Micah Pyles
petition. One of many such examples includes Union Carbide’s acquisition of Adesite, a Brazilian tape manufacture. During the early years of structural adjustment (1970s) Scotch Tape—a part of the U.S. based Union Carbide—arrived in the Brazilian market and “began steadily lowering the price of its products…Adesite’s sales kept going down. The banks cut off credit. Scotch Tape continued lowering its prices by 30 percent, then by 40 percent. Then, Union Carbide appeared on the scene and bought the desperate Brazilian concern for a song” (Galeano 1997: 223). Of course, after winning out, Union Carbide then monopolized the market and raised the price of tape by 50 percent in order to compensate for multiple years of profit loss (Galeano 1997). In this way, the vast majority of national industries within Latin America, whether privately owned, state owned or a combination of the two, fell prey to multinational corporations disproportionality from the United States. What then, was the fate of the former “industrial bourgeoisie” after this vicious phase of denationalization? Being more afraid of mass rebellion at home than imperialist domination from abroad, ruling elites most often assimilated into the new industrial model, becoming “agents and functionaries of proponent foreign corporations” (Galeano 1997: 208, 214). Thus the role played by local elites in subordinating their own national sovereignty to the will of international lending institutions and the economic entities they serve is made lucid.What remains of these ruling classes today does indeed constitute internal dominant social factions; however, these are social factions that are in turn dominated from abroad (Galeano 1997).The next logical question that arises, given the continued state of underdevelopment within Latin American, is why hasn’t the IMFs model for economic modernization been successful in its efforts? One primary reason is that the liberalizing policies under SAPs allow for the free flow of capital, therefore, profits made by transnational corporations do not remain in LDCs, but hemorrhage out in whatever fashion so wished by capital controllers. For example, multiple reports by the Economic Commission for Latin
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