Letters
Globalization and the Environment Editors: The exchange between Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens ("Is Globalization Americanization?" Summer 2000) was disappointing in its treatment of...
...We need to ask what makes things profitable...
...KEN CONCA College Park, Md...
...Instead, they pit corporate interests, more often than not supported by state power, against increasingly globalized coalitions of social movements and citizens' groups...
...Rootless Consumers Editors: I found Steven Pressman's essay on e-commerce very provoking ("E-Commerce, The Sales Tax, and Equity," Summer 2000...
...If these activities were based on advanced, clean, efficient, and user-friendly technologies, they wouldn't be outsourced in the first place...
...He's right to say that sales taxes are regressive, and that they should be repealed and replaced with a more equitable system...
...Why is waste, far from being "redundant," still enormously profitable...
...I would have thought that the real issue would be democratizing the economy and promoting community-based enterprise and culture...
...Steven Pressman Replies: I am not optimistic that states will eliminate their sales taxes any time soon...
...Or is all that passé for acquisitive, globalized lefties...
...My hope was to get people thinking along these lines—a necessary requirement if we are to adopt more progressive forms of taxation...
...It's not that capitalism has avoided pollution control and use of efficient materials because they are inherently unprofitable...
...Quite the opposite: pollution and waste have been made profitable by laws, technologies, and institutions that make it easy to off-load the enormous social costs onto people and communities residing downstream, downwind, or across the border...
...But this makes it all the more strange to see him dismiss environmentalism as unprofitable—as though the profitability of such activities were determined by an invisible hand working its market magic...
...The most telling aspect of Pressman's piece is his image of himself—the rootless consumer-intellectual—now in Florida, now in South Dakota, now in London or Paris—sitting alone with his computer and incessantly clicking his mouse in search of another bargain...
...Odd, then, that he falls back on an archaic, country-centered view of North and South in which "poorer countries" are uninterested in sacrificing economic growth for the sake of environmental protection...
...Hutton is right to call attention to power and to ask whose agenda is being furthered...
...Giddens's faith in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and "globalization from below" needs a more critical edge...
...Really...
...Why are the positive technological changes Giddens anticipates always just over the horizon...
...We must distinguish between movement-based coalitions that press powerful institutions for real change and a well-institutionalized M10 sector that too often reproduces the same problems of inarementalism, antidemocratic practice, and North-South paternalism that plague governments, corporations, and intergovernmental organizations...
...This view ignores the trans-state character of economic power in the world economy...
...In the environmental realm, the answer is more often than not corporate power, state facilitation, and the failure to force polluters to internalize the cost of harm...
...Does this guy actually live anywhere...
...In struggles against large dams, persistent organic pollutants, or geneticaly engineered foods, the lines of conflict have little to do with interstate North-South diplomacy...
...The real issue," he writes, "is whether we can and should have sales taxes in a global economy...
...But how long does he think that would take (he never even speculates...
...Summer 2000) was disappointing in its treatment of environmental concerns...
...Giddens recognizes that, economically speaking, state power isn't what it once was...
...Giddens's optimism that the dirty phases of industrial development can somehow be leapfrogged through the use of clean technologies misses the central point—that the global South has almost no influence on the trajectory of technological development in the world economy...
...ZELDA BRONSTEIN Berkeley, Calif...
...In the meantime, where is the equity in letting oligopolistic, Wall Street-driven corporations like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble off the hook, especially when sales tax accounts for much of the difference between their prices and the ones charged by the dwindling number of independent booksellers and other merchants who have to compete with them...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 127...
...The answers have little to do with technology...
...My article pointed out a number of good reasons to oppose the sales tax, especially in a global economy...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
