[WSF-Discuss] There Is an Alternative to Corporate Rule

[CACIM]

*There Is an Alternative to Corporate Rule*

Published on Saturday, September 13, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

@
http://chrisy58.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/there-is-an-alternative-to-corporate-rule/

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
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