Fences and Windows, page 5
At a globalization conference in the lead-up to the Prague meeting, Indian physicist Vandana Shiva explained mass rejection of World Bank projects as less a dispute over a particular dam or social program and more a fight for local democracy and self-government. “The history of the World Bank,” she said, has been “to take power away from communities, give it to a central government, then give it to the corporations through privatization.”
The young anarchists in the crowd nodded. She sounded just like them.
Toronto
Anti-poverty activism and the violence debate
June 2000
How do you organize a riot? That is an important question right now for John Clarke, the most visible member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Last week OCAP held a rally to protest the spiralling homelessness that has led to twenty-two street deaths in seven months. After it turned into a pitched battle with charging horses and riot police confronted by bricks and boards, Clarke was instantly singled out as a Machiavellian puppeteer, pulling the strings of a limp, witless rent-a-mob.
Several unions threatened to withdraw their funding from the anti-poverty group, and Clarke himself faces criminal charges for allegedly inciting a riot. [The charges are still pending.] Most commentators took it as a given that the demonstrators could never have decided all on their own to fight back when the police stormed the crowd with clubs and horses. After all, they came armed with swimming goggles and vinegar-soaked bandanas, so clearly they were ready for battle (never mind that this gear was meant as protection against the inevitable tear gas and pepper spray, which even the most peaceful and law-abiding demonstrators have sadly come to expect from the police). Someone must have orchestrated the violence, told them to pick up bricks, held Molotov-cocktail-making workshops. Why would Clarke do this? Apparently, according to press reports, to seek fame and fortune.
In half a dozen newspaper articles, it was pointed out that John Clarke is not homeless himself, that he—gasp!—lives in a rented bungalow in Scarborough. Even more scandalous: there were other people at the protest who weren’t homeless, either. What is the assumption? That activists are always self-interested, out to protect their property values, lower their tuition fees, or get themselves raises? In this context, putting one’s body on the line for a set of beliefs about how society should function is seen as somehow fraudulent, even sinister. The young and radical are told to shut up and get a job.
I have known several of OCAP’s “professional activists” for years. Some of them first became involved in anti-poverty work in their late teens, through Food Not Bombs, a group that believes food is a basic human right and that you should not need a municipal permit to cook some and share it with people who are hungry.
Some of these young activists could, indeed, get lucrative jobs and move out of their cramped, shared apartments if they wanted to. They are staggeringly resourceful and well educated, and some of them are so wily with a Linux operating system that they could easily be one of those teenage dot-com millionaires.
But they have chosen a different route, one that flatly rejects a value system in which the only acceptable use of our skills and talents is to trade them for money and power. Instead, they are using those highly marketable skills to work for power dispersal: to convince the least empowered members of Ontario society that they have powers—to organize collectively, to defend themselves against brutality and abuse, to claim shelter; powers that are going unused.
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty exists for the sole purpose of empowering the poor and the homeless, which is why it is so very unjust that last week’s protest was presented as the scheming handiwork of a single man who uses the poor as props and pawns. The Coalition is one of the very few anti-poverty groups that emphasizes organizing, as opposed to mere charity or advocacy. Within OCAP, poor people are not simply mouths to feed or bodies that need sleeping bags. They are something else entirely: a constituency that has a right to be heard. Finding a way for the homeless to recognize their political rights and take on their opponents is an extraordinarily difficult task, which is why OCAP is frequently held up as a success story by activists around the world.
How do you organize the homeless, the transient, the poor? We know that workers are organized in factories, homeowners in their neighbourhoods, students in their schools. But OCAP’s constituency is, by definition, dispersed and constantly on the move. And while workers and students can become political lobbies by forming unions and going on strike, the homeless have already been discarded by every institution they could possibly disrupt.
Obstacles such as these have led most anti-poverty groups to conclude that the poor and the homeless need to be spoken for and acted on. Except for OCAP, which is trying to create a space for the poor to speak, and to act, for themselves. And this is where things gets complicated: most of us don’t really want to hear the anger in their voices, see the rage in their actions.
Which is why so many people are pissed off at John Clarke. His crime isn’t organizing a riot. It is refusing to clean up poverty for the benefit of cameras and politicians. The Coalition doesn’t ask its members to abide by the genteel protocols of polite protest. And it doesn’t tell angry people they shouldn’t be angry, especially when confronted by some of the very same police officers who beat them in back alleys or the politicians who write laws that cost them their homes.
John Clarke didn’t organize a riot and neither did OCAP. They just didn’t stop it.
II
FENCING IN DEMOCRACY
TRADE AND TRADE-OFFS
In which citizens discover that the
true price of “free trade” is the
power to govern themselves
Democracy in Shackles
Who benefits from free trade?
June 2001
During the April 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, U.S. President George W. Bush proclaimed that the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would help usher in “a hemisphere of liberty.” Explicitly linking globalization and democracy, Bush argued that “people who operate in open economies eventually demand more open societies.”
Does globalization really foster democracy? It depends on the kind of globalization we create. The current system simply outsources decision making to opaque and non-representative institutions, but there are other choices available. At home and on the world stage, democracy is a choice, one that demands constant vigilance and renewal.
President Bush seems to have a different vision. Like so many defenders of the current global economic model, he argues that democracy is not so much an active choice as a trickle-down effect of economic growth: free markets create free peoples. Would that democracy really were such a laissez-faire matter. Unfortunately, investors have proven themselves all too willing to support oppressive monarchies like Saudi Arabia’s, or Communist authoritarianism in China, as long as these regimes crack open markets to foreign companies. In the race for cheap labour and precious natural resources, pro-democracy movements are often trampled.
Sure, capitalism thrives in representative democracies that embrace pro-market policies such as privatization and deregulation. But what about when citizens make democratic choices that aren’t so popular with foreign investors? What happens when they decide to nationalize the phone company, for instance, or to exert greater control over their oil and mineral wealth? The bodies tell the story.
When Guatemala’s democratically elected government introduced sweeping land ownership reforms in the 1950s, breaking up the monopoly held by the U.S.’s United Fruit Company, the country was bombed and the government ousted. At the time, the U.S. claimed it was an inside job, but nine years later, president Dwight D. Eisenhower reflected that, “We had to get rid of a Communist government that had taken over.” When General Suharto staged his bloody coup in Indonesia in 1965, he did so with co-operation from the United States and Europe. Roland Challis, the BBC’s Southeast Asia correspondent at the time, maintains that “getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal.” Similarly, it was “free market” forces in the United States that instigated the military overthrow of democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973, eventually leading to his death. (At the time, Henry Kissinger famously commented that a country shouldn’t be allowed to “go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”)
The current open talk in Washington about the need to unseat Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez shows that this deadly logic didn’t die with the Cold War. But these days, the free market’s interference with democracy usually takes subtler forms. It’s a directive from the International Monetary Fund requiring governments to introduce user fees in health care, or to slash billions from public services, or to privatize a water system. It’s a plan cooked up by the World Bank to erect a massive dam, implemented without consulting the communities displaced by the project, ones whose way of life will disappear. It’s a World Bank report calling for more “flexibility” in the labour market of a heavily indebted country—including restrictions on collective bargaining—in order to attract foreign investors. (If they resist and defend themselves, they may well find themselves classified as terrorists, and all means to suppress them will become permissible.)
And sometimes the interference is a complaint to the World Trade Organization that public ownership of a national postal service “discriminates” against a foreign courier company. It’s a trade war waged against countries that decide, democratically, to ban hormone-treated beef or to provide free AIDS drugs to their citizens. It’s the incessant clamouring for tax cuts from business lobbies in every country, based on the ever-present threat that capital will flee if we don’t grant the corporations’ up-to-the-minute wish list. Whatever the methods employed, “free markets” rarely stand by and tolerate truly free peoples.
When we talk about the relationship between globalization and democracy, we need to look not only at whether nations have won the right to cast ballots every four or five years but also at whether citizens still consider those ballots meaningful. We must look not only for the presence of electoral democracy but also examine the day-to-day quality and depth of those liberties. Hundreds of thousands take to the streets outside trade meetings not because they oppose trade itself but because the very real need for jobs and investment is systematically being used to undermine all our democracies. The unacceptable trade is the one that erodes sovereign rights in exchange for foreign investment.
What I dislike most about the trickle-down democracy argument is the dishonour it pays to all the people who fought, and fight still, for genuine democratic change in their countries, whether for the right to vote, or to have access to land, or to form unions. Democracy isn’t the work of the market’s invisible hand; it is the work of real hands. It is often stated, for instance, that the North American Free Trade Agreement is bringing democracy to Mexico. In fact, workers, students, indigenous groups and radical intellectuals are the ones slowly forcing democratic reforms on Mexico’s intransigent elite. NAFTA, by widening the gap between rich and poor, makes their struggle more militant, and more difficult.
In the place of such messy, disruptive, real-world democratic movements, President Bush offers a calm, soothing lullaby: just relax and wait for your rights to come to you. But contrary to this lethargic vision of trickle-down democracy, globalization in its current form doesn’t bring liberty. Neither does the free market or the ready availability of Big Macs. Real democracy—true decision-making power in the people’s hands—is always demanded, never granted.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas
The leaders may agree, but on the streets of Latin American cities, the debate is raging
March 2001
Next Friday, trade ministers from the thirty-four countries negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas will meet in Buenos Aires. Many in Latin America predict that the ministers will be greeted with protests much larger than the ones that exploded in Seattle in 1999.
The FTAA’s cheerleaders like to pretend that their only critics are white college kids from Harvard and McGill who just don’t understand how much “the poor” are “clamouring” for the FTAA. Will this public display of Latin American opposition to the trade deal change all that? Don’t be silly.
Mass protests in the developing world don’t register in our discussions about trade in the West. No matter how many people take to the streets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City or São Paulo, defenders of corporate-driven globalization just keep on insisting that every possible objection lobbed their way was dreamed up in Seattle by somebody with newly matted dreadlocks slurping a latte.
When we talk about trade, we often focus—and rightly so—on who is getting richer and who is getting poorer. But there is another divide at play: which countries are presented as diverse, complicated political cultures where citizens have a range of divergent views, and which countries seem to speak on the world stage in an ideological monotone.
In North America and Europe, debates are raging about the failures of the current trading system. And yet such diversity of public opinion is rarely attributed to citizens of Third World countries. Instead, they are lumped into one homogenous entity, spoken for by dubiously elected politicians or, better yet, discredited ones such as Mexico’s former president Ernesto Zedillo, now calling for an international campaign against “globophobes.”
The truth is that no one can speak on behalf of Latin America’s five hundred million inhabitants, least of all Zedillo, whose party’s defeat was in large part a repudiation of NAFTA’s record. All over the Americas, market liberalization is a subject of extreme dispute. The debate is not over whether foreign investment and trade are desirable—Latin America and the Caribbean are already organized into regional trading blocs such as Mercosur. The debate is about democracy: what terms and conditions will poor countries be told they must meet in order to qualify for admission to the global trade club?
Argentina, the host of next week’s FTAA meeting, is currently in open revolt over massive cuts to social spending— almost US$8 billion over three years—that have been introduced in order to qualify for an IMF loan package. Last week, three cabinet ministers resigned, unions staged a general strike and university instructors moved their classes to the streets.
Though anger at wrenching austerity measures has focused primarily on the IMF, across the continent it is rapidly expanding to encompass trade deals such as the proposed FTAA. For proof of the dangers, many Latin Americans look to Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement came into force on January 1, 1994, and seven years later, three-quarters of the population of Mexico live in poverty, real wages are lower than they were in 1994 and unemployment is rising. So despite the claims that the rest of Latin America wants a NAFTA to call its own, the central labour associations of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay—representing twenty million workers—have come out against the plan. They are now calling for countrywide referendums on FTAA membership. [As is Brazilian presidential candidate Lula da Silva who, at the time of writing, was pegged to win the October 2002 elections.]
Brazil, meanwhile, has threatened to boycott the Quebec summit altogether, furious at Canada’s ban on Brazilian beef. Ottawa cited safety concerns but Brazilians think it had more to do with Canadian resentment over Brazil’s subsidized jet manufacturing. The Brazilian government is also wary that the FTAA will contain protections for drug companies that will threaten its visionary public health policy of providing free generic AIDS drugs to anyone who needs them.
Defenders of free trade would have us believe in the facile equation of trade = democracy. The people who will greet our trade ministers on the streets of Buenos Aires next week are posing a more complex and challenging calculation: how much democracy should they be asked to give up in exchange for trade?
IMF Go to Hell
The people of Argentina have tried the IMF approach; now they want a turn to govern the country
March 2002
On the same day that Argentine President Eduardo Duhalde was embroiled in yet another fruitless negotiation with the International Monetary Fund, a group of Buenos Aires residents were going through a negotiation of a different kind. On a sunny Tuesday earlier this month, they were trying to save themselves from eviction. The residents of 335 Ayacucho, including nineteen children, barricaded themselves inside their home, located just blocks away from the national congress, and refused to leave. On the concrete facade of the house, a hand-printed sign said, “IMF Go to Hell.”
It may seem strange that an institution as decidedly macro as the IMF would be implicated in an issue as micro as the Ayacucho eviction. But here in a country where half the population has fallen below the poverty line, it’s hard to find any sector of society whose fate does not somehow hinge on the decisions made by the international lender.
Librarians, teachers and other public sector workers, who have been getting paid in hastily printed provincial currencies, won’t get paid at all if the provinces agree to stop printing the money, as the IMF is demanding. And if deeper cuts are made to the public sector, as the lender is also insisting, unemployed workers, 30 percent of the workforce, will be even closer to the homelessness and hunger that has led thousands to storm supermarkets demanding food.
And if a solution isn’t found to the recently declared medical state of emergency, it will certainly affect a woman I met on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In a fit of shame and desperation, she pulled up her blouse and showed me the open wound and hanging tubes from a stomach operation that her doctor was not able to stitch up or dress due to a chronic shortage of medical supplies.
