Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [175]
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