Feb/March 2001
It
Does Pay to Fight
by Jackie Alan Guiliano
Bipartisanship
at the Expense of the Citizenry
by Howard Zinn
The
Greens Great Opportunity
by Blair Bobier
DLC
Says Gore's Presidential Bid Ruined by Populist Message: Others Disagree
by Brian Hansen
Letter
from Porto Alegre
by Norman Solomon
Doing
the Right Things, Without Making Someone Wrong
by John Darling
Globalization
From Below
by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello & Brendan Smith
Book
Review by Suzi Aufderheide
No Logo: Money, Marketing and the Growing Anti-Corporate Movement
by Naomi Klein
Book
Review by Gerry Cavanaugh
Hannibal
by Thomas Harris
Money
Talks
by Kayla Starr
America's
Food Safety Crisis Intensifies
by Ronnie Cummins
Coming
Home
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
The
Secret of the Valentines Angel
by Peter Melton
A
Prescription for Well-Being
by Peter Moore
Age-old
Concepts Benefit Modern Babies
by Pamela Jorrick
Cancer:
An Unexpected Way to the New Being
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Book
Review by Kent Shew
Quantum Touch
by Richard Gordon
Cosmic
Calendar
By Salina Rain
(continued)
Globalization From Below
By Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello and Brendan Smith
Corporate campaign targets are now being expanded to include the crucial but often hidden players in globalization from above private financial institutions. The Rainforest Action Network has launched a campaign against "the financiers of ecological destruction and human suffering," focusing on Citigroup, the largest private financial institution in North America. It highlights Citigroup’s role as chief financial adviser in the Chad/Cameroon Oil and Pipeline Project in Africa, which will pollute pristine rainforest and disrupt indigenous forest communities; its role in financing redwood logging operations in California; its firing of unionized janitors; its financing of Monsanto and other genetic engineering companies; its role in predatory lending and denial of loans to African-Americans; and its profits from prison construction and privatization.
The campaign to restrict genetically modified organisms forced Monsanto and US negotiators earlier this year to accept the Cartagena Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity, allowing GMOs to be regulated. Greenpeace called the protocol "a historic step toward protecting the environment and consumers from the dangers of genetic engineering." Monsanto not only accepted the protocol, it announced a decision to withdraw from the business of selling sterile seeds and to participate in a dialogue with Greenpeace.
This example shows the multilevel strategies that globalization from below is using to parlay its power. While asserting authority superior to the WTO, the protocol also illustrates the crucial positive role that international institutions can play in limiting the depredations of global corporations and markets. And it empowered national governments to regulate GMOs and the corporations that purvey them. The campaign put pressure both on governments and directly on corporations like Monsanto, while other governments put pressure on the US government, a leading force against regulation of GMOs. It may well have been the pressure on Monsanto and its resultant change of heart that changed the position of the US government.
Globalization-from-below activists are also intervening in sophisticated ways in national politics. When South Africa tried to pass a law allowing it to ignore drug patents during health emergencies, the Clinton Administration lobbied hard against it and put South Africa on a watch list that is the first step toward trade sanctions. But then Philadelphia ACT UP began hounding presidential candidate Al Gore on the issue. According to the New York Times, "The banners saying that Mr. Gore was letting Africans die to please American pharmaceutical companies left his campaign chagrined. After media and campaign staff looked into the matter, the Administration did an about-face" and, while certainly not doing enough to make AIDS drugs available, accepted African governments’ circumvention of AIDS drug patents.
No doubt The Economist exaggerated when it wrote that the new wave of protest around globalization is "more than a mere nuisance: it is getting its way." But globalization from below is having a concrete impact on policies and conditions in scores of instances all over the world. Each such campaign is a partial representation of the movement’s vision, goals and program, reflecting fundamental values of human dignity, self-government, environmental sustainability and human solidarity.
Trevor Manuel, finance minister of South Africa and co-chairman of the Prague IMF/World Bank meetings, recently complained, "I understand what [protesters] are against, but I am not sure what they are for." In fact, as even Newsweek had to concede after the Battle of Seattle, "One of the most important lessons of Seattle is that there are now two visions of globalization on offer, one led by commerce, one by social activism."
Solidarity
in Diverse Groups is Growing
The movement for globalization from below is now developing positive programs
that integrate the needs and objectives of its diverse constituents. More
than 1,000 civil-society organizations in seventy-seven countries, essentially
the "Seattle coalition," have launched a new global campaign to
demand "an alternative, humane, democratically accountable and sustainable
system of commerce that benefits us all." They have agreed to an eleven-point
program for transformation of the WTO and the global trading system, focused
not on eliminating trade or returning to some lost past of national economic
isolation but on promoting "internationalism where different cultures,
countries, and people trade and exchange goods and ideas and work together
toward common goals."
The vision of globalization from below has been articulated in scores of international statements and above all in the movement’s own actions. Many of its guiding principles are elaborated in the Global Sustainable Development Resolution, co-sponsored by a group of progressive members of the US Congress. They include leveling labor, environmental, social and human rights conditions upward; democratizing institutions at every level from local to global; making decisions as close as possible to those they affect; equalizing global wealth and power; converting the global economy to environmental sustainability; creating prosperity by meeting human and environmental needs; and protecting against global boom and bust.
The advocates of globalization from above often portray its critics as backward-looking economic nationalists who want to hide from the realities of globalization and its opportunities in order to protect narrow special interests. And indeed, all over the world, Patrick Buchanan, Jean-Marie Le Pen and their ilk are exploiting the antiglobalization backlash to recruit followers for ethnocentric, anti-immigrant, antigay, racist, sexist and nationalist bigotry. Globalization from below, in contrast, is rooted in solidarity among people and groups who recognize their diversity but who nonetheless grasp their common interests. It can only succeed to the extent that the diverse elements that make it up are able to incorporate one another’s needs and concerns while holding their own more xenophobic impulses in check.
Some within the movement advocate centralized global government as the solution to corporate globalization; others seek a reassertion of national or even local sovereignty. But the problems of globalization are unlikely to be solved either by some central global authority or by national or local autarky. The real choice today is between a globalization from above that disempowers people at every level and a globalization from below that expands self-government not only at a global level but at regional, national and local levels as well.
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