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.39.The cognitive closure to negative externalities of industrial market processesis by no means confined to the Third World.It is a general blinker of the modelin all its jurisdictions of implementation.Consider the following US example.In a CNN television discussion on November 26, 1996, a spokesman of theenvironmental health scientists of the US Environmental Protection Agencyproposed new legislation to reduce air pollution, reporting that 166,000 UScitizens die prematurely each year from air particulates from industrial effluentsand exhausts.His opponent, a representative of the corporations producingthe effluents, insisted that further regulations were too costly.The evidence 280 THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISMof the 166,000 deaths from the preventible air pollution depositing thedeadly particulates was ruled out of view.40.Another first-hand account of the Maquiladora free trade zones of LatinAmerica is given by Charles Bowden in While You Were Sleeping , Harper sMagazine, December 1996, pp.44 52.The city is Ciudad Juarez on theborder of Texas. Real wages have been falling since the 1970s the workingclass [have suffered a drop] in their purchasing power of in excess of 50 percent over an eight year period.There are few environmental controls andlittle enforcement of those that exist.yet industry is thriving.it is asuccess story.last year growth registered 12 per cent.The future is basedon the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and industrial growthproducing poverty faster than it distributes wealth. For Bowden, in particularbecause of the many murdered teenage girls, the situation in Juarez is a livinghell.But every element of it is perfectly consistent with the market s self-regulating principles.41.When federal health department scientists in Canada warned of the dangerof these foods, the report was suppressed (Thomas Walkom, Mutant FoodProducts Hard to Swallow , The Toronto Star, June 2, 1998, p.A2).Theworld s largest producers of soya and milk, US transnationals like MonsantoCorporation, mix gene-altered soya with real soya and produce hormone-boosted milk at 40 per cent higher volume per unit of cost, and then threatenWTO trade action against any government which labels the products for discriminating against the process of production , a new transnationaltrade prohibition.Adulterated food in this way becomes illegal to identify.42.I am indebted to Karen Finlay of the Department of Consumer Studies,University of Guelph for this finding of her research.43.Myron Gordon, Faculty of Management Studies, University of Toronto, hasstated that production is now secondary in the global market.He providesa pace-setting figure of $800 millions for production costs, $800 millionsfor research, and $2 billion for advertising (Interdisciplinary Conference onthe Evolution of World Order, Toronto, June 7 9, 1997).44.A more developed account of the political economy of the armamentscommodity may be found in my monograph, Understanding War, Toronto:Science for Peace, 1989.Lest it be thought that armaments are means oflife in the sense of means of defending civilian populations from aggressors,we need to bear in mind that over three of four people killed by the armamentscommodity in war are non-combatant civilians, and most of them are killedby their own governments (Ruth Leger Sivard et al, World Military and SocialExpenditures 1996.Washington D.C., 1996).45.We may think that after the end of the Cold War research into the leadingweapons of mass destruction by US government programmes has effectivelytapered off.But according to a 300-page document leaked in the summerof 1997, a massive secret programme to build a new generation of nuclearweapons, more extensive than at the height of the Cold War, has beenfunded to design and develop new warheads using computer-simulateddetonations to avoid the restraints of signed test-ban treaties.The newprogramme is called, with now familiar Orwellian embellishment, TheStockpile Stewardship and Management Plan.(Ed Vulliamy, reportingNational Resources Defence Council, US in Secret New Nuclear Buildup ,Guardian Weekly, August 24, 1997, p.1) NOTES AND REFERENCES 281At the same time, the publicly-funded US military-industrial complexcontrols over 70 per cent of the armaments market of the less developedcountries, who expend up to 70 per cent of their public revenues on theseweapons along with debt-interest payments to international money-lenders.( External Debt and Military Spending , XI Conference of the InternationalPhysicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, October 1993)In these ways the money sequences combine to bleed impoverishedsocieties dry of the little public wealth they possess.46.Richard Norton-Taylor, Huge Subsidies Boost UK Arms Sales, GuardianWeekly, May 28, 1995, p.1.47.United Press International, November 2, 1983.48.Japanese banks which became heavily involved in international financingafter the world-leading success of its planned productive ventures inautomobiles and electronic manufacturing now hold an estimated $850 billionin bad debts (figure cited in Marcus Gee, The Real End of Japan Inc., Globeand Mail, April 18, 1998, p.D4).49.The figures of child deaths are from UNICEF, September 1997, while thoseon child stunting are from UNFAO, September 1995.50. 25% of Military Spending Would Cure World s Worst Ills, Canadian Centrefor Policy Alternatives Monitor, July/August 1995, p.18.51.The following is a typical pattern of the relationship between state militariesequipped with advanced weapons commodities using these armaments toclear indigenous people off the land, a pattern as old as colonization andimplemented also in such places as Guatemala, Somalia, East Timor and thePhilippines.In the case of the global market invasion of the lands of thesouthern Mexican state of Chiapas, the story went as follows.Prior to the1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mexican governmentremoved a constitutional provision protecting the communal lands of theMayan people so that the land could be converted to corporate agribusinessproduction, and at the same time open South Mexico markets to the cheaper,subsidized corn and bean products of US corprorations.The Mayans resisted the death sentence of NAFTA , and the Mexican military proceeded todestroy the Chiapas farmers villages and farms, latrines and water pipes withhelicopters, tractors and armed personnel carriers, and also bombed themfrom the air with the latest napalm products.(John McMurtry, A Day inthe Life of the New World Order , Globe and Mail, April 1, 1995, p.A17.)52
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