[discuss-dan] a corporate globe?

[Mark Cohen <buildingbridges@mindspring.com>]

Published on Wednesday, January 31, 2001 in the Toronto Star 
Corporate Leaders Fear Free Ideas 
by Richard Gwyn 
  
`WE WERE not born to live in a corporate globe, yet that is the world we are
moving towards.'' - Eric Kierans, former communications minister, in his
soon-to-be-published memoir, Remembering. 

Each year at this time, every international corporate leader who is anybody,
as well as attendant politicians and public officials and a few academics
and journalists, gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
to ponder such topics as Whither Humankind and How To Make More Bucks. 

This year's gathering is as elegant, expensive, sedate, high-toned, and as
smug, as all the previous ones. Except in one respect. 

Circling the Congress Centre in Davos there are now a series of high steel
barricades. These are topped by barbed wire. At all the entrances, more than
300 police stand on guard, some carrying a rifle and rubber bullets, while
others are equipped with full riot gear including water cannon. In reserve
behind them there are 600 soldiers. 

There is something almost engagingly ridiculous in the spectacle of
corporate leaders needing to be protected - by the state, in a neat irony -
against a few demonstrators saying rude things about how it might be better
if the world's income gaps weren't so obscenely wide and getting ever wider
or brandishing placards protesting genetically modified foods. 

There is also something ridiculous, but this time in a very serious sense,
in the contrast between the way all those corporate leaders will spend a
week telling each other, and the world, about the importance of free markets
and free trade and, just about, freedom from taxes, and their own fear of
free ideas. 

This admission by corporate leaders of their fearfulness in engaging in
debate with those who don't agree with them represents, I believe, the
single most significant achievement - unintended of course, and so all the
more revealing - of all these annual Davos conclaves of recent years. 

It demonstrates that the anti-globalization movement - more precisely, the
anti-corporate globalization movement - which first attracted widespread
attention with the so-called Battle of Seattle a year ago, has reached the
level where it can put the globalists on the defensive. 

Beside the steel barriers and gun-toting police, there were several telling
signs of defensiveness at this year's Davos meeting. The title for the
gathering was ``Sustaining Growth and Bridging the Divide.'' This was paying
the anti-globalists the tribute of hypocrisy, since corporate leaders are
not in the least interested in ``Bridging the Divide'' - that is, in
narrowing the income and power gaps between themselves and everyone else. 

As well, the corporate types got United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan
to come among them and say all the right things about how, ``For far too
many people in the world, greater openness looms as a threat'' and how, in
order to reassure the public, corporate leaders should commit themselves to
a Global Compact expressing just how much they, too, were worried - were
really, really worried - about things like labour standards and the
environment. 

In his forthcoming memoir, Kierans makes as good a case as anyone has done
why it should be that the globalists now find themselves on the defensive. 

His core point that human beings were ``not born to live in a corporate
world'' is dead on. Economics, profits, incomes, money all matter immensely,
of course. But they seem to be becoming the totality of life itself, or the
only things that matter with everything else marginal, disposable, forgettable. 

Kierans is also dead on when he writes that at some point, ``The controls of
the civil state will no longer apply.'' This is to say that governments, or
those we elect to express our will, will become marginal and disposable and
forgettable. 

More accurately, perhaps, governments and corporations will become a single,
indistinguishable whole. It can't be a coincidence that at a time when
corporations have never been more powerful (and wealthier, and larger) that
the most pro-business administration in modern U.S. political history, that
of George W. Bush, should just have taken power. And this happened following
an election that was both the most money-dominated and the least democratic
(the winner actually lost the election) in U.S. history. 

And yet the anti-globalists have so forced corporate leaders onto the
defensive that they can now only meet inside the equivalent of a gated
community where no one who doesn't think like them is allowed in to disturb
their peace. 

Mutely, unintentionally, those corporate leaders are admitting that they,
too, recognize that human beings were not born just to live in a corporate
globe. 
Copyright 2001 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited 

 


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