade will 
tend to drive the level of existence to the lowest grade for 
people who are spectators, not participants in the decisions that 
affect their lives. 

Overall, the 1980s accelerated a global rift between a small 
sector enjoying great privilege, and a growing mass of people 
suffering deprivation and misery.  Though superfluous for wealth 
production or consumption, the only human functions recognized in 
the dominant institutions and their ideology, they must be dealt 
with somehow.  Current social policy in the US is to coop them up 
in urban centers where they can prey upon one another; or to lock 
them in jail, often for such crimes as possession of hard drugs, 
another useful concomitant of the drug war.  The latter policies 
have the further merit of providing a Keynesian stimulation to 
the economy through booming prison construction and employment 
for security guards, the fastest-growing white collar profession. 

There have always been two classes of people: the rulers with 
their agents, and the beasts of burden who serve them or are 
superfluous for their needs.  The divide, familiar to the point 
of triviality, only becomes more stark and clear in an era of 
global corporate mercantilism, free movement of capital, and 
dissolution of unions and other democratic structures that might 
interfere with state capitalist autocracy, guided by its "vile 
maxim." 

The maxim "All for themselves, and nothing for other people" 
requires a slight amendment: "all for themselves _now_." The 
longer term is as irrelevant as other people.  Thus in a lead 
news story, the _Wall Street Journal_ hails Bush's 
"extraordinary coup" in compelling the entire world to abandon 
plans for a meaningful agreement on greenhouse gases at the June 
Rio conference (the official reason for the US demand for empty 
verbiage is that a treaty would impede "growth" -- like "jobs," a 
code word meaning "profits").  Someone more clever than I could 
pen a fine story or cartoon on the final edition of the 
_Journal_, going to press with a passionate editorial 
demonstrating that global warning is a left-wing fraud just as 
the rising sea level engulfs the corporate 
headquarters. <<<NB: Rose Gutfeld, _WSJ_, May 27, 1992.>>> 

The internationalization of capital that has accelerated since 
1971 gives a somewhat new character to competition among national 
states.  To cite one indication, while the US share in world 
manufactured exports declined 3.5% from 1966 to 1984, the share 
of U.S.-based TNCs slightly increased.  And international trade 
patterns yield a very different picture if imports from overseas 
subsidiaries are counted as domestic production.  Commercial 
products reflect these tendencies; to take one example, almost a 
third of the market price of a GM Pontiac Le Mans goes to 
producers in South Korea, over a sixth to Japan, about the same 
to a combination of Germany, Singapore, Britain, Barbados and 
others.  As a geographical entity, the country and most of its 
population may decline; the corporate empires are playing a 
different game.  With somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of world 
trade already conducted within North-based TNCs, these are 
factors of growing importance as we look towards Year 
501. <<<NB: Arthur MacEwan, _Socialist Review_, July-Dec. 1991; 
Watkins, _op. cit._, 2, 21.>>> 

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