Feb/Mar 2003

If Only I Could Be Like My Cells
Deepak Chopra, MD

Why Spirituality is Essential to Progressive Politics
Ana Villa-Lobos

The Spiritual Art of Peacemaking
James Twyman

Finding Answers in Community Meetings
John Darling

Reclaiming Our Courage
Paul Rogat Loeb

The Rhinoceros In Our Living Room is Slip Covered
Jeannie Azzopardi

Iraq and the Economy
Dennis Kucinich

Letter to a Warrior
Elias Amidon

Democracy in Action
Letter to Members of MoveOn

Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil
America Vera-Zavala

American Revolt in Pennsylvania
Thom Hartmann

The Omega Point
Finn Honoré

We live in A World With Finite Resources
George Monbiot

Using Homeopathic Remedies
Doug Falkner, MD, M.Hom

The Healing Power of Touch
John Darling

A Somatic Contradiction
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Shamanism and Psychology Join Forces
Jeanette M. Gagan, PhD

Natural Building: A New Course of Action
Coenraad Rogmans

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil

By America Vera-Zavala

The city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, which hosted the World Social Forum for the third consecutive year, is not an ordinary city. It is extraordinary when it comes to democracy and more specifically—participatory democracy, “Orçamento Participativo” (OP).

In 1988 the first elections for municipalities were held in Brazil after 21 years of military dictatorship. In Porto Alegre, a city of 1.3 million, Partido do Trabalhadores (the PT party) won. In 1989 the first PT mayor in Porto Alegre took seat. 1989 was also the year that the working class kid and trade union leader Lula ran for presidential elections for the first time—and took everyone by surprise by almost winning.

The PT candidate in Porto Alegre ran for mayor with a program that proposed among other things to stop dismissal of workers from the public sector, to increase the public sector, to end tax incentives to corporations and to make a tax reform so that a more progressive tax system could be introduced. The idea of participatory budget was also part of the program and the campaign. The former mayor Raul Pont says:

“Participatory democracy was part of the 1988 electoral program, but nobody knew what it was. We said during the electoral campaign that we wanted to govern with popular participation, with popular councils, but not even we knew what that actually was. There was no other previous experience of this in Brazil. We wanted to change radically the way of governing, and we thought that participatory democracy would be possible. We started with the budget because we thought that was the most important and most urgent thing to open up.”

And so they did. The first year only 1,000 people participated. The munici-pality was bankrupt as the former right-wing government had mismanaged the city. Taxation became an issue of public debate when the municipality had to raise revenue to be able to invest. In 1989, when the new administration took over the City Hall, 98% of the budget was already committed to pay civil servants. The municipality had no money to invest. That situation generated a discussion with the community about making a tax reform and introducing a progressive tax system. The same year the new administration took power, more than 15 bills were presented to the local parliament and 14 of them were approved. Since that year the municipality has had money to invest and the citizens have thereby had means to redistribute and participation has increased.

Today more than 50,000 people engage every year in the process of the participatory budget. The process starts in March and lasts until end of January. The city is divided into 16 districts and 5 thematic committees that work with issues that concern the whole city. People engage in their districts or in the thematic committees. The local governments go to every district and thematic committee and present the evaluation of the previous year’s investments, the investment plan, and the statutes of the OP.

The citizens decide which three budget areas are the most important, which invest-ments and projects should be undertaken. These decisions are then presented to the local government which adds up the points to identify the three areas which will be the priorities of the city.

After the municipality has defined which three areas are prioritized the investment is allocated according to three criteria: Total population of the district; Infrastructure requirements; The area given priority by the district.

This is most important to redistribute wealth and help the areas that need it most. The biggest piece of the cake will always go where the need is largest, that is a guar-antee built into the process. An investment plan is made according to the outcome of the OP process and a budget matrix has to go through the local parliament.

The objective of the Orçamento Participativo is to give people the possibility of making decisions by means of participatory democracy. The people are the ones that decide which projects should be given priority and how they should be implemented. The people also decide the rules of the OP process and the technical criteria of the projects. The OP process is not institutionalized, it’s not part of municipal legislation, it is in fact legitimized through participation and political pressure created by citizens.

This means that the OP process is a parallel power to the municipal power and that means also conflicts and clashes with the local parliament where the opposition to the PT is in majority. The participatory budget has existed since 1989, because the PT has won every election for mayor since. That is 13 years that the process has developed and 13 years the opposition has been criticizing it. The first six years of OP the opposition was simply against the budget process. The years passed and as they saw that the process was popular and that participatory democracy had a strong popular base in the city they changed tactics. Now, nobody is against the OP but the opposition wants to institutionalize it so that everything has to go through the local parliament. Among the local deputies of the opposition there is a strong criticism that the representative democracy—which they claim is the base of democracy—is losing its importance.

Participation is not only wide-spread but there is also good representation among the participants. They truly represent the multitude that society consists of. The year 2000 43% were newcomers to the budget process, 58 % of participants were women, 62% of the participants were white, 20% were black. Of the black participants 63% were women. There was a good distribution of different age groups, and the poorer groups were also very well represented.

Participatory democracy has made a difference both practical and political. Today the citizens of the city have access to paved roads, a sewage system, water system, garbage collection, and over 70 schools have been built. Redistribution increased in the public sector as well. When a multinational comes to town they are always welcomed under the conditions that the local government together with the community puts forward. The idea is that the corporations themselves should pay for the problems they cause. It can be about building houses for people that have to be moved, to pave roads or open up roads, build bridges or small boutiques for the small and medium sized enterprises—and always pay taxes.

This is not only very rare in the era of globalization that public politics places demands on corporations, but it’s also a clear example of a vertical negotiation between the local and the global. Global-ization demands that are raised on the local level automatically leap to the global level. If global power is everywhere it is easy to touch power when local decisions are made that in one way or another have a connection with the global. Local decisions will neither revolutionize globalization nor end global power structure but will affect it. If the touch is made several times (like Porto Alegre which always puts demands on corporations) that can actually shape globalization. If the touch comes from several places it can eventually change globalization and the global power structure.

To make decisions that do not follow the logic of neoliberal globalization is not easy but is made much easier if the decision is legitimated by popular participation. The participatory budget in Porto Alegre is one of the few examples in the world of a participatory democracy where citizens are given the possibility to make economic decisions. This in contrast to neoliberal thinking, where economists who do not know a region make economic decisions, as the International Monetary Fund does. The participatory democracy experience in Porto Alegre is also an example of increased participation in policy and decision-taking.

Building movements, parties, winning elections, developing democracy and struggling to change the world is also about making dreams come true. Who would have thought, after 21 years of military dictatorship, that 50,000 people each year would engage and decide over the Porto Alegre city budget? Who would have thought that the working class kid that used to sell oranges in the street, and then as a worker organize strikes at the big Scania factory, Lula, would become president of Brazil in 2003? What we dream of today might become true tomorrow if we work hard. That is why we have to look at examples like Porto Alegre and others and dream of a global democracy—while building it bottom-up—so that it becomes reality.

America Vera-Zavala is finishing her thesis “Democracy in the Era of Globalization: Power and Counter-Power with Special Reference to Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre.” This was a January 22, 2003, ZNet Commentary, www.zmag.org.

Growing US Movement Against Corporate Rule

By Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap

Numerous social justice groups across the US are valiantly fighting corporate assaults and are working to explore strategies that actually dismantle corporate rule at a legal and cultural level. These groups are trying to shift the balance of power within their communities so that individual corporate threats and harms are alleviated, but are also working to reclaim the political and legal mechanisms for “We the People.” This means examining the history of corporate power in the US, and the legal, political and cultural context for how and why corporations can claim the right to constitutional protections— rights that were originally intended for human beings.

One new and exciting development in the growing movement for US democracy is the recent agreement by the US Supreme Court’s to hear the Nike Corporation’s appeal of a California Supreme Court ruling from April of 2002. In Kasky vs. Nike Inc., the California court rejected claims by Nike’s lawyers that the First Amendment protected Nike from being sued under state consumer protection laws for misrepresenting facts in a public relations campaign. (Nike is a claiming a Constitutional “right to lie.”) The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this spring on the Constitutional issue of whether Nike Inc. can claim exemption from the state law under the First Amendment.

This case is a key opportunity to re-examine the judicial creation of constitutional rights for corporations and to raise awareness of the far-reaching effects such protections have in law and civic society.

The authors of our Bill of Rights never intended it to include corporations in defining persons. In addition to provoking public debate, Reclaim Democracy! (www.reclaimdemocracy.org) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s “Campaign to Abolish Corporate Personhood” (www.wilpf.org/corp/cintro.htm) are working to pressure the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to reverse its practice of advocating for “corporate free speech.” Such advocacy undermines the critical human rights work for which the organization was founded.

In November 1998 the town of Arcata, California passed “Measure F: The Arcata Advisory Initiative on Democracy and Corporations,” which called for creation of a standing city council committee on “Democracy and Corporations” to begin to rein in the authority and privileges of large corporations doing business in Arcata.

Last summer this committee celebrated its first victory when the city council passed the first ordinance drafted by the committee: a cap on chain restaurants in the city, which makes it illegal for a restaurant with 12 or more franchises to open in the city. The committee is also seeking public input on whether to further restrict large corporate businesses from moving into Arcata. One idea is a cap (at existing numbers) on all chain retail business including hardware, groceries, shoes, drugs, videos, etc.

This is the only committee of its kind in the US that is creating tools to allow the community to democratically control its local economy. The committee also provides support to all of the groups in Humboldt County (and a model for the rest of the US) who are struggling against large corporations and the harms they cause to our cultural, political and economic systems.

Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, (707) 269-0984, duhc@montor.net; PO Box 610, Eureka, CA 95502.