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There Is an Alternative to Corporate Rule
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Dawn Stanger
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Sep 14, 2008 03:14 PDT
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There Is an Alternative to Corporate Rule
All over the world, truly democratic approaches are bubbling up from the
grassroots.
by Mark Engler
One of the remarkable features of modern political life is how
consistently global elites deny that viable alternatives to the current
global order exist, even as the terrain of international politics
rapidly shifts. The "imperial globalists" that rose to power in the Bush
years contend that without U.S. military strength decisively projected
abroad, the forces of evil will sweep the globe. Meanwhile, "corporate
globalists" of Wall Street persist in their belief that, in the
post-Cold War world, we have no choice but to embrace the continual
advance of the "free" market.
Neither idea is credible. The disastrous war in Iraq has firmly
contradicted the neocons' argument that preemptive war can create
security. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits continue to proclaim
neoliberalism -- the radical free market doctrine that has defined the
"Washington Consensus" in international economics in recent decades --
to be inevitable and irreplaceable. Yet as that ideology falls into
disrepute across the globe, their contention is revealed as ever more
deeply disingenuous. Today, there exist scores of books and hundreds of
reports that offer new directions for the global order -- plus
innumerable initiatives at local, national, and international levels to
create political and economic systems that uphold human rights and
defend the environment.
In truth, a lack of viable ideas is hardly the problem for those who
reject both corporate and imperial models of globalization. Whether they
are part of boisterous national uprisings or quiet, persistent community
efforts to fuel a truly democratic globalization -- a globalization from
below -- members of grassroots networks are now engaged in a debate
about the proper balance of vision, program, political strategy, and
tactics needed to move forward.
Changes in the Global Justice Movement
Part of what has fueled public confusion about alternatives was specific
to the political moment when globalization protests captured the
attention of the mainstream media. During the period around the year
2000, global justice organizing was being covered only in contexts where
participants were providing a voice of opposition -- at the summit
meetings of institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), World
Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF). These events became flash
points of resistance for a reason: the summit meetings were remarkably
effective at drawing together a tremendously diverse body of global
citizen activists.
Yet the globalization scene began to shift early in the Bush years, with
the attacks of 9/11 playing an important role in the change. Just as
abruptly as the major news outlets had announced the arrival of a "new"
global movement after the Seattle protests against the WTO, challenges
to the Washington Consensus became virtually invisible to their
reporters once again after 9/11. This only partially reflected what was
happening on the ground. In the months following the attacks, some
protests -- notably a major mobilization against World Bank and IMF
meetings in Washington, DC -- were cancelled as the world rose to
express sympathy for the victims. However, the Bush administration's
reckless response wiped out global good will and ultimately widened the
scope of protests.
As strategies to impose elite visions of globalization continued, global
justice protests throughout the world resumed. Many people, particularly
in Southern countries, combined outrage at U.S. militarism with a
repudiation of corporate globalization. When Bush traveled abroad, he
was met with huge protests, many of which raised economic issues as well
as anti-war concerns. Yet media outlets mostly reported these
demonstrations as incoherent anti-American riots when they covered them
at all. Beltway pundits rushed to declare the global justice movement
dead. Leading the pack was Edward Gresser of the Progressive Policy
Institute, the think-tank of the pro-"free trade" Democratic Leadership
Council, who pronounced the movement "destined for irrelevance" in a
realigned world.
Millions of people had reason to protest. These activists were about to
redraw the political map of Latin America, preside over the collapse of
neoliberalism's legitimacy, lead a worldwide rebellion against
preemptive war, and push issues of economic justice to ever more
prominent places in the global development debate. Their efforts for a
democratic globalization, they would assert, were very much alive.
The View From Porto Alegre
As it turned out, a most visible manifestation of the next stage of
global justice movement would come from a modest city of 1.5 million
people deep in the south of Brazil, a place whose name has become
synonymous with the pursuit of a more just and democratic global order.
Today, mention of Porto Alegre, the original home of the World Social
Forum, should be sufficient to forever put to rest the knee-jerk
contention that there is no alternative to dominant visions of
globalization.
Even as progressives within the U.S. turned to resisting Bush
administration policies of preemptive war and its reactionary assaults
on Constitutional rights, international movements have not waited for
regime change in the U.S. to further the decline of the Washington
Consensus. Massive crowds have joined Americans in rallying against the
war in Iraq, as on February 15, 2003, when upwards of ten million people
in over 500 cities took to the streets, constituting the largest
coordinated global day of action in history. But, at the same time,
local communities have waged battles to reverse privatization of public
utilities and transnational campaigns have fought for reforms like debt
cancellation. In countries throughout Latin America, they have
successfully overthrown neoliberal governments, elected leaders who
oppose the Washington Consensus, and they have pressured those officials
to enact social policies that serve working people.
Reflecting this sustained torrent of global activity, the World Social
Forum has grown and matured. While the first global forum in 2001 hosted
12,000 participants, subsequent events have grown larger and larger,
drawing crowds of up to 150,000 people. In addition to returning to
Porto Alegre for three additional years after the initial summit, the
global event has also convened in Mumbai, India and Nairobi, Kenya, with
smaller forums taking place at the regional level. At World Social
Forum, community leaders, nonprofit representatives, scholars,
organizers, and progressive lawmakers have presented, debated, and
refined ideas that collectively represent as comprehensive a set of
policies for the global economy as any wonky campaign office could ever
hope to devise. These spaces have served as physical embodiments of the
proposals for a democratic globalization.
Groups meeting in tents designated for discussion of energy and the
environment have strategized about ways to break our dependence on the
oil economy. They have proposed investment in mass public
transportation, high mileage standards for cars, and shifting government
subsidies for hydrocarbon exploitation to alternative energy. Other
environmentalists have worked to promote an international carbon tax to
penalize polluters -- something undoubtedly in the public interest,
especially given mounting evidence about the perils of global warming.
All these represent perfectly viable public policies, but have been
vehemently opposed by the oil industry.
In other tents, family farmers and food safety advocates from throughout
the world have gathered to promote models for redistributive land
reform. Even the international financial institutions acknowledge that
land reform would be beneficial for the poor, but it has been pushed off
the political map by national elites and agribusiness conglomerates.
Other advocates explained how current government subsidies for exports
and for pesticides boost large-scale "mono-cropping" over organic
agriculture; in response, they argued for a shift in public funds to
support sustainable farming. Indigenous communities further asserted
their right to self-determination, particularly with regard to
maintaining traditional systems of land ownership and food production.
Tents holding discussions on the need to curb corporate power have
advanced a slate of innovative proposals. These include public financing
of elections to end what U.S. Senator Russ Feingold has called "a system
of legalized bribery and legalized extortion." They include laws that
allow victims of corporate abuses in the developing world to sue in U.S.
or European courts. And they include detailed proposals for
strengthening anti-trust law in order to break up business monopolies --
among them the massive media empires that do much to set the limits of
public debate.
A group called ATTAC, one of the organizations that founded the World
Social Forum, has set up tents promoting campaigning for the Tobin Tax.
First proposed by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin in the
1970s, the initiative would impose a low percentage tax on the hundreds
of billions of dollars worth of international financial transactions
that take place each day. This would provide a disincentive for
short-term gambling on currencies, and it would encourage longer-term
and more productive investment. Moreover, even a miniscule levy could
create an annual fund of upwards of $100 billion that could be used to
stop the spread of disease and alleviate global poverty.
Warehouse workspaces hosting labor organizations have offered myriad
methods for protecting workers' rights and ending sweatshop conditions.
Over seventy cities and localities in the United States have passed
Living Wage laws since the early 1990s. These go beyond paltry minimum
wage requirements and mandate that businesses pay employees at least
enough to keep their families out of poverty. At the social forums, U.S.
advocates discussed how to spread these campaigns. Meanwhile,
representatives from the estimated 180 worker-run factories that formed
after capital fled Argentina's collapsing neoliberal economy in 2001
spoke about their experiences in self-management. And groups like the
Women's International Coalition for Economic Justice have stressed that
U.N.-backed summits and other international efforts to advance women's
rights must not be subordinated to multilateral trade agreements.
Finally, workshops organized by representatives from the fair trade
movement profiled endeavors to build direct ties between producers in
the global South and Northern consumers. The fair trade model aims to
eliminate exploitative middlemen, ensure that workers get a living wage
for their labor, and give local collectives a greater say in the
determining the conditions under which international economic exchanges
take place. Like organic food, fair trade remains a niche market, and it
cannot substitute for wider structural changes in global economy. But it
provides both a living alternative to exploitative trade and a hopeful
model for future change.
Even this wide range of activity hardly constitutes an exhaustive
survey. Unlike the corporate and imperial models, a globalization from
below does not take the form of one-size-fits-all prescription for the
global economy. With regard to alternative policies, the model of
participatory democracy produces, in the words of another slogan, "One
No, Many Yeses." It generates a strong challenge to structures of
neoliberalism and empire, but allows for a wider sense of what might
replace them.
Contrary to individual manifestos that presume that a lack of ideas is
the problem for progressives, the advocates at Porto Alegre have
presented an agenda for change rooted in local struggles and campaigns
that have long been underway. Excellent volumes such as Alternatives to
Economic Globalization, a book compiled by the San Francisco-based
International Forum on Globalization, have profiled other aspects of
this agenda. The Human Development Reports produced annually by the
United Nations Development Program have backed many of these same
initiatives. A number of progressive proposals have even been introduced
as legislation in the U.S. Congress in such measures as the recent TRADE
Act, advanced by fair trade advocates this summer. Needless to say, the
elite beneficiaries of corporate and imperial rule, still steadfast in
their contention that no alternatives exist, would prefer that the
public not take notice of any of these developments.
Just Saying No, or First Do No Harm
The ideas, experiences, and proposals of the World Social Forum provide
a trove of information for all those who want to construct a new agenda
for the global economy. At the same time, as long as democratic
movements do not have the power to overrule political and economic
elites, there exists an important case for just saying "no" -- for first
insisting that those now in power stop doing harm.
When Wall Street neoliberals and Washington militarists ask, "What is
the alternative?" they base the question on faulty assumptions. Their
question serves to naturalize very radical agendas of empire and
corporate rule, suggesting that these are normal and acceptable states
of affairs. They are not. In a situation where power is grossly
imbalanced, where crimes are being perpetuated in the name of democracy,
and where ever larger sections of public life are being handed over to
the market, saying "no" to these radical agendas can be a perfectly
worthy task in itself.
In an important respect, the alternative to invading Iraq is not
invading Iraq. The alternative to NAFTA is no NAFTA. The neocons'
invasion of Iraq has cost thousands of American lives, taken the lives
of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, produced some two million
refugees, and is set to squander over a trillion dollars of public
funds. It has generated heightened regional tensions, greater
instability, and more terrorism. Given the disastrous history of U.S.
interventions -- not just in Iraq, but also, to mention some
particularly ignoble examples of the past 60 years, in Vietnam,
Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, the Dominican Republic,
and Nicaragua -- calling for a moratorium on such military actions,
official and covert, is a first step in stemming the damage of imperial
globalization.
The agenda of corporate globalization, which unfortunately thrived
during the Clinton presidency and is still popular within the right wing
of the Democratic Party, is subtler. But this, too, has relied on
forceful maneuvering to come into existence. Neoliberalism involves
aggressively opening markets, clearing the way for a previously unheard
of level of speculative capital transfer, and dictating the
restructuring of local economies. None of these things occur naturally,
and they deserve opposition. A moratorium on harmful "free trade" deals
and on further expansion of the WTO, especially into areas beyond the
traditional realm of trade, is a vital immediate demand.
Simply refusing each of the mandates of the Washington Consensus -- or
at least rejecting the idea that they should be imposed world as a
one-size-fits-all uniform for development -- would itself allow for a
substantial restructuring of globalization politics. The true utopians
in the global economy are people who embraced the market fundamentalist
fantasy that unchecked capital would serve the common good. Refuting
this idea can be fairly straightforward.
Neoliberal corporate globalization prescribes the elimination of tariffs
and other protections for local enterprises. An alternative would be to
allow poorer countries to keep these intact, reviving what is known in
trade agreements as "special and differential treatment." This model
would give developing countries more flexibility in choosing to nurture
infant industries and to protect agricultural commodities that are
important to traditional cultures and to the security of their food
supply. When the Washington Consensus demands the privatization of
public industry and the division of the commons into private property,
an alternative is to keep these things in the hands of the public,
defending the provision of public goods as a way of ensuring economic
human rights -- including guaranteed public access to water,
electricity, and health care. If it calls for cuts in social services,
an alternative is to reject the cuts, maintaining or bolstering these
services and instead pushing for a redistributive tax system that makes
the wealthy pay their fair share.
When Washington mandates a more "flexible" labor market -- one without
unions or worker protections -- an alternative is to defend living
wages, collective bargaining, and the right to associate. And when IMF
bailouts for wealthy investors create a situation in which, to
paraphrase author Eduardo Galeano, "risk is socialized while profit is
privatized," an alternative is simply to end these bailouts, making
speculators bear the cost of their gambles.
The demand to reverse neoliberal structural adjustment policies proposes
a fundamentally different relationship between wealthy nations and the
global South than currently exists. It would grant countries the freedom
to determine their own economic policies, priorities for government
spending, and rules for controlling foreign investment. Instead of
imposing a single hegemonic model on the entire world, this new
relationship would allow for broader diversity and experimentation in
international development. While this does not by itself constitute a
vision for ensuring human rights or protecting the environment, it
nevertheless represents an important strategic gain. It alone would
likely bring change of great enough magnitude to make the politics of
the global economy look virtually unrecognizable to those who have grown
accustomed to Washington-dictated corporate globalization.
Those who reject corporate and imperial models of globalization have a
wealth of ideas at their disposal, a healthy internal debate to refine
their strategies, and a vibrant, growing international network of
citizens that see their efforts as part an interconnected whole. They
also have very powerful enemies. Fortunately, as we enter the post-Bush
era, the international community has voiced a firm rejection of
unilateralism and preemptive war. Likewise, ever-larger swaths of the
globe view the neoliberal doctrine of corporate expansion as a failed
and discredited vision. This creates unique opportunities for citizens
to fight to bring a democratic globalization into existence. More
exciting still is that many people are already doing so, and, on key
issues like debt relief and across entire regions like the Latin
America, they are winning. The punditry is increasingly taking notice.
For there is nothing so dangerous to those who insist that the world
must remain as it is as the simple, stubbornly defiant doctrine of hope.
-- Mark Engler, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, is author
of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy
(Nation Books, 2008), from which this article is adapted. He can be
reached via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com
Published on Saturday, September 13, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
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