The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [94]
In fact, there are those who compare today’s huge multinational corporations to colonizers. Just like colonial powers, the corporation’s central aim is not to foster local economic development, happiness, and prosperity but to enrich itself. In Africa, for example, colonizers built the railroads not so they would connect local African towns with one another, but as tracks that ran in single lines from the interior to the ports on the coast, so that resources and slaves could be extracted as efficiently as possible. And that’s exactly what the major chains, with the help of international trade policies, have done: they’ve built tracks for the wealth of local communities (whether that wealth comes from natural resources in Africa, toxic goods produced by exploited workers in China, or the sweat of underpaid retail employees in America) to flow in one direction—into their pockets.
The Rule Makers
None of what I’ve described thus far happened in a vacuum. It has all been made possible by the massive development of information technology over the last twenty-five years: the evolution of computers, semiconductors, fiber optics, satellites, etc., which have laid the foundation for the elaborate management systems that have enabled companies to find the cheapest, fastest path to making and distributing products. Then there’s the physical infrastructure of power plants, factories, ports, and roads—especially in rapidly developing countries like China and India.
A final huge piece of this puzzle involves the structure of the global economy, a group of global regulatory institutions, and a set of agreements that have been worked out between countries to promote trade and “growth.” Uncovering the pervasive role of trade agreements and international financial institutions, or IFIs, is crucial. There is no way to comprehend the Story of Stuff without them, because they establish the rules by which not only the global distribution system but the whole of the take-make-waste economic model operates.
To understand how these IFIs came to be, we have to delve briefly into history, especially the financial crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression that lasted through the 1930s and led up to World War II. For decades up to that point, governments had relied on the supposedly free market to take care of business with minimal government involvement. Even during our so-called Progressive Era between the 1890s and 1920s, when early protections like antitrust legislation and food-safety regulations were adopted, big corporate interests, not government, were dominant.102
Then, in response to the Great Depression, national governments worldwide scrambled to protect their own workers and businesses by imposing tariffs on foreign Stuff, which led to a collapse in international trade and worsened unemployment and poverty for people across the globe. Even large increases in government spending for public works didn’t solve the problem. In this international atmosphere of extreme political and economic stress, Adolf Hitler launched World War II, which got the U.S. out of the Depression but trashed the industrial base of Europe and much of Asia. As the war drew to a close in 1944, the Allied powers, led by the United States, decided they needed a way to rearrange global economic relations around the new de facto world currency, the U.S. dollar, while also facilitating investment in the economies freshly destroyed by the war.103
And so two superinfluential international agencies were born at a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The “Bretton Woods Institutions”—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (the nickname of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development)—were later joined by the World Trade Organization, or WTO (which evolved from the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT). The IMF was created to deal with financial imbalances between countries: its primary role was to keep the world’s currencies stable and exchangeable in order to support international trade and to provide emergency loans