APRIL 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 4

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B O O K    N O T E S

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IN A VERY NARROW SENSE, nearly half of The Buying of the President is dated, a mere few months after its release. The race for the Republican presidential nomination is over, the campaign finance records of Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and other challengers no longer a matter of preeminent public interest.

But for those who remain interested in more than horse-race political reporting, The Buying of the President makes for important and compelling reading.

More than by uncovering individual scandals, the book makes its impression by revealing the extent to which the major parties and all serious contenders for the presidency rely on major corporate funding of their election campaigns.

The aggregate picture painted is mind-numbing. In addition to listing the top 10 career patrons of each of the major candidates and providing other statistical data on campaign financing, the book offers narrative accounts of each candidate's ties to major donors and funny money. Among the stories recounted:

• How President Clinton has worked to pay off his debt of gratitude to the investment firm of Goldman Sachs, his largest contributor, by hiring Robert Rubin as assistant secretary and then secretary of treasury. In his advocacy of and control over the Mexican bailout, Rubin has been able to make decisions of enormous import to his old workmates.

• How Lamar Alexander made $620,000 on a $1 investment on an option to buy the Knoxville Journal. From 1981 to 1988, Alexander made $1.9 million on $20,000 invested in four separate businesses, including a deal with Whittle Communications. Whittle invented Channel One, the commercial television network for schools, and hopes to operate a chain of for-profit schools. In 1991, Alexander became secretary of education in the Bush administration.

• How contributions to Bob Dole from the Ernest and Julio Gallo company and family have paid off handsomely. The senator from Kansas has worked to guard the Market Promotion Program, a corporate welfare scheme designed to support U.S. agribusiness exports which yielded Gallo more than $23 million between 1986 and 1994; he intervened in an administrative dispute to permit Gallo to replace the term "bulk processing" on its champagne bottles with "the Charmat method;" and he has opposed "sin taxes."

Those candidates who responded to the Center for Public Integrity's request for comments on the allegations included in The Buying of the President held to a single line: each claimed they would have taken the same positions had they not received financing from their corporate benefactors.

This contention is a valid criticism of The Buying of the President and similar efforts to document how money distorts politics. Although the politicians' defense is less plausible in cases where they took action on matters of narrow concern to a contributor -- such as Dole's intervention in the Gallo bulk-processing label dispute -- it may often be the case that they would have taken the same position on a policy question in the absence of campaign donor interest.

But The Buying of the President is careful not to make unfounded charges of direct quid pro quo arrangements. And the aggregate effect of the book's documentation should succeed in persuading even the staunchest believers in the integrity of the current U.S. political system that something is seriously wrong.

A more surprising flaw in the book is its failure to offer an agenda for reform. Although it alludes to various proposals for campaign finance reform, it does not advocate any, instead calling only for citizen vigilance in assessing candidates and a call to always "follow the money."

-- Robert Weissman

Breakfast of Biodiversity:
The Truth About Rain Forest Destruction
John Vandermeer & Ivette Perfecto
Oakland, California:
Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1995
185 pp. $16.95

BREAKFAST OF BIODIVERSITY IS ANOTHER TRIUMPH for Food First, the Oakland-based food policy thinktank which has done so much to demonstrate, in laypersons' terms, that malnutrition, food production and food security are not so much scientific or technical problems and challenges as political and social ones.

Breakfast of Biodiversity is not full of pictures of lush rainforests and exotic animal dwellers, but a non-romantic, straight-ahead look at the causes of rainforest destruction.

John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto argue that rainforest destruction does not occur due to overpopulation or indeed due to any other single cause; they contend that rainforest destruction can only be understood as resulting from a "web of causality" -- a range of interconnecting social processes. The strands of their web of causality include: commercial logging, peasant farming, unequal land distribution, chemical-intensive agriculture and the Third World debt and global economic inequality.

The metaphor of a "web" is intended to convey multiple causes and processes. In abbreviated form, Vandermeer and Perfecto describe the following:

• Commercial logging completely clears forests in some instances, but more often involves selective cutting that leaves substantial tree stands.

• Logging roads make rainforests accessible, attracting peasants who are starved for land.

• Peasant farming often gives way to modern, chemical-intensive, plantation farming, as large domestic or foreign agribusiness concerns buy or steal land from small farmers. Government policies support commercial agriculture, partly because of government officials' alignment with local and foreign business elites, but especially because indebted Third World nations are desperate to earn foreign currency.

• Plantations attract migrant laborers, who are periodically discharged from their jobs as international markets for the plantations' goods contract. Without available alternatives, those migrants then encroach on nearby rainforest land.

Central to Breakfast of Biodiversity's perspective is the notion that while rainforest land can be degraded, it is not as fragile as often portrayed. That means that rainforest land cleared, or partially cleared, of trees can recover relatively quickly, and can maintain a high degree of biodiversity.

A related point is that non-intensively farmed peasant land can also support a high degree of biodiversity. There may be no sharp qualitative break between a virgin rainforest and a mixed, non-chemical peasant farm in rainforest territory, Vandermeer and Perfecto argue.

With these understandings of the web of causality of rainforest destruction and the nature of rainforest biodiversity and regeneration, Vandermeer and Perfecto assert that the traditional approach to rainforest preservation is misguided. Citing the case of Costa Rica, they write that protecting pockets of rainforest, while permitting modern plantations in the area around the pockets, or simply ignoring areas between the pockets altogether, is unlikely to have much beneficial effect in the long run. Eventually, the dynamics of encroachment on rainforest land will cross even into the pockets, and no rainforest will be preserved at all.

An effective approach to rainforest protection must be a holistic one, they contend. What goes on between pockets of extant rainforest is critical. If the land is broadly distributed and used for sustainable peasant farming, high degrees of biodiversity can be maintained -- even on farmed land -- and local farmers will not seek to encroach on rainforests. And if there are no commercial plantations in the area, in-migrants will not put additional pressure on rainforests. The problem with this approach, Vandermeer and Perfecto acknowledge, is that it runs against powerful forces in the international political economy, and in domestic ones as well.

The great achievement of Food First books is to treat complicated concepts intelligently, but in an extraordinarily accessible and easy-and-fun-to-read way -- all the while explaining how social and political structures, not inevitable and uncontrollable forces, are responsible for poverty-related problems. Breakfast of Biodiversity lives up to the tradition. -- Robert Weissman

The People Versus Global Capital
By The International People's Tribunal
New York: Apex, 1994
163 pp.

THIS THIN, HIGHLY INFORMATIVE BOOK details how the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and their corporate and governmental allies are quietly undermining democracy and economic development throughout the world.

International financial organizations usually operate below the radar of the mainstream news media, aside from perhaps the random story about how a new dam is forcing the relocation of a town or how a new area of a rainforest is being chopped down to raise debt-service capital. But such articles often only hint at the devastation the international economic system is visiting upon peoples around the world.

To publicize the effects of international lending projects, the International People's Tribunal invited scholars and activists from around the world to testify about the damages their nations have suffered. Together they condemn the aggressive efforts to force rapid debt repayments from nations with limping economies already unable to feed, clothe and educate many of their people.

These reports, which make up much of the book, speak of how, for example, rapid repayments cause hyperinflation in South America, force desperate emigration from Central America to the United States, increase illiteracy and malnutrition in Jamaica and cut sanitation programs in India.

There are other costs as well. In nations where high debt service payments are required, political leaders do not dare move toward democracy, which would give citizens more of a chance to throw them out of office, whether these leaders are responsible or not. After all, citizens cannot really punish unaccountable institutions like the World Bank or the IMF.

The tribunal, a permanent international organization based in Rome, draws attention to unanswered grievances citizens have against nations and international organizations. They present "indictments" against organizations and governments.

Unlike some investigations of this nature, the tribunal develops proposals designed to remedy the problems caused by aggressive loan repayment programs forced on the South. In particular, the group draws attention to how the further cheapening of labor in the developing world makes it all the easier (and all the more profitable) for corporations to abandon factories in high-wage nations like the United States. It urges worker and human rights organizations in the United States and elsewhere to do more to internationalize peoples' movements against international financial organizations and multinational corporations.

The tribunal also urges international organizations to take greater account of non-monetary factors such as increased illiteracy and deforestation when they impose payment programs on indebted nations. Too often, they complain, such factors are simply out of the equation, "externalities" to the economic accounting of how much a nation can afford to pay. The tribunal also proposes greater North-South financial transfers.

In the euphoria after World War II, U.S. boosters proclaimed the twentieth century the American Century. Books like The People Versus Global Capital show that the twentieth century has actually become the Corporate Century. Prospects for the twenty-first century suggest conditions may become even worse unless people join international movements to limit such unchecked and dangerous power.

-- Steve Farnsworth