(
(*)
Resisting the Post-National: Canadian Critiques of the
Geo/Cultural/Politics of Globalization
The unpleasant neologism
of “Geo/Cultural/Politics”
is intended as one marker of a sequence of unmaskings
I would like to offer here—and as a compressed way of saying that
globalization, though represented by its advocates in discourses
strongly flavoured with claims both of
economic rationality and of
historical inevitability, is in actuality a political project designed
to
enhance, at the expense of everyone else, the geopolitical power of
social
elites associated with trans-national corporate interests;1
that it does so through an economics of piracy sustained by
barely-concealed
threats of violence on the part of state powers controlled by those
same
interests;2
and that this project is both associated with and to a significant
degree
propagated by particular forms of cultural representation and
socio-cultural
reproduction, and also dedicated to the destruction of competing forms
of
representation and social reproduction.3 But
perhaps the best apology for this neologism, this act of compression,
might be
to suggest that the phenomenon itself is uglier than any language I can
use in
describing and analyzing it.
Although I will be principally
discussing the contributions of a number of contemporary
English-Canadian
public intellectuals and activists—let’s compress again, and call them
‘thinker-activists’—to
emergent discourses of resistance to globalization, I do not mean to
suggest
that the fact of their being Canadian has provided them with privileged
insights into the matter. Nor do I want to imply that the forms of
resistance to the condition of globalized
post-nationalism (which is also to say neo-liberalism or
neo-conservatism) that
they have advocated and participated in have necessarily taken a
recognizably
nationalist form.
Let me add, parenthetically,
that when I
conflate neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism I am not forgetting that
the
former term refers to a political economy and ideology of
pseudo-democratic
corporatism whose penetration of national economies and devastation of
social
infrastructures is facilitated by international institutions like the
World
Bank and the IMF and trade agreements modeled on the U.S.-Canadian FTA
and the
subsequent NAFTA, while the latter term refers to a harder-edged
ideology with
Leo Straussian-monetarist roots which has
increasingly cast aside any pretence of working through quasi-legal
instrumentalities in favour of a
geopolitics of naked
aggression. The two are different—but only as the left and right
wings of
the same bloody bird.
Canadian anti-globalizers
While Canadians as such have no
privileged access to an understanding of globalization, a number of
Canadian
thinker-activists have made signal contributions to the
anti-globalization
movement. Maude Barlow, for example, who has been a significant
presence
at meetings of the World Social Forum, is the founder of a nationalist
public-interest movement, The Council of Canadians,
that
has more than 100,000 members. She played a key role in the late
1990s in
exposing the secret negotiations towards a proposed Multilateral
Agreement on
Investment (MAI), and has been an important voice in the international
struggle
against corporate appropriations of world water resources, and in
mobilizations
of Canadian resistance to corporatist continental integration (see Barlow and Clarke 1997 and 2002, and
Barlow). Linda
McQuaig’s witty, exhaustively researched,
and
deservedly best-selling books have included defenses of a publicly
owned social
infrastructure, demolitions of the globalizers’
anti-democratic ‘there-is-no-alternative’ ideology, and, most recently,
in It’s
the Crude, Dude, an incisive analysis of the contemporary
geopolitics of
oil depletion and imperial aggression (see McQuaig
1991, 1995, 1998, 2001 and 2004). Naomi Klein’s brilliant book No
Logo,
which offers a spirited account of the economics and politics of
trans-national
‘branding,’ outsourcing and maquiladora
or
sweat-shop production, and of current struggles to expose and demystify
this
system, has enjoyed a wide international success. Klein’s
subsequent work
has included a series of lucid political essays, which she identifies
as
“dispatches from the front lines of the globalization debate”; the
writing and
co-producing of a film, The Take, which documents
worker-occupied and
managed factories in Argentina; and, most recently, No War, an
edited
collection which includes her own essay “Baghdad Year Zero,” a report
on the
corporate looting of Iraq being attempted by the war criminals of the
Bush
administration (see Klein 2000, 2002 and 2005, and Lewis and
Klein).
Any short list of leading
English-Canadian critics of globalization should include at least another six or eight names: Himani
Bannerji, Stephen Clarkson, Daniel Drache, James Laxer, David McNally, Sherene
Razack, John Ralston Saul, and Mel
Watkins. Not
bad for a start—and I haven’t yet got around to mentioning the two
thinkers
whose writings against globalization will be the principal subject of
this
paper: economist Michel Chossudovsky, and
philosopher
John McMurtry.
One can speculate about the
immediate socio-historical
contexts that have fed this work by Canadian public
intellectuals. Nearly
sixty years ago the distinguished Canadian economic historian Harold Innis remarked that “Oscar Wilde wrote an essay
on the
decay of lying but I am not sure that it would bear reading in this
country. We are all too much concerned with the arts of suppressio veri,
suggestio falsi”
(Innis 386). But concerned in what
sense? People
who have had to endure what Innis
elsewhere called
“the Siamese twin relationship between
It may be that a high but not
wholly
suffocating level of obfuscation in one’s surroundings is a stimulus to
strong
critical thinking. The not unrelated facts that Canadians enjoy
the
benefits of socialized medicine denied to our American neighbours,
and that the destruction of our public medicare
system has for at least the past fifteen years been a principal if
unacknowledged goal of Canadian and American neoliberals
and neoconservatives alike, may have helped to orient that critical
thinking
toward the discourses and infrastructures that further, or disable,
social
justice.
And perhaps it has helped to
have
periodic pokes in the eye from that very large and sometimes openly
unfriendly
Siamese twin of ours. Recent such pokes, prompted by Canada’s lack
of
enthusiasm for the “War on Terror,”4
have included the spectacle of right-wing U.S. media pundits like the
dreary
Ann Coulter amusing themselves with threats of invasion against a
northern neighbour already labeled “Soviet
Canuckistan”
by their colleague Patrick Buchanan (see Carr, Coulter), and—more
materially—the Bush administration’s announcement that despite repeated
rejections of its position on Canadian softwood lumber imports by
international
trade tribunals, including the NAFTA adjudication panel, it will
continue to
collect punitive tariffs of twenty percent—while Canada can whistle for
the
more than five billion dollars of punitive tariffs already collected,
which by
most interpretations of trade law should long since have been
reimbursed.
There is of course an ethical as
well as
a commercial dimension to the intermittent political and economic
bullying
which these episodes exemplify. For out of fear that if Canada
showed
insufficient zeal in the hunt for potential Islamist terrorists the
United
States might delay or obstruct commercial traffic across what used to
be
celebrated as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canadian
government has shamefully participated in a U.S.-organized campaign of
arbitrary arrest and torture—most notoriously in the case of Canadian
citizen
Maher Arar, who while returning from a
vacation in
Tunisia was arrested in New York by the FBI and then “renditioned,”
with the full connivance and participation of the RCMP, to the
torture-chambers
of Syria (see Walkom). Arar,
need it be said, was in no way involved with terrorist activities.
I turn now to thinker-activists
whom I
regard as two of the pre-eminent Canadian critics of globalization:
Michel Chossudovsky and John McMurtry. At
this point a brief declaration of interest may be in order. John McMurtry has been for many years an admired
colleague of
mine at the University of Guelph, where he
taught
until his retirement last year; and Michel Chossudovsky
has published a number of my articles, including a series of essays and
bibliographical studies on the subject of the stolen U.S. presidential
election
of 2004, at the website of his Centre for Research on Globalization.5
Michel Chossudovsky
Googling
Michel Chossudovsky is a sobering
experience: there
are several scores of thousands of references to his work on the
Internet. During the 1970s, his major publications as an economist
were a
series of research papers on socialist and neoliberal
economic policies and their consequences in
But the books for which Michel Chossudovsky is best known are more
recent. The first
edition of The Globalization of Poverty was published in 1997
(a revised
and expanded edition appeared in 2003 as The Globalization of
Poverty and
the New World Order). War and Globalisation:
The Truth Behind September 11 appeared
in
2002. America’s ‘War on Terrorism’, published in 2005 as a
second
edition of War and Globalisation,
is actually
a substantially new book, more than two hundred pages longer and
containing
eleven new chapters.
In these books, which are
arguably
foundational texts for any adequate understanding of contemporary
history, and
also in many scores of articles published in scholarly journals and at
the
website of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Chossudovsky
has performed two indispensable tasks.
First, he has provided in The
Globalization of Poverty an appropriately global analysis,
formulated with
exemplary lucidity, of the worldwide devastation caused by the repeated
application in state after state, under the harsh ministrations of the
IMF and
the World Bank, of the “deadly economic prescriptions” (Chossudovsky
2002: xxii) whose initial applications in Chile and Argentina during
the 1970s
he had been able to study at first hand.
The large patterns made manifest
in The
Gobalization of Poverty can, to be
sure, be
learned about in varying degrees from other sources—among them James Petras’s and Henry Veltmeyer’s
important book Globalization Unmasked, Nobel Prize-winning
economist
Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and
its
Discontents, and, for an insider’s account which makes it very
clear that
the noxious effects of ‘Washington-Consensus’ economics are not
accidental,
John Perkins’ riveting Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. But
nowhere else, to the best of my knowledge, has such a clearly
articulated
overview been made available.
The book is based on extensive
field
research. Significantly, as Chossudovsky
indicates in the preface to the second edition, this research was
initiated
during the 1980s “in
Chossudovsky
conducted further field research in many other countries as well,
including Brazil,
Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the
Philippines,
and Russia. In all of them he observed “the same pattern of
economic
manipulation and interference by the Washington-based institutions,”
and
similarly disastrous consequences: widespread starvation in India,
“local-level
famines” in Vietnam, “abysmal poverty” throughout “vast areas of the
former
Soviet Union”—and in Yugoslavia, as in Rwanda, the further catastrophes
of
massacres and war. In Yugoslavia too, the socio-political
fracturing that
led to civil war had prior economic causes stemmng
from the re-colonizing and asset-stripping of the country under the
‘Washington-Consensus’ international regime: “Devised by World Bank
economists,
a ‘bankruptcy program’ had been set in motion. In 1989-90, some
1100
industrial firms were wiped out and more than 614,000 industrial
workers were
laid off. And that was only the beginning of a much deeper
economic
fracturing of the Yugoslav Federation” (Chossudovsky
2003: xxiii).
Chossudovsky’s
detailed analyses of the manner in which the IMF imposes loan ‘conditionalities’ on victim countries, and of
the dismal
consequences that have ensued in one country after another, produce a
forceful
recognition of the world-wide structural violence of
globalization. Of
course, the violence encoded in such documents as the ‘Letters of
Intent’
imposed upon debtor nations by the IMF has on many occasions been not
merely
structural, but also overt, and inflicted (when methods such as regime
change
through the creation and massive financing of opposition movements have
failed)
by means of coups d’état, attacks by American- or European-financed
mercenary
armies, and direct military interventions by imperial powers.
But in the preface to the second
edition, written at the time of the American and British invasion of
The events of September 11, 2001
have
been generally recognized as constituting a moment of major historical
discontinuity. Before 9/11 George W. Bush was widely thought of as
a
hapless noodle, a temporary ‘president’ (his title widely mocked by the
use of
inverted commas) whose ‘election’ in 2000, decided by a judicial coup
d’état
(see Lazare), would no doubt be reversed
the next
time around. Effective power was clearly in the hands of
Vice-President
Dick Cheney, while the hand-puppet Chief Executive seemed even to his
own
administration good for little more than long vacations at his Crawford
ranch
and visits to primary schools where he could parade his dyslexia while
making propaganda
for fraudulent “No Child Left Behind” educational reforms.6 The
administration’s handling of the economy (tax-breaks for the rich, lies
and
unemployment for the rest) was increasingly unpopular, and its
shamelessly
unilateralist foreign policy embarrassed even those Americans who had
tolerated
slightly less blatant forms of the same attitudes under Ronald Reagan
and
George Bush père.
After 9/11, in contrast, Bush
was able
to redefine himself as a war leader whose rhetoric the sycophantic
choristers
of the corporate media were not ashamed to describe as Churchillian. Even
as he proposed a “War on Terror”—an abstract noun, if you please—a war
that
would be of planetary scope and indeterminate duration, his approval
ratings
rose to unprecedented levels.
But it is not because of any
mere shift
in the opinion polls that 9/11 constitutes a moment of historical
discontinuity. In
the wake of that event, Congress was stampeded into approving the
so-called
Patriot Act, which together with related legislation had the effect, as
Gore
Vidal remarks, of “eliminating in one great erasure the Bill of Rights”
(Vidal
166).7 And
after the rapid conquest of Afghanistan the Bush administration made
clear its
appetite for further murderous dust-ups—with Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea (the
idiotically named “Axis of Evil”)—to be followed, it would seem, by
assaults on
Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and others. It began to be apparent, even
to the
dimmest of onlookers, that an attack on the United States credited to
non-state
terrorists was being used to proleptically
legitimize
an already planned sequence of attacks on states which—unless one
subscribed to
the convenient fantasies of Dick Cheney and his acolytes—had no
detectable
links to the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities. The
Michel Chossudovsky’s
contribution to an understanding of this important historical
transition has
been made possible by his calm indifference to the punishments
orthodoxy
reserves for those courageous enough to undertake a radical challenge
of its
axioms—among them denunciation as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ as a wearer
of tinfoil
hats, as a person whose arguments cannot possibly merit serious
attention. In the face of occasional bursts of flak (sometimes
including
charges of a much nastier kind),8
he has continued undeterred to gather evidence from reliable sources,
to make
principled analyses of its implications, and to offer forthright
statements of
his conclusions.
He was thus able to observe in War
and Globalisation that the war against
Afganistan had emerged out of previously
declared
geopolitical and energy-resource strategies and had been planned, long
before
9/11, for October 2001; that Osama bin Laden had long-term connections
with the
CIA, which continued between 1998 and
Chossudovsky
concludes, with characteristic directness, that “‘September
These conclusions are further
substantiated by the additional chapters and updated research of
One must likewise conclude that
the twin
consequences of an imperial-geopolitical or resource-war aggressiveness
aimed
at completing the project of globalization, and of a
devolution of American democracy in the direction of a
militarized
totalitarianism, were neither accidental nor unintended.
John McMurtry
Like Michel Chossudovsky,
John McMurtry has been a leading Canadian
critic both
of the orthodox and accepted account of 9/11 (see, for example, McMurtry 2002b), and also of the wars that event
has been
used to legitimize (McMurtry 2003,
2004). He has
also in consequence been subjected to abuse in the corporate press,
which he
shrugs off with equal nonchalance.10 But
as he has recently written, “As a philosopher, I am not interested in
‘conspiracy theories’, the favoured term
to
invalidate all questions about 9-11. I am interested in the deeper
question of the life-and-death principles of regulating value
systems which
connect across and explain social orders. In the wider lens of
investigation of the normative regime of a civilisation,
the pattern of 9-11 decisions is linked to a larger historical pattern
of
policies and an increasingly pernicious value set” (McMurtry
2002a: xiv).
This wide-spectrum interest in
social
ethics has been evident throughout McMurtry’s
writings, from his early study of The Structure of Marx’s World-View
(1978), and a second book that emerged out of his anti-war activism
during the
1980s, Understanding War: A Philosophical Inquiry (1989), to
the
forthcoming volume on Philosophy and World Problems that he is
editing
and co-writing as part of a series published by UNESCO. For
reasons of
space, I am going to limit myself here to comments on a single aspect
of McMurtry’s thought: his concept of the
“civil commons,”
which is central to his conceptualizing of the value system of what he
terms
(in opposition to the piracies of globalized
corporate capitalism) the “life economy.” The same concept is
central also
to his understanding of the possibilities of resistance and
restoration. It is elaborated in the sequence of three major books
upon
which McMurtry’s international reputation
as a
philosopher chiefly rests: Unequal Freedoms (1998), The
Cancer Stage
of Capitalism (1999), and Value Wars (2002).
One key feature of McMurtry’s
concept of the civil commons is its incorporation both of the natural
life-ground that sustains human society, and also of the human
institutions and
the web of social and discursive interactions by which this natural
life-ground
is preserved and protected from over-use and despoilment.11
In an analysis of the global
economic
and financial system that despite its higher level of abstraction is in
many
respects reminiscent of Chossudovsky’s
book The Glibalization of Poverty,
McMurtry
argues that in recent decades governments have been mutating “to become
more
and more dominantly coercive debt collectors on behalf of banks and
foreign
bond-holders from citizens who have received little or no benefit from
the
debts, and international trade agents and deal-makers for transnational
corporations against the most basic interests of domestic workers and
businesses, using the armed force of the state to enforce the
society-stripping
invasion” (McMurtry 1999: 219). What
governments
are collaborating in, he says, is a “stripping of society’s shared
life-ground,” an attack on the civil commons, which he defines as
“human
agency in personal, collective or institutional form which protects and
enables
the access of all members of a community to basic life goods” (McMurtry 1999: 192, 204). This civil
commons includes,
at the same time, those aspects of our life-ground in nature which we
can work
to preserve through “conscious human acts and social constructions (for
example, effective laws against environmental pollutants that destroy
the
‘global commons’ of the atmosphere or oceans)” (McMurtry
1999: 205)—but which under unregulated market conditions are subject to
what
Garrett Hardin in a famous but politically naïve essay, first published
in
1968, called “the tragedy of the commons.”
Hardin understood this tragedy
of the
commons as the inescapable consequence of any unconstrained application
of a
logic of marginal private advantage and communal disadvantage to a
“commons” in
nature (whether that be shared pasture-land, limited fresh water
supplies, or
fishing grounds).12 McMurtry’s much more complex concept of the
civil commons
contains within itself discursive and institutional forms of social
agency by
means of which human societies have striven—often with long-term
success—to
preserve and sustain the natural commons which support their
lives. The
concept and its associated practices thus, in McMurtry’s
usefully historicized discussions of them, provide an answer to the
question of
resource management posed by Hardin’s very preliminary exploration of
the logic
of social ecology.
But the political economy of
globalization poses a more urgent problem, since it constitutes a
simultaneous
attack upon both aspects of the civil commons—upon the structures of
human
agency which protect basic life goods and give us shared access to
them, and
also upon the underlying commons in nature on which human society
depends.
Although McMurtry’s
repeated references to social “stripping” or “strip-mining” are
evidently metaphorical,
the practices to which they refer are both real and ethically
intolerable. He mentions in Value Wars the then-recent
conversion
of Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist
of the
World Bank and Chair of the U.S. President’s Advisory Committee on the
Economy,
to a position critical of the powers he had served—and he quotes
tellingly from
a ‘post-conversion’ interview with journalist Greg Palast
in which Stiglitz provided what McMurtry
calls an “inside anatomy of the death economy.”
In that interview, Stiglitz
defined a four-stage process insisted upon by the World Bank, the IMF,
and the
U.S. Treasury, their majority stockholder, for every country within
their
power. In the first stage, countries are obliged to undertake “briberisation-privatisation,” in which publicly
owned
resources and industrial assets are sold off, with handsome commissions
going
to corrupt local elites. They must then endure “capital-market liberalisation,” or what Stiglitz
called the “Hot Money Cycle,” in which, after a flight of deregulated
speculative capital, host governments are forced by the IMF to raise
interest
rates to levels ruinous for local businesses. An ensuing stage of
“market-based pricing” of the necessities of life “squeeze[s] the blood
out of”
poor countries until “social unrest is predictably sparked”; the
resulting “IMF
riots” lead both to military solutions and to further capital flight
that
permits foreign corporations to purchase remaining assets “such as
mining
concessions or ports” at “fire-sale prices.” In the fourth and
final
stage, the pauperized local economy is coerced by “financial blockade”
into
opening itself to unrestricted foreign imports (Palast
interview with Stiglitz, quoted by McMurtry 2002a: 214).13
Described here in general terms,
instantiated in painful detail throughout Michel Chossudovsky’s
The Globalization of Poverty, and lucidly analyzed and theorized
by John
McMurtry in the books that have won him a
reputation
as one of the leading moral and social philosophers of our time, these
processes amount to a direct attack on the civil commons of what used
to be
called the “developing countries.” What then can be said—focusing
now on
the domestic politics of so-called first-world countries—of the changes
to
existing social contracts that have been demanded by conservative or neoliberal governments in North America and
across Western
Europe since the beginning of the 1980s? The objects of their
attack have
included progressive labour codes,
environmental
regulations, state-owned corporations and utilities, welfare and public
housing
programs, civil rights entitlements, international law governing human
rights,
redistributive taxation of private income and corporate profits, laws
restricting the movement of corporate capital, laws forbidding the
formation of
corporate media monopolies, and public investment in non-profit health
care, in
public non-commercial broadcasting and in education—with a particular
hostility
to the critical as opposed to instrumental functions of public higher
education. The list amounts, I would suggest, to a good first
approximation of the institutional embodiments of the civil
commons.
From diagnosis to resistance
I had it in mind, when I began
this
essay, to conclude with speculations over possible consequences of the
American
habit of bullying the neighbour in the
attic. Most Canadians don’t much mind the feeble sallies of
wittols like
Pat Buchanan or Ann Coulter—though more material factors like distaste
for war
and political-theocratic extremism, or resentment over the softwood
lumber
dispute, might well widen the existing gap between the two
countries. Or
perhaps, on the other hand, American economic pressures and political
bullying
will result in a further weakening of the Canadian civil commons and a
closer
integration of
But as Michel Chossudovsky
and John McMurtry would remind us, the
stakes are
higher than considerations such as these might suggest. Behind the
glitter
and the propaganda, globalization was always about structural violence,
about
the further enrichment of those who already own a wholly
disproportionate share
of this world’s wealth, and the further immiseration
of the dispossessed and powerless. Now we know it is also bound up
with
other kinds of violence as well—the calm violence with which the
horrifying
events of September 11, 2001 were planned, and the more urgently
murderous violence that has disseminated torture chambers of a new
American gulag around much of the globe, and has sown the cities of
Iraq with
cluster-bomb fragments, white phosphorus, and the poison dust of
depleted
uranium.
Yet at this point the deeper
meaning of
the civil commons, as embodying a whole complex of human discourses and
human
impulses that impel us toward choices which affirm life values, and
hence as
embodying also an unplumbed reservoir of resistance to the glaring
injustices
of globalization and war, comes into play. For a dawning
understanding of
the truly global and systemic nature of the problems that face us
cannot help
but be accompanied by the complementary thought that every local
movement of
resistance in defence of one or another
threatened
element of the civil commons is also a moment of awakening, and a
portal into
an equally global human solidarity.
Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer is Professor
at the
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NOTES
1
Among the many studies one might cite in
support of this opinion, I would note Mander
and
Goldsmith, Rosenberg, Hertz, Wood, George, and Buckman.
2 See Perkins, Stiglitz,
Ziegler 2002 and 2005, Petras
and Golinger
3
The institutions involved with social
reproduction are pre-eminently our schools and
universities. Important
studies of the impact of globalization on education include Barlow and
Robertson, Soley,
4
Canada’s refusal to join the “Coalition of the
Willing” in the invasion of Iraq was not especially a sign of virtue,
or of
courage: Canada took part in the assault on Afghanistan, and has
contributed
substantially to the subsequent occupation; it sent naval vessels to
the
Persian Gulf to assist with the invasion of Iraq; and it has
participated in
the American-led overthrow of the Aristide government and the
subsequent
occupation of Haiti.
5
One of these, Keefer 2005a, is of some relevance
in the present context.
6
One can of course be both dyslexic and a
genius—witness Albert Einstein and the philosopher Gillian Rose—but
Bush is
incurious, profoundly ignorant, and unethical as well as
dyslexic. As Mark
Crispin Miller has argued, the selling of such a man to the American
electorate
by the Republican Party and the corporate media poses a problem of
systemic
disorder rather than of individual incapacity: “It is as if the
7
When Attorney General John Ashcroft criticized
past restrictions on the FBI as confining it to operating “with
outdated
means,” Lewis Lapham remarked that “As
modified by
the context and subject to the circumstances, the phrase ‘outdated
means’ can
be taken to refer to any paragraph in every article of the
Constitution” (Lapham 82-83).
8
The most recent such episode has been a campaign
of defamation conducted by the Ottawa Citizen and B’nai
Brith Canada in August 2005 following the
latter’s
discovery that anonymous anti-semites had
inserted
their noxious drivel into a discussion forum hosted by Chossudovsky’s
website. For details, see Keefer 2005b. Indecent in terms
both of his
own lifelong commitments and the fact that members
of
his immediate family died at
9
Goss, a Republican and former CIA agent, has
since been made director of the CIA. Graham, who co-chaired the
Joint
Inquiry of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees into the 9/11
attacks,
subsequently wrote that “the White House was directing the cover-up” of
9/11,
and was doing so “for reasons other than national security” (Graham
166, quoted
by
12
Hardin’s point, taking the example of shared
pasture-land, is that the marginal private benefit obtained by each
cattle-owner who increases her herd by one cow will be greater than her
share
of the communal deficit caused by over-grazing; it will therefore
always be in
every cattle-owner’s private interest to contribute to destroying the
common
land by overgrazing it. Not having done any historical research,
Hardin
was unaware that societies like medieval England which practised
common-land grazing actually had quite elaborate systems of customary
law (a
nascent civil commons, in effect) designed to prevent that
outcome.
13 Words in quotation marks in this paragraph are Stiglitz’s own.