Linked with Homogenization of Global Consciousness. And with Jerry Mander on May 26, 2007.
He says: « The machine is adapted for humans and humans are adapted to the machine. It is a human-machine merger ».
He says: « Corporations live in a kind of nether world where they have all the rights and protection accorded individuals by our laws. For example, you can’t regulate corporate speech in any way, because they’ve successfully become « fictional persons » and therefore have the same rights as an individual to free speech. But the difference is that the individual is only able to use handbills and maybe do a little article in a magazine now and then, while the corporations are able to spend a billion dollars in advertising to tell you what to think … Corporations will advertise whatever isn’t true because if it were true they wouldn’t have the image problem in the first place. If the corporation were a good citizen it wouldn’t need to say it is. The truth is that corporations generally act in direct opposition to nature because profit is based on the transmogrification of raw materials into a new, more salable form ». (Read the whole interview on ratville times).
Jerry Mander – USA
Jerry Mander is Director of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG). He is also the programme director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology and a senior fellow at Public Media Center. He is an author and co-editor of ‘Alternatives to Globalization – A Better World is Possible’.
He talks about how the global economic system, established half a century ago at Bretton Woods, is fundamentally unsustainable. He argues that the poor are not benefiting from economic growth and that the wealth gap between rich and poorer is at its greatest in history. He examines how the model’s four major components are failing – abundant natural resources, new markets, cheap labour and compliancy. He then draws hope from the emergence of new alliances, new thinking and new economic models. Recorded in January 2005. (Listen to his 8 1/2 minutes speach on the Big-Picture video).
Another interview on ratville times: INGRAM: America has had a love affair with each new technological wonder. You suggest that with most of these technologies, we assumed a best-case scenario. What are the questions we should have asked before they came on line?
MANDER: The point is the way new technologies are introduced to us without a full discussion of how they are going to affect the planet, social relationships, political relationships, human health, nature, our conceptions of nature, and our conceptions of ourselves. Every technology that comes along affects these things. Cars, for example, have changed society completely. Had there been a debate about the existence of cars, we would have asked, do we want the entire landscape to be paved over? Do we want society to move into concrete urban centers? Do we want one resource–oil–to dominate human and political relationships in the world? The Gulf War resulted from our choice of the car a hundred years ago. (Read the whole interview down the page on this link).
See: the Mander Clusters.
He says also: « All, THESE ECONOMIC areas now show visible symptoms of industrialization, exemplified particularly its monoculture In agriculture, where many families formerly grew diversified crops to feed themselves and their communities, we now see a global juggernaut of corporate massification: massive land buyouts, people driven from their farms and cultures to squalid urban situations, and vast farmlands converted to monocultures, using pesticides and machine-intensive means to care for plants that human beings once nurtured. Where once small farms fed many people and kept the land rich, now all production is in soybeans, or cattle, or coffee for export. This is industrial logic. Meanwhile, the poisons on the lands seep to the rivers and into the food and water. And the people driven to cities, jobless, join the hordes of hungry migrants moving across borders ». (Read the whol long article on resurgence).
Read: Jerry’s background and message.
We’ve had globalization for quite a while, it’s just being accelerated right now. Wherever the rules of free trade and economic globalization are followed, you have economic and ecological disasters immediately thereafter. You’ve got the complete destruct ion of small, traditional farming in Africa and elsewhere; you’ve got the complete devastation of nature all around the world; you’ve got people shoved off their lands to make way for giant dams and agri-business and so on, who then become part of the mil lions and millions of people roaming the land and going into cities looking for impossible-to-find jobs, all in competition with each other, and violent and angry. And then people are angry with them, because who needs more people around? So you’ve set in to motion a global disarray and nonfunctionalism that would not have been achieved — certainly not at the same level and with the same speed — without this emphasis on global development. However poorly people lived in terms of material wealth in traditional societies, there was much that they retained. They retained a fair amount of local control. They retained some degree of traditional culture. Even in societies that had already been im pacted, like India, you had a lot of cultural identity and a history of relationships to scale that were really different. It was an economy of small-scale institutions. That has been wiped out by economic globalization with the invasion of franchises and giant institutions that have taken over the land. (Read the whole interview on Scott London).
Excerpts from a talk by Jerry Mander.
Read: Review of Jerry Mander’s ‘Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television‘, by Ron Kaufman.
links:
Environmental Grantmakers Association;