1940 Mexico. The people, mostly natives and mestizos living on ancestral lands, grow all the beans, oranges, sheep, and medicine they need to live. Mexico is a patchwork of land-based communities.
(A mountain village east of Española, New Mexico. Snowflake Martinez is born to a family of once-Mexican farmers and sheepherders. It is a painful birth. His mother cries out loud, and blood is splattered on the mud walls of the candlelit room. The Martinez family is jubilant.)
1944 It is summer-hot in New Hampshire. An occasional maple leaf drops onto the windshields of the mirror-black Packard and Dodge sedans that pull up to the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. Corporate executives, financiers, bankers, and government leaders disembark in a mood of dark concern. They are sensing instability. In between slabs of roast beef, ice-cream molds in the shape of American flags, and demitasses of Columbian-grown coffee, they situate the United States at the center of a new, improved capitalist world. The U.S. dollar, they decide, is to be the standard by which all other money is measured. They envision the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to facilitate their efforts to expand corporate capitalism around the world.
("Los norteamericanos took our land, y we got to be poor," Snowflake whispers. "Then Los Alamos Lab came. Al fin everybody had to work for American dollars.")
The way it was is not the way it is;
the way it is becomes how it will be.
1945 The United States displays its newfound dominance, blasting three atomic bombs across the global brain.
A U.S. warship bobs prominently on the waters of the Suez Canal. King Ahb El-Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia boards with great decorum. President Franklin Roosevelt receives him and, over tea, promises military protection in exchange for American access to oil.
1946 Television is launched.
The map of corporate vision extends magically plastically in black and white (in Technicolor) north south east west to encompass the globe.
1947 Dominion-pink recedes. India wins independence. Pakistan follows.
I am born in Cleveland, Ohio. It is a Demerol-scapolomine-ether birth in a sanitary green-tiled room. In celebration, Mimere picks up the lady-in-waiting handbell and rings for tea service.
American Telephone and Telegraph scientists invent the transistor, paving the way for the miniaturization of electronic circuitry.
1949 President Harry S. Truman makes an anthropological proclamation. Self-sustaining peoples are "underdeveloped," he pronounces. The industrial nations of the North are "developed," the chosen, the front-runners, he announces. All others are stragglers lagging behind in the race whose finish will determine the definitive expression of human accomplishment.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund open their teller-windows, offering economic growth of the front-runner brand. They extend money to underdeveloped and newly decolonized governments so that they – potential bargain-basement providers, producers, and consumers that they are – can build global-ready industries. Mexico borrows. Chile borrows. India borrows. Everybody borrows, innocently entering, not the definitive race as they are told, but a nasty snare that will immobilize them for generations to come. Now they owe.
The Soviet Union officially enters the race in the front-runner division, blasting its first atomic bomb.
1950 Indonesia breaks from Dutch rule.
At Mimere's house on Stillman Road, a family portrait is taken. The grown-ups sit in the center of the picture but seem on edge. They nervously speak of their rose gardens and of World War II. No one mentions what is happening now.
1951 A young father in Cleveland takes his children for a Saturday drive in a Packard sedan. He pirates them into the basement of a hospital, then tortures and rapes them.
I think you may know my father. Harvard University, summa cum laude. He is sticking needles into my brother's penis. He is using tweezers to yank out the baby teeth that stand in the way of ramming summa cum into our mouths.
1952 Americans spend $16 billion on television sets.1
1953 Tokyo. A struggling research company housed in a shack purchases an AT&T license to manufacture transistors. The company is called Sony.
Enter the biologists. The intimate geography of the cell becomes known: the landscape of genetic inheritance is discovered in DNA.
1954 The landscape of communism is rejected. Senator Joseph McCarthy searches under every bed for subversive-Commie-pinkos: heads roll; mothers and fathers are jailed; The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson is banned. The race tolerates no questions.
Vietnam breaks from France.
1956 Morocco, Egypt, and Sudan achieve independence.
(Snowflake goes on his first hunt. He and Jamie Sandoval ride their ponies through yellow-leafed forests into the land grant territory of their fathers. The two boys shoot a deer, cut it up with hunting knives, carry it in sacks back to the village.)
1957 Africa's Gold Coast overthrows Britain to become Ghana.
Sputnik sails through the cosmos, opening infinity to a race of orbiting eyes and ears.
1959 Cuba achieves independence.
1960-1 Nigeria goes free. Senegal too – and Madagascar, Republic of Congo, Tanganyika, and South Africa.
In a Deep South town, where the atmosphere of slavery lingers like humidity on the skin, African-Americans are assembling, marching, protesting. During one mass arrest the police chief questions a nine-year-old, "What's your name?"
The boy gazes straight into the chief's eyes and answers: "Freedom."
1962 Algeria breaks from France; Uganda, Trinidad, and Jamaica from England.
Packing nuclear, United States President John Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev face off over Cuba.
The insides of our guts are quivering in all-out terror. God is dead! The world is ending! Nothingness reigns! As if to salve our dread, Revco Discount Drug arrives. Its warehouse approach to cosmetic sales is situated on the new commercial strip by the racetrack on land that just last year was farm. We girls lay our allowances on the counter in exchange for pale pink lipstick. My father threatens to kill me if I tell. He buys me a transistor radio. I jam it to my ear, drawing out every note of "Louie, Louie" from its tinny little delivery as I lounge across the four-poster bed where he rapes me on Saturday night.
1964 North Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson launches all-out war. Farmers are murdered, soldiers gassed, women raped, the lush countryside turned into bombed-out moonscape. The goal: to corral this headstrong people, kicking and screaming in their jungle camouflage, into the corporate economy.
At risk of bloody retaliation, perhaps death, my brother stands up.
"I will tell!" he trembles to our father in a fit of crazed courage.
"I will call THE POLICE!" Twelve years of torture ends.
1965 Indonesia. It does not end everywhere. U.S.-backed troops slip into the newly decolonized rice paddies, murdering a million of the country's craftspeople, small-shop owners, and farmers in what seems at once revenge for preferring sustainability and a strategy for eliminating land-based culture.
(As a poor rural Chicano, Snowflake Martinez is a prime target for induction into the U.S. Army. He runs.)
I run from my father and his tea-stained world.
1968 In one of the all-time public relations moves, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers something spectacular for us: it rockets a steel-girded capsule of men to the moon. One of them jumps and leaps and waves a stiff American flag.
We watch cynically in a commune on Vine Street.
(Snowflake watches cynically in the general store of the village.)
The map expands to the limits of the technological imagination: mustard moonscape now – Jupiter Mars the black infinity of space.
1971 Sony expands its operations beyond national borders, opening the first Japanese electronics plant on United States soil.
Intel Corporation designs the 4004 microprocessor, a circuit made of thousands of transistors on the tiniest fleck of silicon.
Shit happens: I become ill and I don't know why.
1972 Stateless money happens. The far-flung effects of the expanding economy catalyzed at Bretton Woods fly in the face of the nation-state as a self-contained bank account. Good-bye gold standard! The fixed American dollar gives way to ever-fluctuating, ever-transient capital on paper. Banks and corporations now have the capability to move money to and from their worldwide operations with a phone call, to extend markets to any place under the sun, to hold sovereign governments hostage by threatening to pack up and take their jobs with them: in essence, to use land and people anywhere any way they want.
Landsat I is the first remote-sensing satellite to provide a spectral-based portrait of the whole Earth.
1972 The tragedy of Bretton Woods-style domination is revealed. Corralled into a race of someone else's making and handicapped in their run, "underdeveloped" and newly-decolonized nations cannot pay back their loans. The World Bank imposes austerity programs: slashing wages; eliminating aid to the displaced, unemployed, and starving; devaluing local currency; flinging open the borders to hypernational investment; eliminating all opposition.
Chile. Thousands of ordinary citizens are tortured.
My father buys me a Sony tape recorder.
1973 Biologists discover that a dividing cell injected with genes from another cell reproduces endless copies of the foreign genetic material.
A once self-sustaining country is injected with foreign capital.
1974 Diner's Club invents the credit card.
How it is.
1975 North Vietnam defeats the United States.
How it will be. Three million Vietnamese have died. The United States has massacred not just the people but the land, dropping more explosives than were used in all of World War II. Farms become toxic swamps, forests smoking craters. "National independence simply leads to take-over by a new brand of colonialists," reflects historian Erich Jacoby. The Vietnamese must now forge survival not as the self-sufficient people they have shown themselves to be – but against the dictates of global capitalism.
The tragedy of decolonization is revealed. Given the insidious contamination of their societies by empire, new ruling elites reproduce, in Pakistani Eqbal Ahmen's words, "a new pathology of power."2
Dictatorships emerge. Fundamentalism. Inter-ethnic violence. Civil war. Trauma. Suffering.
Muzak fills our heads.
1979 Drugs fill our veins. The Central Intelligence Agency allies with rebel opium armies in Afghanistan against Soviet forces. Heroin from the Afghani mountains pours into the United States. Drug-related deaths in New York City rise 77 percent.3
(Snowflake's brother, Hipolito, is found cold dead in his trailer behind the drive-in in Española.)
I qualify for MasterCharge.
1980 Corporate ownership of the genetic maps of living organisms is no longer science fiction. The Supreme Court awards patent rights for bacteria to General Electric.
1981 Hewlett-Packard produces the superchip. It can multiply two 32-bit numbers in 1.8 millionths of a second.
Meanwhile, from the plush wool carpet in the Oval Office, President Ronald Reagan hurls curses at the "Evil Empire." All-out terror. We are quivering again.
The urge to freedom is irrepressible. It erupts; it is crushed. It erupts again; it is crushed again.
1982 It erupts. Millions of protestors march to end the nuclear arms race.
Impossibly in debt, Mexico gives in to World Bank austerity. Already maquiladora-factories cluster along the Mexican side of the border – taking advantage of wages one-tenth those in the United States, nonexistent environmental laws, and corporate-friendly tax breaks. Under austerity, regulations are loosened even more. A stampede of foreign investments is unleashed. The number of maquiladoras quadruples. Local businesses fold. Poverty skyrockets.4 The industrial solvent xylene peppers drinking water at fifty thousand times the level allowed in the United States.5
Those CEOs, politicos, and bankers, they are feeling as insecure as ever. They are putting their wallets together again, plotting now to break down every known barrier to their goals. They want access to every last rain forest and gold mine in the world; they want the consumerism of every nation and village on Earth.
1986 The Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade beings. Behind closed doors, in some unknown location, the bankers and executives and government leaders discuss things you and I know nothing about. Wherever they are, whatever they decide, slabs of Argentinean beef and Columbian-grown coffee are served on fine china.
1988 In a mass rebuff of communism, the Soviet empire fractures into sovereign states.
The race is on: running hard and fast. Not against anything now. Just for itself.
McDonald's sets up franchises in Moscow.
Desperately in debt, the Mexican government breaks up its traditional cooperative ejido farms and signs all rights to corn production to U.S. corporations.
The inner map of an animal may now be owned, engineered, and sold. Du Pont wins patenting for its "Harvard Mouse," a rodent that, because it is injected with human genes, is predisposed to cancer.
1989 The socialist and communist nations of Eastern Europe fall. Golden arches sprout in Prague and East Berlin. Forty-seven of the top one hundred economies of the world are not nation-states but transnational corporations.6
(Snowflake's cousin Rudolfo is jailed for gathering downed firewood on his ancestral land grant.)
1990 Mexico. Seventy-five percent of the people now live in poverty.7 Forty percent of all beans are imported.8 Children in the streets of Mexico City beg so they can buy Frito-Lay corn chips.
1991 The U.S. blasts into Iraq with bombs and uranium-tipped bullets in a brief but TV-ready war to prevent Saddam Hussein from expanding into oil fields claimed by American corporations. Afraid that his privileged protection from the U.S. might be in jeopardy, King Fahd invites President Bush to station military forces on Saudi soil.
Systemex, Inc. wins the patent rights to human bone marrow.
How it is. Your skeleton belongs to Systemix.
British-owned Pillsbury moves its Green Giant broccoli and cauliflower operations from California, where workers are paid $9.00 an hour – to Mexico, where they get $4.28 a day.9 McDonald's feeds 22 million people each day.10
It is said that 37,000 family-run shops throughout Europe will fold under the financial duress of corporate imperialism, to be replaced by 300 corporate supermarkets.11 It is said that what workers are left in the developed nations will soon earn salaries equal to those in the underdeveloped. It is said that the speed and pervasiveness of corporate supercomputers – from banking to satellite surveillance – make possible the massive exchange of data and money that provides nonstop fuel for the economy.
If the map could show us the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as a product, it would be a rubber stamp. GATT gives legal legitimacy to what has already come to be.
The way it is.
Gucci. Rolex. Oscar de la Renta. Club Med. United. People who buy Toyota trucks jump straight up in the air.
1992 Seventy-five percent of all corporations are based in North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
An American child witnesses 100,000 acts of violence on television by the end of elementary school.13 Wal-Mart opens a new store every three days.14 Its yearly revenues top those of Indonesia.15
How it is;
How it is.
Peasants in India become criminals for using the twigs and leaves of their sacred neem tree. Half a million farmers and their families, wearing threadbare saris and scarves, march to Bangalore to protest the patenting and corporate ownership of their ancestral plants.
(Snowflake buys a neat little package of sunflower seeds at the supermarket. Beautiful flowers grow – with not one seed to eat or plant anew. Snowflake does not understand how this could be. If he wants to plant sunflowers again next summer, he will have to buy more seeds.)
Free trade: freedom for corporations and banks to go wherever they want – from the moon to the DNA of your bones.
I buy a small house in a village in northern New Mexico.
1994 Mexico. The Zapatista National Liberation Army seizes the main cities of the province of Chiapas – demanding real democracy, land reform to return stolen lands, full rights for land-based peoples.
I ride my pinto into the badlands. I have just heard about the Zapatistas on the radio. Suddenly, like a bolt, I awaken to their brilliance: they have acted on the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement opens the continent to a corporate free-for-all that will, once and for all, destroy land-based sustainability.
1994 Mexico: the economy collapses. Mexico: the economy is propped up.
1995 GATT becomes the law of the Earth.
It is not that you and I were overrun by democracy before; it is not that we had a say in what government or corporations did to the air and water, to the wolves and owls, to our lives.
Malls, clear-cut, fallout.
But now, over roast beef and coffee, the banks and transnational corporations construct the legal right to override any environmental protection, any worker-safety regulation, any human-rights legislation that we struggle to pass. Government subsidies to sustainable farming and community-based technologies are outlawed. The "will of the market" rules.
I am a cardholder.
Where is justice? The World Trade Organization adjudicates all disputes. In its courts there is no guarantee of impartiality, no outside appeal, no media or citizen-witnesses allowed, no disclosure of conflict of interest.
Carte blanche.
1995 Indonesian workers get 15¢ an hour to assemble racing shoes that cost Nike $5.60 to manufacture. You buy them for $135.16 The company makes $800 million a year.17
Seventy-five million people are forced by poverty to leave their native lands in search for work.18
The Earth reaches the limits of its capacity to provide resources for the race. The Earth becomes incapable of absorbing the toxins produced.19
Two hundred religious leaders pray to Allah, Jesus, and Shakti – raising their crosses and prayer wheels in opposition to corporate ownership and engineering of life.
1997 Asia: the economy collapses. Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia go bankrupt.
1998 Riots erupt in Indonesia. World financial markets plunge.
Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania: car bombs raze U.S. embassies killing 224 and injuring more than 5,000.
1999 The urge to freedom erupts.
Farmers-against-junk-food drive a bulldozer into a McDonald's restaurant in Millau, France.
Seattle. 50,000 protestors, puppeteers, anti-corporate and pro-localization activists shut down World Trade Organization meetings, causing the talks to collapse.
(Snowflake Martinez rides up the mountain to meet his fellow land grant heirs in a musty pine cabin. They come together to mount a movement for the return of their ancestral lands.)
2000 Prague. 10,000 activists take to the streets to protest IMF and World Bank policies.
2001 Montreal. Seven McDonald's are attacked. Another is destroyed by fire in Tucson.
How it will be.
September 11. New York City. Two commercial airliners hijacked by knife-wielding Middle Easterners careen into the World Trade Center towers, toppling the skyscrapers and instantaneously entombing some 4,000 people. A third hijacked plane is flown into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing 190. A fourth, destined for the White House, crashes into a field in Pennsylvania killing all aboard.
From a cave hide-out in the mountains of Afghanistan, the fundamentalist Islamic organization Al Qaeda demands that the U.S. stop dominating the Arab world for oil profits.
The U.S. pummels Afghanistan with bombs.
How it is.
At home, Americans madly wave the red-white-and-blue. The new U.S.A. Patriot Act dismantles citizens' rights to jury trials and defines "terrorism" as any form of protest or civil disobedience.
How it will be.
A U.S. biotechnology corporation gets the jump on everyone else in a race of its own: it clones a human embryo.
On the map:
YOU ARE HERE.
NOTES:
1Ezra Bowen, ed., 1950-1960: This Fabulous Century (New York: Time-Life Books, 1970), 250.
2Eqbal Ahmed, "The Neo-Fascist States: Notes on the Pathology of Power in the Third World," Arab Studies Quarterly 3, No. 2 (Spring 1981): 170-180.
3Interview with David Musto in Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lawrence Hill Books, 1972, 1991), 437.
4Carlos Heredia and Mary Purcell, "Structural Adjustment and the Polarization of Mexican Society," in The Case against the Global Economy, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club Boks, 1996), 278-82.
5Alexander Goldsmith, "The Seeds of Exploitation," in Mander and Goldsmith, Case against the Global Economy, 268-69.
6Tony Clarke, "Mechanisms of Corporate Control," in Mander and Goldsmith, Case against the Global Economy, 298.
7"Corporate Globalization Fact Sheet," CorpWatch (March 2001), <www.corpwatch.org>
8Tom Barry, ed., Mexico: A Country Guide (Albuquerque: International Hemisphere Education Resource Center, 1992), 163.
9Richard Rothstein, "Free Trade Scam," L.A. Weekly, May 17-23, 1991.
10New York Times, May 12, 1991: and Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 238.
11Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1992).
12"Coporate Globalization Fact Sheet," CorpWatch.
13Washington Post, July 1, 1993; and Barnet and Cavanagh, Global Dreams, 156.
14Kai Mander and Alex Boston, "Wal-Mart: Global Retailer," in Mander and Goldsmith, Case against the Global Economy, 333.
15"Corporate Globalization Fact Sheet," CorpWatch.
16Interview with Dusty Kidd, Nike public relations, in Barnet and Cavanagh, Global Dreams, 326; and "Whatever Happened to the New World Order?" 24 Hours Supplement, (February 1992), 8.
17Gail Johnson, "Is Nike Losing Its Swoosh?" Adbusters, no. 19 (autumn 1997), 57.
18United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report, 1992 (New York: United Nations, 1992), 6.
19David Korten, "The Limits of the Earth," The Nation, July 15-22, 1996, 16.
Chellis Glendinning has been engaged in movements for social change for more than forty years and in 2001 was named by the Utne Reader as one of the world's "most original thinkers." Her books include the acclaimed My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, When Technology Wounds (nominated for a Pulitzer in nonfiction), and Waking Up in the Nuclear Age. Glendenning is a psychologist, poet, pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, and fighter for environmental justice. She lives in the village of Chimayó in northern New Mexico.
Off the Map was published by New Society Publishers in 2002, and is available from their web site. It is 187 pages and lists for $15.95. ISBN 0-86571-463-0.