Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [176]
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.
Chapter 2. The Resource Imperative: The Passing of Autarky and the Fall of the West
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