Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [183]
35. See Edward C. Banfield with the assistance of Laura Fasano Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: The Free Press, 1958).
Chapter 5. From Soft Goods to Service
1. Figures from Bill Orr, The Global Economy (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 101.
2. Ibid., p. 99.
3. John Holusha, “The Risks for High Tech,” The New York Times, September 5, 1993, p. F 7. Much of the decline results from cutbacks in public sector spending, but even private sector spending has remained flat.
4. Fortune, August 26, 1991, pp. 165–188.
5. Fortune, August 23, 1993, pp. 160–196.
6. Figures and quotes from D. J. Connors and D. S. Heller, “Viewpoints: The Good Word in Trade is ‘Services,’” The New York Times, September 5, 1993, Section 3, p. 9.
7. Fortune, May 31, 1993, pp. 206–208.
8. Pat Cadigan, “Pretty Boy Crossover,” Synners (New York: Bantam, 1993) as cited in John Leonard, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” The Nation, November 15, 1993, pp. 580–588.
9. Quoted by Bernard Weinraub, “Robert Altman,” The New York Times, July 29, 1993, p. B 1.
10. Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes! France Rallies,” The New York Times, January 2, 1994, p. H 1.
11. Ibid.
12. Cited by Daniel Pipes, “The American Conspiracy to Run the World,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, Nov. 14–20, 1994, p. 25.
13. Corporations are especially fond of this language: thus General Electric Chairman Jack Welch called Sony founder Akio Morita (felled recently by a cerebral hemorrhage) “spiritually global.” Jolie Solomon with Peter McKillop, “We Have Lost a Very Important Player,” Newsweek, December 13, 1993, p. 50.
14. In a special issue of the International Political Science Review (Vol. 14, No. 3, July 1993) on “The Emergent World Language System” [the title already makes the point!], Abram de Swaan writes: “In the midst of this galaxy there is one language that is spoken by more multilingual speakers in the supranational language groups than any other and that is therefore central to all central languages. This supercentral language is, of course, English,” p. 219. David D. Daitin goes further in an argument that corresponds to the battle between Jihad and McWorld when he writes, “The logic of globalization suggests that world languages such as English will begin to challenge national vernaculars in such a way as to threaten their existence as living languages.” “The Game Theory of Language Regimes,” ibid., p. 226.
15. Even the first time around, in the 1930s, the public interest ultimately was undercut by the compromises won by commercialism: see Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
16. This is not exactly a new story. As William Leach tells it in his Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), the rise of consumerism from the 1890s through the Depression more or less parallels the rise of American capitalism.
17. The absence of government interest in America is startling, given the implications of the new media merger mania for freedom of information, equal access to knowledge, and issues of monopoly. A private coalition of sixty nonprofit, consumer, labor, and civil rights groups has convened a Telecommunications Policy Roundtable that hopes to provide public debate about the public interest in these new technologies, but it is unlikely to be an adequate counterbalance to the multibillion-dollar deals currently being struck by private corporations.
Chapter 6. Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology
1. Jeff Miller, “Viewpoints: Should Phone Companies Make Films?” The New York Times, January 2, Section 3, p. 11.
2. Roger Cohen, “Europeans Back French Curbs on U.S. Movies,” The New