Guest guest Posted September 6, 2001 Report Share Posted September 6, 2001 What Are We For? Part One By Michael Albert Anti-globalization activists understand that sympathetic and mutually beneficial global ties are good. But we want social and global ties to advance universal equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management, not to subjugate ever-wider populations to an elite minority. We want to globalize equity not poverty, solidarity not anti-sociality, diversity not conformity, democracy not subordination, and ecological balance not suicidal rapaciousness. Two questions arise. Why do these aspirations leave us critical of corporate globalization? And what new institutions do we propose for meeting these aspirations? Rejecting Capitalist Globalization Current international market trading benefits overwhelmingly those who enter today's exchanges already possessing the most assets. When trade occurs between a U.S. multinational and a local entity in Mexico, Guatemala, or Thailand, the benefits do not go more to the weaker party with fewer assets, nor are they divided equally, but they go disproportionately to the stronger traders who thereby increase their relative dominance. Opportunist rhetoric aside, capitalist globalizers try to disempower the poor and already weak and to further empower the rich and already strong. The result: of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 aren't countries; they are corporations. Similarly, market competition for resources, revenues, and audience is most often a zero sum game. To advance, each actor preys off the defeat of others so that capitalist globalization promotes a self-interested me-first attitude that generates hostility and destroys solidarity between individuals, industries, and states. Public and social goods are downplayed, private ones elevated. Businesses and nations augment their own profits while imposing losses on others. Human well being and development for everyone is not a guiding precept. Solidarity fights a rearguard battle against capitalist globalization. Moreover, in current global exchange structures, whether they are McDonaldsesque or Disneyesque or instead derive from worthy indigenous roots, cultural communities and values disperse only as widely as their megaphone permits them too, and worse, are drowned out by other communities with larger megaphones who impinge on them. Capitalist globalization swamps quality with quantity and creates cultural homogenization not diversity. Not only does Starbucks proliferate, so do Hollywood images and Madison Avenue styles. What is indigenous and non-commercial struggles to even survive. Diversity declines. In the halls of the capitalist globalizers, only political and corporate elites are welcome. The idea that the broad public of working people, consumers, farmers, the poor and the disenfranchised should have proportionate say is actively opposed. Indeed, the point of capitalist globalization is precisely to reduce the influence of whole populations and even of state leaderships save for the most powerful elements of Western corporate and political rule. Capitalist globalization imposes corporatist hierarchy not only in economics, but also in politics. Authoritarian and even fascistic state structures proliferate. The numbers of voices with even marginal say declines. As the financiers in corporate headquarters extend stockholders' influence, the earth beneath is dug, drowned, and paved without attention to species, by-products, ecology, or humanity. Only profit and power drive the calculations. Anti-globalization activists oppose capitalist globalization because capitalist globalization violates the equity, diversity, solidarity, self- management, and ecological balance that activists pursue. Supporting Global Justice What do anti-globalization activists propose to replace the institutions of capitalist globalization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization? The International Monetary Fund or IMF and World Bank were established after World War II. The IMF was meant to provide means to combat financial disruptions adversely impacting countries and people around the world. It employed negotiations and pressures to stabilize currencies and to help countries avoid economy disrupting financial machinations and confusions. The World Bank was meant to facilitate long-term investment in underdeveloped countries, to expand and strengthen their economies. It was to lend major project investment money at low interest to correct for the lack of local capacity. Within existing market relations, these limited goals were positive. Over time, however, and accelerating dramatically in the 1980s, the agenda of these institutions changed. Instead of facilitating stable exchange rates and helping countries protect themselves against financial fluctuations, the IMF began bashing any and all obstacles to capital flow and unfettered profit seeking, virtually the opposite of its mandate. Instead of facilitating investment on behalf of the local poor economics, the World Bank became a tool of the IMF, providing and withholding loans as carrot or stick to compel open corporate access, and financing projects not with an eye to benefits for the recipient country, but with far more attention to benefits going to major multinationals. In addition, the World Trade Organization or WTO that was desired in the early post war period actually came into being only decades later, in the mid 1990s. Its agenda became to regulate trade on behalf of the already rich and powerful. Instead of only imposing on third world countries low wages and high pollution due to being able to easily coerce their weak or bought-off governments, as IMF and World Bank policies accomplish, why not also weaken all governments and agencies that might defend workers, consumers, or the environment, not only in the third world, but everywhere? Why not remove any efforts to limit trade due to its labor implications, its ecology implications, its social or cultural implications, or its development implications, leaving as the only legal criteria whether there are immediate, short-term profits to be made? If national or local laws impede trade-say an environmental, a health, or a labor law-the WTO adjudicates, and its entirely predictable pro-corporate verdict is binding. The WTO trumps governments and populations on behalf of corporate profits. The full story about these three centrally important global institutions is longer, of course, but improvements are not hard to conceive. First, why not have, instead of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, an International Asset Agency, a Global Investment Assistance Agency, and a World Trade Agency. These three new (not merely reformed) institutions would work to attain equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance in international financial exchange, investment and development, trade, and cultural exchange. .. They would try to ensure that the benefits of trade and investment accrue disproportionately to the weaker and poorer parties involved, not to the already richer and more powerful. .. They would not prioritize commercial considerations over all other values, but would prioritize national aims, cultural identity, and equitable development. .. They would not require domestic laws, rules, and regulations designed to further worker, consumer, environmental, health, safety, human rights, animal protection, or other non-profit centered interests to be reduced or eliminated, but they would work to enhance all these, rewarding those who attain such aims most successfully. .. They would not undermine democracy by shrinking the choices available to democratically controlled governments, but they would work to subordinate the desires of multinationals and large economies to the survival, growth, and diversification of smaller units. .. They would not promote global trade at the expense of local economic development and policies, but vice versa. .. They would not force Third World countries to open their markets to rich multinationals and to abandon efforts to protect infant domestic industries, but would facilitate the reverse. .. They would not block countries from acting in response to potential risk to human health or the environment, but would help identify health, environmental, and other risks, and assist countries in guarding against their ill effects. .. Instead of downgrading international health, environmental, and other standards to a low level through a process called " downward harmonization, " they would work to upgrade standards via a new " upward equalization. " The new institutions would not limit governments' ability to use their purchasing dollars for human rights, environmental, worker rights, and other non-commercial purposes, but would advise and facilitate doing just that. They would not disallow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced-irrespective of whether they were made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxins, or with no regard for species protection-but would facilitate just such differentiations. Instead of bankers and bureaucrats carrying out policies of presidents to affect the life situations of the very many without even a pretense at participation by those impacted, these new institutions would be open and democratic, transparent, participatory, and bottom up, with local, popular, and democratic accountability. These new institutions would promote and organize international cooperation to restrain out-of-control global corporations, capital, and markets by regulating them to make it possible for people in local communities to control their own economic lives. .. They would promote trade that reduces the threat of financial volatility and meltdown, enlarges democracy at every level from the local to the global, defends and enriches human rights for all people, respects and fosters environmental sustainability worldwide, and facilitates economic advancement of the most oppressed and exploited groups, and at the request of smaller trade partners would intervene to prevent violations of these guiding norms. .. They would encourage domestic economic growth and development, not domestic austerity in the interest of export-led growth. .. They would encourage the major industrial countries to coordinate their economic policies, currency exchange rates, and short-term capital flows in the public interest and not for private profit. .. They would establish standards for and oversee the regulation of financial institutions by national and international regulatory authorities, encouraging the shift of financial resources from speculation to useful and sustainable development. .. They would establish taxes on foreign currency transactions to reduce destabilizing short-term cross-border financial flows and to provide pools of funds for investment in long-term environmentally and socially sustainable development in poor communities and countries. .. They would create public international investment funds to meet human and environmental needs and ensure adequate global demand by channeling funds into sustainable long-term investment. .. And they would develop international institutions to perform functions of monetary regulation currently inadequately performed by national central banks, such as a system of internationally coordinated minimum reserve requirements on the consolidated global balance sheets of all financial firms. These new institutions would also work to get wealthy countries to write off the debts of impoverished countries and to create a permanent insolvency mechanism for adjusting debts of highly indebted nations. They would use regulatory institutions to help establish public control and citizen sovereignty over global corporations and to curtail corporate evasion of local, state, and national law, such as establishing a binding Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations that includes regulation of labor, environmental, investment, and social behavior. And second, in addition to getting rid of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO and replacing them with the three dramatically new and different structures outlined above, anti-globalization activists also advocate a recognition that international relations should not derive from centralized but rather from bottom-up institutions. The new overarching structures mentioned above should therefore gain their credibility and power from an array of arrangements, structures, and ties enacted at the level of citizens, neighborhoods, states, nations and groups of nations, on which they rest. And these more grass-roots structures, alliances, and bodies defining debate and setting agendas should, like the three earlier described one, also be transparent, participatory and democratic, and guided by a mandate that prioritizes equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological sustainability and balance. The overall idea is simple. The problem isn't international relations per se. Anti globalization activists are, in fact, internationalist. The problem is that capitalist globalization alters international relations to further benefit the rich and powerful. In contrast, activists want to alter relations to weaken the rich and powerful and empower and improve the conditions of the poor and weak. Anti-globalization activists know what we want internationally--global justice in place of capitalist globalization. But what about domestically? What do we want inside our own countries? Part Two will address that aspect of the vision question. ---- After Genoa by Naomi Klein Part of the tourist ritual of traipsing through Italy in August is marvelling at how the locals have mastered the art of living -- and then complaining bitterly about how everything is closed. " So civilised, " you can hear North Americans remarking over four-course lunches. " Now somebody open up that store and sell me some Pradas NOW! " This year, August in Italy was a little different. Many of the southern beach towns where Italians hide from tourists were half-empty, and the cities never paused. When I arrived two weeks ago, journalists, politicians, and activists all reported that it was the first summer of their lives when they didn't take a single day off. How could they? First there was Genoa, then: After Genoa. The fall-out from protests against the G8 in July is redrawing the country's political landscape - and everybody wants a change to shape the results. Newspapers are breaking circulation records. Meetings - anything having to do with politics - are bursting at the seams. In Naples I went to an activist planning session about an upcoming NATO summit; more than 700 people crammed into a sweltering classroom to argue about " the movement's strategy After Genoa. " Two days later, near Bologna, a conference about politics " After Genoa " drew 2000; they stayed until 11 p.m. The stakes in this period are high. Were the 200,000 (some say 300,000) people on the streets in July an unstoppable force that will eventually unseat Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi? Or will Genoa be the beginning of a long silence, a time when citizens equate mass gatherings with terrifying violence? For the first weeks after the summit, attention was focused squarely on the brutality of the Italian police: the killing of 23 year-old Carlo Giuliani, reports of torture in the prisons, the bloody midnight raid on a school where activists slept. But Mr. Berlusconi, whose training is in advertising, is not about to relinquish the meaning of Genoa that easily. In recent weeks, Mr. Berlusconi has been furiously recasting himself as " a good father " determined to save his family from imminent danger. Lacking a real threat, he has manufactured one: an obscure United Nations conference on hunger, scheduled for Rome, November 5-9. To much media fanfare, Mr. Berlusconi has announced that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) meeting will not be held in " sacred Rome " because " I don't want to see our cities smashed and burnt. " Instead, it will be held somewhere remote (much like Canada's plans to hold the next G8 in secluded Kananaskis). This is shadow boxing at its best. No one planned to disrupt the meeting. The event would have attracted some minor protest, mostly from critics of genetically modified crops. Some hoped the meeting would be an opportunity to debate the root causes of hunger - much as those pushing for slavery reparations are doing in Durban. Jacques Diouf, director of FAO, seems to be relishing the unexpected attention. After all, despite being saddled with the crushing mandate of cutting world hunger in half, the FAO attracts almost no outside interest -- from politicians or protesters. The organization's biggest problem is that it is so uncontroversial, it's practically invisible. " For all these arguments.about this change of venue, I would like to say I am very grateful, " Mr. Diouf told reporters last week. " Now people in every country know that there will be a summit to talk about the problems of hunger. " But even though the threat of anti-FAO violence was dreamed up by Mr. Berlusconi, his actions are part of a serious assault on civil liberties in After Genoa Italy. On Sunday, Italy's Parliamentary Relations Minister Carlo Giovanardi said that during November's FAO meeting, " demonstrations in the capital will be prohibited. It is a duty, " he said, " to ban demonstrations in certain places and at certain times. " There may be a similar ban on public assembly in Naples during the NATO meeting, which has also been moved out of the city. There was even talk of cancelling a concert by Manu Chao in Naples last Friday. The musician supports the Zapatistas, sings about " clandestinos " and played to the crowds in Genoa - that, apparently, was enough for the police to smell a riot in the making. In a country that remembers the logic of authoritarianism, this is all chillingly familiar: first create a climate of fear and tension, then suspend constitutional rights in the interest of protecting " public order. " So far, Italians seem unwilling to play into Mr. Berlusconi's hand. The Manu Chao concert took place as planned. There was, of course, no violence. But 70,000 people did dance like crazy in the pouring rain, a much-needed release after a long and difficult summer. The crowds of police ringing the concert looked on. They seemed tired, like they could have used a day off. www.nologo.org Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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