Mortgaging the Earth musical version--Annals in the history of globalization

Mortgaging the Earth musical version: My 1994 book Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (pp. 246-49), discussed a leaked memo from the World Bank in which then World Bank Vice President for Economics Larry Summers advocated "welfare enhancing economically efficient" trade of pollution and waste from industrialized polluted nations to poor "underpolluted" Third World countries. I received the leaked memo during the preparations for the 1992 United Nations Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, and had it forwarded to Brazil's then Environment Minister, the late Jose Luztenberger. Lutzenberger wrote Summers that his proposals were "perfectly logical" [according to the logic of neoliberal economics] and "totally insane." Summers went on to be U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, and after that President of Harvard. At the time he was a prime advocate of the one sided globalization that has provoked the populist--and perhaps contrary to the expectations of some progressives, often virulently right wing and nationalistic--reaction which we are witnessing in many countries today. Bard College and former Yale Music School composer John Halle got in touch with me and composed a piece based on the words of the memo, which has been publicly performed many times since its premiere in 2003. This eight minute or so composition, with youtube images, is more relevant than ever, and deeply engrossing, though disturbing.

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