In this space last year ("Carte Blanche, BLte Noire,"
Winter 2000), I described some aspects of the emerging European
and worldwide movement against corporate-driven globalization,
ending on an optimistic note ("it's
a great
time to be politically alive"). A year on, I'd say it's
greater still. The movement is gaining strength, exudes self-confidence,
and has chalked up some partial victories. Young people are
joining in droves and the adversary is, if not yet on the ropes,
at least a bit dazed by the breadth and determination of the
offensive.
The media in some countries still try hard to treat the genus
protester as a marginal curiosity rather than a political animal.
The Washington Post reported on the April demonstrations against
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in
the "Style" section, stressing hair, nose rings, and
body art. In Europe, however, and particularly in France, the
press has been obliged to accept and report on the new actors
that have arisen alongside transnational corporations and governments.
The media now provide at least a capsule version of our message.
"Seattle" has become shorthand for a turning point,
marking the moment when the anti-globalization forces thrust
themselves upon the mainstream consciousness. As I write, the
Seattle era has barely celebrated its first birthday, yet some
incredible events have occurred.
Actually, I refuse the term "anti-globalization" that
the media have lumbered us with. This combat is really between
those who want inclusive globalization based on cooperation
and solidarity and those who want the market to make all the
decisions. Thomas Friedman, an ardent apostle of the latter
view, puts it perfectly in his book The Lexus and the Olive
Tree: as your country is forced to accept the new, neoliberal
rules, "your economy grows and your politics shrink."
(In fact, your economy doesn't necessarily grow, and certainly
not as much as between 1950-1975, but that's another story,
one Friedman chooses not to tell.)
Protesters, on the other hand, think politics should be stretched
and expanded so as to engender a radically new kind of internationalism.
People my age cut their political teeth in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist
solidarity movements - for Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, South
Africa, and the like. This time it's different. There is a genuine
and growing sense that all ordinary people, wherever they live,
are in this together. We have the same grievances and sense
of injustice; we have, above all, the same enemies, even though
the trade unionists, environmentalists, and cultural workers
of the North lead far more comfortable lives than globalization's
myriad losers in the South. No one denies that the chief victims
are the billion people living on less than a dollar a day and
the three billion - half the world - making do with less than
two dollars per day. But suddenly the injuries they endure seem
relevant to us all.
The fight is also about making new and different rules. The
media stress lawlessness - and there is some on the part of
a tiny fraction of those who have taken to the streets - but
on the whole the protesters are studiously non-violent and want
enforceable rules. They understand that the notion of "deregulation"
is a sham. States may be downsizing their regulatory arsenals,
but new rules are being made all the time at the international
level by organizations most see as fronts for transnational
corporations and that no citizen has a prayer of influencing
unless it's by blocking their meetings.
Old war horses like me who have spent decades writing and speaking
about such austere topics as the horrors of world hunger, third
world debt, the World Bank or the World Trade Organization (WTO),
gaze in wonder at this new movement, hopeful that we might have
had something to do with it. Perhaps we did - at least I doubt
that it emerged full-blown from the head of Zeus - but whatever
its roots, there has never before existed such instinctual one-worldism,
at least not in my experience. Young people especially seem
to find it completely normal to come out in large numbers and
quite possibly get their heads bashed over issues like structural
adjustment, sweatshops and unfair trade policies whose impacts
are mostly felt thousands of miles away from their own precincts.
In France, a two-and-a-half-year-old organization called the
Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions in Aid
of Citizens (ATTAC) has 27,000 members, 170 local committees,
several cross-cutting sectoral affinity groups (culture, Africa,
Mediterranean, trade, and so on) and is growing steadily in
16 other countries. Despite its name, its concerns go beyond
obtaining a "Tobin Tax" on international currency
transactions and include third world debt, the international
financial institutions, the protection of public pension funds,
and, most recently, the WTO. This movement, like many others,
is helping people to understand how globalization works and
for whom; its activists are in the streets for every major political
rendezvous. In fact, more French people demonstrated in twenty-some
different cities in solidarity with Seattle than came out in
Seattle itself.
And then there was the extraordinary trial of Jose Bove and
his nine small-farmer comrades at the end of June - at least
eighty thousand people turned up in the sleepy town of Millau
(population twenty thousand) to support the sheep farmers who
dismantled a McDonald's to protest just about everything from
the proliferation of junk food and hormone-fed beef to U.S.
cultural dominance and the power of the WTO. The whole world
must by now be familiar with this mustachioed folk hero, the
beginning f whose saga I reported last year.
So the climate is improving and the spirit is there. The problem
is that we haven't actually forced the corporate globalizers
and their hench-organizations to change. Yes, we got rid of
the Multilateral Agreement on Investment; yes, we've won temporarily
on some genetically modified organism issues; yet, a couple
of meetings got short-circuited or shut down. But the same old
people with their same old policies are still firmly in place.
We have a long way to go before we win.
Even when they retire, the globalizers are not rebuked but
instead - I weigh my words - glorified. Take the case of Michel
Camdessus, head of the IMF for thirteen long years during which
millions of lives were destroyed or shortened by IMF-devised
structural adjustment policies, all of which he oversaw and
approved.
The Vatican has now named the selfsame Camdessus to its Justice
and Peace Commission in charge of defining social policy for
the church. When Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize,
we had to recognize that there are moments when political satire
cannot complete with reality; so its is with Camdessus in his
new chair. As for the IMF, structural adjustment hatchet man
Stanley Fischer is still in the number-two slot behind the new
German managing director, Horst Kohler.
For years the IMF's blanket excuse for mayhem inflicted on
ordinary people in southern and eastern countries was, "We
are not a development agency." Now, all of a sudden, "We"
are. At least "We" have changed our rhetoric so that
the "Extended Structural Adjustment Facility" has
become the "Poverty Reduction and Growth Fund," although
no transformation of the content is perceptible. As in magical
thinking, the name of the thing acts upon the thing itself.
James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, also talks a
good game. No one is more affected by the plight of the poor
than he; his speech at the annual General Meeting in Prague
was a model of hand-wringing concern. Wolfensohn nonetheless
ditched his chief economist, Joe Stiglitz, who dared to criticize
structural adjustment and the Washington Consensus. It is widely
rumored that Stiglitz was a thorn in the side of the U.S. Treasury
Secretary Larry Summers; that the latter rang up Wolfensohn
to say, "Jim, if you want another five years at the bank,
Joe must go." Be that as it may, the only man at the bank
who was telling at least a part of the truth got the sack. Except,
that is, for Ravi Kanbur, another honorable bank economist and
chief author of its flagship World Development Report on poverty,
who resigned rather than let Summers rewrite substantial portions
of his text. [Ed. Note: See "The Cracking Washington Consensus,"
by Mark Levinson, Dissent, Fall 2000.]
Resistance to Pressure
Neither of these institutions has wavered on the issue of third
world debt in spite of the millions of signatures collected
and the huge numbers of people demonstrating thanks to the organizing
efforts of Jubilee 2000. The debt is higher than ever, and there
was, in fact, a regression in commitments between the G-7 meetings
in Cologne in 1999 and Okinawa in 2000. The IMF even managed
to tell Mozambique, arguably the poorest country in the world,
that it didn't have to pay a hundred million dollars in debt
service after its devastating floods, only seventy-three million
dollars.
Across the pond at the WTO, services negotiations are moving
forward in the framework of the General Agreement on Trade in
Services (GATS). Seattle couldn't stop this new stage of liberalization
because it had been mandated in Marrakesh when the WTO was created.
Transparency and accountability reach new nadirs on the shores
of Lake Geneva, where the minutes of the all-important working
groups are posted ten to twelve months after their meetings
occur.
"Services" under GATS includes public transport,
health, education, environmental, and cultural services - 160
areas in all. Whereas Americans benefit from virtually no public
services (the postal service comes to mind but little else),
Europeans, who have many, are deeply and rightfully suspicious
of their negotiator's intentions. Our governments and the European
trade commissioner Pascal Lamy keep reassuring us that our excellent
public health insurance and generally good public school systems
are not in jeopardy, yet Lamy's chief services negotiator has,
for example, announced that "health and education are ripe
for liberalization."
Lamy himself told a recent meeting of the U.S. Council for
International Business in New York that "If we [Europeans]
want to improve our own access to foreign markets then we can't
keep our protected sectors out of the sunlight. We have to be
open to negotiating them all if we are going to have the material
for a big deal. In the U.S. and the EU [European Union], that
means some pain in some sectors but gain in many others and
I think we both know that we are going to have to bite the bullet
to get what we want." He has not yet announced what "pain"
he is prepared to accept on behalf of his fellow Europeans.
Lamy is also pushing for changes in the EU Amsterdam Treaty
that would give him "fast-track" powers in trade negotiations
like the ones President Clinton was refused by the U.S. Congress.
If he gets his way, individual governments will no longer be
able to veto agreements concluded by the EU. National parliaments
will have nothing to say, while the largely toothless European
Parliament will be "consulted."
Carrion Capitalism
The usual suspects, some of whose deeds are described above,
are, whether they know it and like it or not, front men. I try
not to use the word "globalization" now without a
qualifier such as "market-driven" or "corporate-led,"
because Transnational Corporations (TNCs) are its real motors.
The TNCs had a rather good year 2000, rounding out the twentieth
century with the biggest buying binge in history. In 1999, they
carried out more than six thousand trans-border mergers and
acquisitions, mostly the latter, for a total of $720 billion.
More than a hundred of these were mega-deals involving over
a billion dollars; totals for M and As, as they say in the trade,
are fully expected to surpass the trillion dollar mark by the
end of 2000.
Financial crises like those in Asia, Russia, or Latin America
have their uses, weakening foreign firms and rendering them
vulnerable to takeover artists. Several brokerage houses and
hedge funds have set up "vulture funds," whose only
mission is to seek out wounded companies and those whose privatization
is being forced by the World Bank-IMF tandem. Perhaps we could
coin a phrase and call it carrion capitalism"?
The outcome of this ballet of the trans-border billions is
huge and growing concentration in every sector. The dangers
are obvious, particularly for smaller, weaker countries, but
also for employees and consumers who are not going to get many
benefits when the entire world has become a collection of giant
oligopolies.
Meanwhile, U.S. corporations are enjoying a fiscal field day.
Between 1996 and 1998, several dozen of the most prominent U.S.
firms either paid no federal taxes at all (and in addition got
refunds and credits) or paid far less, at much lower rates,
than they theoretically owed. Corporate profits flew off the
charts during this period (up by more than 23 percent), yet
income to the U.S. treasury from the corporate sector grew by
only 7.7 percent.
Perhaps the treasury should thank its lucky stars for even
that, given that tax shelters are extraordinarily thick on the
ground. Companies have recently discovered the highly effective
dodge of stock options, which for tax purposes are counted as
an expense but do not count against profits as reported to shareholders.
So you can reward your top executives beyond any historical
precedent while graciously allowing ordinary tax-paying citizens
to shoulder the burden of financing public goods.
Oh yes, Microsoft and Cisco Systems paid zero federal tax in
1999. All this and more can be gleaned from a report by the
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. A representative
of the Tax Executives Institute commented to Bloomberg News
that "There is nothing in the report that suggests that
any of this results from any illegal or improper activity."
Quite so. That's precisely the problem.
To sum up, the climate may be far better than it was, but so
far we haven't actually won anything from the worldwide corporate
government. We need more people and better organization if we
mean to start changing that. Anyone who wants to join this fight
will have a reasonably good time, valuable comrades, and a huge
amount of unpaid if rewarding work over a long haul.
I sent this piece to Dissent before the result of the U.S.
elections was clear. I don't vote in the United States, because
I don't have to live with the choice of the U.S. electorate
- at least not directly - and as a French citizen I can exercise
my democratic rights where I live. But had I voted, it would
have been for Ralph Nader. There comes a time when enough is
enough, when you have to say that "another world is possible,"
which is the slogan of ATTAC. That is also the message of Seattle
and all the mini-Seattles. The Democratic Party is basically
happy with the world we've got. I think the whole point of politics
right now is to fight for a different one. Another world isn't
just possible - it's indispensable.
Susan George
SUSAN GEORGE is vice president of ATTAC France. Her most recent
book is The Lugano Report.