For, even at its optimum performance level, the long-term benefits go only to a tiny minority of people who sit at the hub of the process and to a slightly larger minority that can retain an economic connection to it, while the rest of humanity is left groping for fewer jobs and less land, living in violent societies on a ravaged planet. The only boats that will be lifted are those of the owners and managers of the process, the rest of us will be on the beach, facing the rising tide. In the area of environment, for example, we read of changes in global climate and occasionally of their long-term consequences, such as the melting polar ice caps, the expected staggering impacts to agriculture and food supply, or the destruction of habitat. We read too of the ozone layer depletion, the pollution of the oceans, or the wars over resources such as oil and, perhaps soon, water. But few of these matters are linked directly to the imperatives of global economic expansion, the increase of global transport, the overuse of raw materials, or the commodity intensive lifestyle that corporations are selling worldwide via the culturally homogenizing technology of television and its parent, advertising.
Obfuscation is the net result.
Even these stories, however, rarely mentioned the crucial point that the new corporate restructuring is directly hooked to the imperatives of globalization and that it is happening all over the world. Obfuscation yet again. In the autumn of 1995, the international press carried reports on the paralyzing strike by hundreds of thousands of French railway and other public service workers. Most reports characterized the workers as trying to protect their privileges, benefits and jobs against government cutbacks. The media also report daily about the immigration crises, about masses of people trying to cross borders in search of jobs, only to be greeted by xenophobia, violence, and demagoguery in high places.