Follow the money A conversation with Barbara Garson BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Everything connects with everything else — to the delight of Marshall McLuhan and others who looked forward to a global village of communication in the optimistic 1960s, and to the dismay of Third World countries suffering under the economic burdens of globalization today.

"The Futures of Globalization" is the theme of the 2003 Honors Colloquium at the University of Rhode Island, in Kingston. From art exhibitions to roundtable discussions and lectures, public programs continue into December. Sub-topics coming up include how globalization affects Providence (October 14), whether it is reversible (October 21), and how it affects social justice (December 2.) (For further information, go to www.uri.edu/hc.)

A talk titled "Money Makes the World Go Round: Globalization from Below" will be given by Barbara Garson on Tuesday, October 7 at 7 p.m. in Chafee 271.

In the ’60s, playwright Garson made quite a name for herself with MacBird, an anti-war cri du coeur that compared Lyndon Johnson to Macbeth and depicted his planning the Kennedy assassination. What began as street performance agitprop became a full-length play that has had more than 300 performances and sold more than a half-million copies of its text.

A self-described "socialist agitator and educator," Garson went on to write two books on social concerns: All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (1975) and The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past (1988).

But it is her 2001 book that brings her to the colloquium: Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy, from Brooklyn to Bangkok and Back. In it she followed the money, by tracing a deposit she made, from her local bank to Chase Manhattan Corp., then to some typical overseas investments. Garson ended up traveling to Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, looking into the effects of multi-million-dollar international loans upon people there, speaking with street vendors and displaced farmers and fishermen, as well as plant managers and entrepreneurs.

Garson discussed the issues recently by phone from her home in New York.

Q: Was there a precipitating experience or understanding that led you to tackle a subject as dry as international economics?

A: Basically, I didn’t know whether it meant anything at all, a new global economy. But if it meant anything, it meant it on the ground, so I would go and find out. And if it didn’t? You know, a couple of times writing the book I said, "Maybe I ought to hand this money back."

Q: Well, what was your conclusion about how new this economy is. There’s been exploitation going on for a long time.

A: Two different conclusions about the new economy. One, I came home with Internet friends from all over the world. And once I began to understand it, I became a small part of organizing demonstrations with them and that certainly is new. So the global part of the global economy I really liked and so do most of the people who are labeled anti-globalists. It’s wonderful to be part of one world!

Q: So we’re in a global village, as Marshall McLuhan was hoping, only in a different regard.

A: That was new for me, that experience. But what I don’t think was new: it took me a long time to realize that what they call global finance these days with the new economy was something that started in the ’70s. Something very unusual is happening in the advanced countries: people didn’t have enough money to buy what [the economy] could produce; there wasn’t a new source of profits and the money had to go abroad. So suddenly in the ’70s all kinds of businesses, particularly financial businesses, were demanding that all the safeguards that had existed, that were developed in the ’30s after the Great Depression, that all of them be knocked down . . . There were no currency controls. And this was just because these businesses were desperate. They didn’t have anything they could do with the money in the United States.

Q: And necessary regulation is always ex post facto.

A: Right. All these regulations, all these stoplights and go-slow signs, had to be knocked down because they were desperate. This part of it I didn’t think was new. I didn’t know, to begin with, but the impetus for saying we have to go abroad with our money and there can be no rules — we put it in, and if it does you harm, that’s your problem, and if it looks like we were silly and over-invested, then we grab the money out and you guarantee our losses, no matter what, you the poorest people in this country — that is not new.

Q: What did you find that you didn’t expect to find?

A: I always thought that, OK, it all leaves and the people are left as poor as before. I realized but I didn’t graphically understand why people would be left poorer than before. How the street vendors were selling food in front of my oil refinery, selling to the mine workers, and who at first appeared to be beneficiaries in that they could get out of their village and come here and do that, how they wound up actually poorer was very hard for me to understand at first. But, of course, it turns out that they couldn’t go back home because their villages had been razed, complete destroyed to build this refinery. And suddenly the price of rice doubled, and they didn’t understand why — but my readers did by then, understood how the IMF men came in and insisted that the Thai government take responsibility for the private loans that my bank made to finance these refineries. And then the way they would have money to pay them back would be to export their rice instead of eating it locally. So that required doubling the price, so that meant my poor street vendor — if she could find anyone to sell it to — she was the one who had to pay twice the price and therefore take less back. And yet she couldn’t just go home, she couldn’t just say, "Oh, I guess this just didn’t work out."

Q: So as dislocations take effect, there are new situations in place for these people.

A: But that’s OK. I mean, life changes. I often muse about that with people who like myself are speaking English and our parents [and] grandparents were immigrants. But this other new factor, with the IMF and World Bank and things like that, all the loans and all the so-called investments, this wild investment that was ill-advised, the money is going to be returned whether the investment was ill-advised or not. An unnecessary oil refinery that "my" company insisted on building, even though the local government didn’t want it. And the debt for the price of that oil refinery.