An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, part 1
We believe that corporate leadership is greedy, but what if it is simply incompetent?
I admire Arundhati Roy, but I worry that we make the USA seem far more powerful than it actually is, if we credit it with those victories that clearly arose from the weaknesses of other countries.
This essay is from 2004 and perhaps it reflects the high regard for the USA's power that even those on the Left had regarding the USA at that time.
What surprises me now is how much everything seems reversed. Almost everywhere that Roy sees strength, I see weakness. Maybe there is the question of how cynical any of us should be.
Why is there such a vast difference between China and India, especially the way those on the Left talk about those two countries? Roy suggests that the USA has the power to make India do everything that the USA wants. But is that because the USA is strong, or because India is weak? The USA clearly can't make China do anything. Why isn't India as strong as China?
Here is the thing: if you watch a bunch of incompetents fail at something, and you consider them geniuses who have succeeded at something, then you are not being rational, and in fact, you are pursuing a line of thought that is basically a kind of conspiracy theory, granting god like powers of foresight and power to individuals who are clearly showing themselves to be imbeciles.
Roy correctly points out that the USA government typically does whatever its corporations want it to. Is that a sign of strength or weakness? If we see an animal dying because it has so many parasites, do we praise the great strength of the animal? Or do we feel sad to watch it die?
Roy seems to feel that the USA wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a sign of USA strength, used for immoral purposes. But is it really a sign of strength to fight a war for many years, lose endless money, lose thousands of soldiers, and then retreat in dismay?
I've many friends on the Left who tend to think that the major corporations are run by people who are greedy but also infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely competent. My friends use phrases like "Follow the money" and "They did it for money" which sounds knowing and cynical and world-wise but I think is just nonsense, given the very high levels of incompetence I've met at every level of corporations.
Seriously, if anyone ever thinks the average business person is rational but greedy, I'd have to ask, have you ever met a business person? In my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" I document two cases where an entrepreneur could have made big money but instead they engaged in self-sabotage and ruined their business. Had they simply been greedy but rational then we all could have made some money and perhaps had some fun while doing it, while providing some service to the public that customers actually wanted. But I've been working with startups for 22 years now and I know for a fact that entrepreneurs who are greedy but rational are rare. Incompetence is everywhere. People see this in their daily lives and yet they always seem to think they are encountering an exception, rather than the general rule.
Everywhere that Roy suggests that the corporations were rationally pursuing greedy objectives, I'd suggest we consider the possibility that the leadership was simply incompetent. And that goes for the national leadership as well.
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire
By Arundhati Roy
©2004 by Arundhati Roy
Page 87-93
Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents - corrupt local elites who service empire. We all know the sordid story on Enron in India. The then Maharashtra government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty percent of India’s entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about five hundred million people!
Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn’t need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.
The tradition of “turkey pardoning” in the United States is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the U.S. president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the fifty million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children, and the press. (Soon they’ll even speak English!)
That’s how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they’re for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO - so who can accuse those organizations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There’s a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?
As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New Genocide in this new ero of economic interdependence can be facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death with out actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997and 1998 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Irq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein’s best efforts by claiming more than half a million children’s lives.
In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is generally considered antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity. Why else would it be that the United States taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than it taxes a garment made in the United Kingdom? Why else would it be that countries that grow ninety percent of the world’s cocoa bean produce only five percent of the world’s chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?
For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancún was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancún taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancún we learned the importance of globalizing resistance.
No individual nation can stand up to the project of corporate globalization on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in the opposition, when they seize power and become heads of state, they become powerless on the global stage. I’m thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum (WSF) last year. This year he’s busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits, and purging radicals from the Workers’ Party. I’m thinking also of ex-president of South Africa Nelson Mandela. He instituted a program of privatization and structural adjustment, leaving millions of people homeless, jobless, and without water or electricity.