two forwards...wto/imf and after genoa

[Guest guest]

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