Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [203]
22. Philip Weiss offers a stunning account of new age reactionary drop-outs in his “Off the Grid,” The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 1995, pp. 24–52.
23. Charles B. Strozier has written a fascinating account of the apocalyptic side of fundamentalism; see Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). See also Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Beliefin Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
PART III. JIHAD VS. MCWORLD
Chapter 15. Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Mattituck: American House, 1838), Book I, Chapter 15.
2. Thus the U.S. Business and Industrial Council is fighting the WTO provisions of GATT, which it fears “is an official surrender by the United States to foreign governments.” Advertisement in The New York Times, July 28, 1994, p. A 13.
3. Jack Sheinkman, “When Children Do the Work,” The New York Times, August 9, 1994, p. A 23.
4. Ibid. As David Keppel writes in a pointed letter taking exception to The New York Times’s editorializing on behalf of the WTO, it is unlikely to be some small country like Benin that challenges American environmental standards as an obstruction to free trade. Rather, “only nominally will the challenger be Benin. It will really be a major global corporation, finding a friendly or desperate foreign government to help overturn regulations it is always fighting.” The New York Times, Letters, August 3, 1994, p. A 20. Note that Article 2 of the WTO treaty prohibits governments from regulating “with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade.” Unnecessary obstacles like a ban on child labor, industrial safety standards, environmental protection regulations, and so forth!?
5. For the controversy here see Laurie Udesky, “Sweatshops Behind the Labels,” The Nation, May 16, 1994, pp. 665–668, and the ensuing correspondence, including a rejoinder from Levi Strauss & Company in The Nation, August 8/15, 1994, pp. 146, 176.
6. In a recent dialogue involving the German social philosopher Juergen Habermas and the Polish reformer and editor Adam Michnik, Habermas replies to the question “What is left of socialism?” with the clear response “radical democracy.” Michnik is “entirely” in agreement. But what this seems to mean is not that democracy survives, but that its idealistic possibilities (associated with socialism as a noble theory) have in practice vanished along with socialism. Michnik, “‘More Humility, Fewer Illusions’—A Talk Between Adam Michnik and Juergen Habermas,” The New York Review of Books, March 24, 1994, p. 24.
7. Thomas L. Friedman, “A Peace Deal Today Really Is a Bargain,” The New York Times, September 11, 1994, Section 4, p. 1.
8. Quoted by Vance Packard in his early classic on consumption, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay, 1960), and cited again by Alan Durning in his excellent study for the Worldwatch Institute called How Much Is Enough: The Consumer Society and the Future of Earth (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp. 21–22.
9. Durning, ibid., pp. 22, 116.
10. The League was an abject failure; the United States was never a member and seventeen other nations out of sixty-three member states dropped out prior to its demise at the onset of World War II, which it failed to avert. See Mihaly Simai, The Future of Global Governance (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1994), p. 27.
The attempt by the more numerous but weaker developing nations in 1974 to institute a “new international economic order” through U.N. Resolution 3201 was made a mockery of by the refusal of powerful First World nations to take an interest. The same fate befell the New World Information Order conceived in the