Jihad vs. McWorld (50 page)

25.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “To Tame Savage Capitalism,”
The New York Times
, November 28, 1993, p. E
II
.

26.
The Czech Republic boasts that its velvet revolution transformed “a totalitarian regime [in]to a democratic system and a profit-based economy,” but who exactly will profit remains to be seen. Cited from a Czech Republic advertising supplement in
The New York Times
(January 7, 1994) just prior to President Clinton’s meeting with President Havel in Prague in January 1994.

27.
Robert McIntyre, “Why Communism Is Rising from the Ash Heap,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, June 20–26, 1994, p. 24.

28.
Brzezinski is properly exercised by what he calls our modern world’s “permissive cornucopia,” though unlike Allan Bloom, he spends more time sounding the tocsin than examining the causes of the threat. His vague remedy is a Freudian reimposition of “self-restraint” that will curb a Western world as “out of control” in its own way as the Third World it faces.

29.
IRAN FIGHTS NEW FOE: WESTERN TELEVISION
and
FOR CLERICS, SATELLITES CARRYING MTV ARE DEADLIER THAN GUNS
, scream
Wall Street Journal
headlines;
The Wall Street Journal
, August 8, 1994, above an article by Peter Waldman citing an Iranian cleric who complains that satellite dishes spread “the family-devastating diseases of the West,” p. A 10.

30.
Jon Pareles, “Striving to Become Rock’s Next Seattle,”
The New York Times
, July 17, 1994, Section 2, p.
I
.

31.
Of McDonald’s nearly 15,000 restaurants, nearly forty-five hundred, or one-third, are abroad; there are over one thousand in Japan alone. Gary Hoover,
Hoover’s Handbook of American Business
(Austin: Reference Press, 1994), pp. 746–747.

32.
Jack Lang, the culture minister of the socialist government deposed in 1993, was especially ambivalent, personally leading the campaign on “franglais” and its mangling of authentic French and calling for legislation to protect the French language (passed under the successor conservative government) as well as the fight to protect the French film industry against Hollywood in the GATT round, yet also proclaiming his affection for Americans and their culture.

33.
National Public Radio,
All Things Considered
, December 2, 1993, from the broadcast transcription.

34.
Slavenka Drakulic, “Love Story: A True Tale from Sarajevo,”
The New Republic
, October 26, 1993, pp. 14–16.

35.
There is also a Michael Jackson babushka that gradually turns into a panther and a chimpanzee.

  1.
He adds: “We decided not to tailor products to any marketplace, but to treat all marketplaces the same.” Cited in Louis Uchitelle, “Gillette’s World View: One Blade Fits All,”
The New York Times
, January 3, 1994, p. C 3.

  2.
The population of Greece is about 10 million, of Ireland 3.5, and of Switzerland 6.5 million. McDonald’s currently has nearly 15,000 restaurants in over seventy countries, and earns 45 percent of its profits outside the United States. Andrew E. Serwer, “McDonald’s Conquers the World,”
Fortune
, October 17, 1994, pp. 101–116.

  3.
GM employed 775,000 in 1989, down from a high of 876,000 in 1986. Its workforce today is still in the 700,000 range even after the cost-cutting job cutbacks of recent years.

  4.
Government expenditures from the latest available figures (1985–88) were, for Senegal, $686 million, for Uganda, $327 million, for Bolivia $619 million, and for Iceland $867 million, for a total of 2.5 billion.
The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics
(New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 136. Domino’s figures are from Gary Hoover,
Hoover’s Handbook of American Business
(Austin: Reference Press, 1994), p. 243. Portugal’s government expenditures were $17.4 billion and Indonesia’s were $17.2 billion.

  5.
For 1985–88, Argentina’s spending averaged $27.5 billion;
Vital World Statistics
, p. 137.

  6.
Reebok, 1992 Annual Report. With international headquarters in Bolton, England, selling shoes manufactured in six Asian countries including Thailand, China, and the Philippines and sold in 140 countries around the globe, this formerly British company is only as American as its U.S. shoe sales make it in any given year (just $1.3 billion of over $3 billion in global sales in 1992).

  7.
The engine and drive trains are still Japanese. The same trends are visible throughout the industry: in 1993, the Japanese car-maker Honda reported that where its first-generation 1977 model Accord (made in Marysville, Ohio) had no American parts, the 1982 model already was 50 percent American while the new fifth-generation Accord currently in production will have more than 80 percent American parts. Doron P. Levin, “Honda Star Gets Another Sequel,”
The New York Times
, August 27, 1993, p. D 1.

  8.
James Bennet, “Want a U.S. Car? Read the Label,”
The New York Times
, September 18, 1994, p. E 6. In its American advertising campaign, Mitsubishi boasts that its cars are “made in America,” and sold through “a full-fledged American corporation—Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America, Inc.,” and that it employs thirty-seven hundred Americans at its U.S. Diamond-Star plant—all part of its “tradition of Americanization”!

  9.
Robert Reich points out that when an American buys a $20,000 Pontiac Le Mans from General Motors, $6,000 goes to South Korea for labor and assembly operations; $3,500 to Japan for engine and transaxle; $1,500 to Germany for design engineering; $800 to Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan for small parts; and $600 to Britain, Ireland, and Barbados for services. This leaves just $8,000 for GM stockholders and the American lawyers, insurance, and health services involved. See Robert Reich,
Work of Nations
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 113–114.
  Other industries have had the same experience: Boeing, perhaps the American corporation of which Americans are proudest, is currently planning production of its 777 Twinjet with which it aspires to dominate the mid-sized aircraft market into the twenty-first century. Yet 20 percent of the aircraft will be built by Japanese firms in Japan (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, and Fuji Heavy Industries), engines will come from Rolls-Royce (as well as two American companies), wing flaps are to be manufactured
by Alenia in Italy, Brazil’s Embraer will make the fin and wingtip assemblies, while literally hundreds of other companies in Korea, Singapore, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere will be involved in smaller ways. Harvey Elliot, “Flying Foreign,”
The Economist: The World in 1993
, special edition of
The Economist
, London, December 25, 1993/January 7, 1994, pp. 6–7.

10.
Asahi Glass of Japan owns 49 percent of the Corning subsidiary, and Nippon Electric Glass owns Owens-Illinois; these are the two American firms that produce the majority of television tubes. Keith Bradsher, “In Twist, Protectionism Used to Sell Trade Pact,”
The New York Times
, November 7, 1993, Section
I
, p. 26.

11.
More parochially, however, those who prophesied doom for the American car industry in the 1970s and 1980s—closely tracked by historians like Paul Kennedy anticipating the decline of the United States as an economic power—have had to eat their words. Detroit is back and Japan is now the complacent “leader” being compelled to play catch-up. See Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White,
Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

12.
The place of the car in America has been recently monumentalized in Alliance, Nebraska, where a replica of Stonehenge executed in junked cars and called “Carhenge” is now drawing tourists; Carhenge postcards are available at the local McDonald’s. See “Fossil Fuels,” in
U. Magazine
, September 1994.

13.
“Mondialisation et ségrégations,”
Le Monde diplomatique: Les frontières de l’économie globale
, May 1993, p. 7.

14.
Robert Kuttner, “Brave New Corporate ‘Workplace of the Future,’”
The Berkshire Eagle
, August 1, 1993, Section E, p.
I
. Kuttner was reporting on an Aspen Institute Conference on “Tomorrow’s Corporation.”
  In
Liberation Management
, an example of new age corporate utopianism, Tom Peters writes “the definition of every product and service is changing. Going soft, softer, softest. Going fickle, ephemeral, fashion[A]n explosion of new competitors … and the everpresent new technologies are leading the way.” Tom Peters,
Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nano-second Nineties
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 6.

15.
William Gibson, with his trilogy of works in the early eighties
(Neuromancer, Count Zero
, and
Mona Lisa Overdrive)
, introduced the notion of cyberspace (from Norbert Wiener’s classic study of interactive communications technology and cybernetics in the late forties) into general parlance. Technically, the term refers to the invisible electronic information space between the computer keyboard (input) and the computer screen (output).
The New York Times
devoted nearly an entire issue of its
Book Review
to computer-generated books and the literary culture of cyberspace in 1994, and since then it has reviewed CD-ROM “books” as well.

16.
Julie Edelson Halpert, “Technology: One Car, Worldwide, with Strings Pulled from Michigan,”
The New York Times
, August 29, 1993, Section 3, p. F 7.

17.
IBM plans on a massive restructuring that will liquidate over sixty thousand jobs; although it will cost nearly $9 billion, it is supposed to save over $4 billion a year in the long run. IBM was hemorrhaging (a second-quarter 1993 loss of $40 million on revenues of 15.5 billion), but Procter & Gamble was perfectly healthy when roughly at the same time in the summer of 1993 it announced the elimination of thirteen thousand jobs or 12 percent of its workforce (a third of them in the United States). Other corporations including General Electric, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, the Chubb Group, Eastman Kodak, and Raytheon have made job elimination a key to future competitiveness. An end to maritime subsidies in 1997, planned by the Clinton administration, will if it occurs mean the loss of twenty thousand maritime jobs. Don Phillips, “Pulling the Plug on American-Flag Ships,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, May 24–30, 1993, p. 33.

18.
Iraq acquired its capacity from countries such as the United States, Germany, France, Britain, and Saudi Arabia, all of which presumably had a vital national interest in preventing nuclear proliferation. Robert J. Samuelson, “The Global Village Revisited,” in
Vital World Statistics
, p. 4.

19.
West Germany with 102 deals was the chief culprit, but the U.S., Switzerland, and Britain had nearly two dozen deals each, while Brazil, Italy, Austria, France, and Japan had five to fourteen deals each. Douglas Jehl, “The World: Who Armed Iraq? Answers the West Didn’t Want to Hear,”
The New York Times
, July 18, 1993, p. E 5. However, it is not the countries but the firms nominally flying country flags that are doing business; and as Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman has observed, “One major foreign order is incentive enough for some of these firms to turn a blind eye to the law,” as well as, one surmises, to the conflicting security interests of their “mother” nations. Ibid.

20.
See Uchitelle, “Gillette’s World View.”

21.
Lester Brown et al., eds.,
Vital Signs 1993: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
(Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1993), pp. 74–75.

22.
Andrew Pollack, “Honda Set to Increase U.S. Output,”
The New York Times
, September 20, 1993, p. D
I
.

23.
Andrew Pollack, “Today’s Corporate Game Plans Know No Boundaries: Mabuchi Motors; an Un-Japanese Model for Japan,”
The New York Times
, January 3, 1994, p. C
I
.

  1.
Outside of the OECD nations and South Korea (whose Samsung Group is number 18 in the world), there are only a tiny handful of other nations with top 500 corporations on the list, and the 17 corporations in question in those countries (as ranked in 1992) are almost all petroleum companies like Venezuela’s PDVSA (at number 56), Mexico’s PEMEX (at number 57), Indian Oil (at number 188), and Malaysia’s Petronas (at number 226); or mining outfits, which comprise the only sub-Saharan companies on the
list—a couple of South African companies and Zambia’s Industrial & Mining (the only black African company on the list at number 457).
Fortune
, July 26, 1993, pp. 191–204.

  2.
Starting in 1950, fertilizer rather than land has increasingly been the indispensable factor in feeding the world’s burgeoning population. While per capita grainland shrank as population grew, per capita use of fertilizer has grown steadily, staying well ahead of population growth until just a few years ago. These trends have favored advanced agricultural economies and disadvantaged those economies in the nations where population was growing.
  The role of agriculture in the overall economy and the number of workers in the agrarian sector are not correlated with gross agricultural output. The OECD devotes less than 3 percent of its GNP to agriculture yet manages to produce 28 percent of the world’s cereals.
The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics
(New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 56.
  American farms employ less than 2.5 percent of the workforce, but America remained in 1988 the world’s number two grain producer (behind China with nearly 70 percent of its labor force in agriculture), the number two fruit producer (behind Brazil with a quarter of its labor force in agriculture), and number four vegetable producer (behind China, India, and the former USSR).
Vital World Statistics
, ibid., pp. 62–66. The key statistic here is “agricultural efficiency, as measured by fertilizer and tractor use”: ibid., pp. 58–59; and
Vital Signs 1993: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
, (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1993), p. 19.