Friday, Sep 5, 2008
On the eve of the A16 protests, experts discuss the roles of the international financial organizations and the Seattle protests in this weekend's battle over globalization.
Apr 14, 2000 | The push toward globalization met its strongest opposition yet when protesters turned a November summit of the World Trade Organization into a violent, anarchist scene. Unprepared, reactive police responded to broken glass and looting with a spray of tear gas and rubber bullets. The famed youthful apathy of the '90s, it seemed, had passed.
The protests sent the already tenuous ministerial meeting into a tailspin, energizing developing nations that felt embattled by the West and essentially derailing the confab. To be fair, not all demonstrators were like Jackal who, along with 100 followers, smashed the windows of Starbucks, McDonald's or any other symbol of rampant capitalism that lay in his path. More demonstrators in Seattle drew their influences from Gandhi than the "Anarchist's Cookbook." The single unifying theme seemed to be contempt for the current trend in globalization; call it the anti-Coca Cola Zeitgeist.
Following their success in Seattle, organizers made the April 16-17 semi-annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund their next target. Collectively called A16, for the date of the meeting, the organizations are protesting what they view as a lack of public accountability, a dubious environmental record, loan agreements that can devastate economies and policies that favor Western nations and contribute to the growing gap between the rich and poor at the two Bretton Woods institutions.
On the eve of the A16 protests and IMF and World Bank meetings, Salon brought together a round table of experts to discuss the past, present and future roles of the global organizations.
How did once-obscure issues like globalization, Western loan policies and debt relief mobilize a new generation of protest when domestic issues like urban poverty or abominable public schools have not?
Merrill Goozner is chief economics correspondent in the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau: As in the '60s, many of the protesters come from elite universities. For many, their first idealistic brush with the less fortunate came when they realized that their school apparel and sneakers were manufactured in global sweatshops run by or for the Nikes and Gaps of the retailing world. The sweatshop issue had existing "protest" constituencies that could serve to guide and mobilize this new generation of protesters: Naderite anti-globalism campaigns like Global Trade Watch and the anti-free trade wing of organized labor.
That still doesn't explain why domestic issues of poverty, inequality and education have not motivated young people in recent years. Perhaps it is because they appear as residual questions. Urban poverty concerns a physical place in our society that quite literally has been left behind. Abominable schools? Some are, yes, but the kids who go to the University of Michigan, Berkeley and Harvard did not attend abominable schools. And for products of the suburbs who inherited (and perhaps rejected) the keys to the SUV, inequality in America may seem as distant, or as close, as inequality between Chad and the U.S.
Daphne Wysham is network director for the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network: This generalization about those who are participating in the protests against the World Bank and IMF is a bit too dismissive. Yes, it's true, many protesters sport pierced noses and other hallmarks of the discontented white middle class. But just because they are the most colorful does not mean they are the majority. There are religious groups by the thousands around the world who have joined this movement for greater accountability and debt relief on the part of the World Bank and IMF; there are labor groups, scholars and a wide array of grass-roots activists.
There are those who may not have degrees from the finest universities in the country, but understand just how close to the bone they are living thanks to the "new prosperity" that globalization has brought to their lives. Most importantly, there are the poor and their allies in developing countries, who are rising up by the thousands, putting their lives on the line to resist the dehumanizing programs that result in their resettlement, social upheaval and impoverishment to make way for World Bank development projects. And there are those such as [former World Bank economists] Herman Daly and Joseph Stiglitz, who have worked inside the bank and know its failings, who agree with many of these criticisms. All of these people understand something is seriously wrong with the growing concentration of wealth, power and decision-making in the hands of the few.
Pete Leyden is the co-author of "The Long Boom" and former managing editor of Wired: I don't think the policies, per se, are what mobilized the protests. Globalization itself is driving the reaction, and people are looking for anything they can to blame. Those two global organizations are among the few out there that can be used to vent people's frustration. They symbolize globalization. They put a face on this very amorphous issue.
In fact, they are creatures of the past and are having a hard enough time keeping up with the realities of modern globalization. Far from being in control of this global economy, they are struggling as much as anyone. That's why it's rather ironic that the protesters are framing them as those in control.
I'll come clean here right from the start: I think globalization is a good thing. It's virtually inevitable and with time it will be seen as overwhelmingly positive. People at the end of this century will look back on the beginning of the century and see this phenomenon of everything going global as the most significant development of our era. We're obsessed with the technological developments right now, which are essentially enabling this globalization. We're being overwhelmed by the economic restructuring that's taking place, but that's just the first of a long continuum of increasing interconnection and interdependence that will also restructure our politics, our culture, our society at large.
We can only solve global warming and global environmental problems when we deal with them as a global community. We can only take on the obscene poverty that half the planet is trapped in if we think of the world as one community. We can only lower the chances of large-scale war if we see our interdependence as more important than our differences. Globalization is pushing us to a point where we can finally fully solve these problems -- the very problems that most of the protesters claim to be concerned with. Globalization is not the problem, but potentially the answer. This perspective completely flips the issue on its head.
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of "Earth Odyssey," a book about the human toll of environmental devastation: Why is it that environmentalists are so riled up about the [World] Bank? After all, the bank's mission is to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable development: Surely that's the kind of work the activists and social justice types should applaud. The problem is, the bank often has not lived up to its lofty rhetoric. Time and again, it has financed gargantuan, ill-conceived projects whose anti-poverty effects are indirect at best and whose environmental consequences are downright disastrous. Bank-funded projects often do more to subsidize Northern corporations than to fight Southern poverty.
Right now, in the western African nation of Chad, the Bank is trying to fund the development of a vast oil field and pipeline that will extend 650 miles through Cameroon to the Atlantic Ocean, ravaging the ecosystems and human settlements in one of Africa's great remaining rainforests. The Bank is loaning or guaranteeing some $540 million of the project's $3.5 billion total cost, but the profits will go to its private partner, Exxon-Mobil, and the notoriously corrupt governments of Chad and Cameroon. The Bank claims that the project's environmental impact will be minimal and the wealth generated will lift living standards of the local poor. But the Dutch government has twice rejected the bank's environmental impact assessment as unconvincing. The bank's "revenue management plan" to keep the kleptocrats in Chad and Cameroon from pocketing its loan money has been ridiculed as naive and unworkable by Harvard Law School's Human Rights Project.
The Chad project is, in short, corporate welfare at its most naked, and it makes about as much environmental sense as incinerating nuclear waste. This is all the more true considering that the project's purpose is to bring to market more oil that humanity can't afford to burn anyway -- not because of prices at the pump, but because of rising temperatures and fiercer weather around the world. Our longstanding fossil fuel use has already begun changing the global climate, so doesn't environmental prudence suggest that the bank should be leading the transition away from fossil fuels and toward solar and other non-carbon energy sources?
Imagine what the Bank could accomplish if it diverted the $540 million it wants to spend subsidizing Exxon in Chad to genuinely sustainable development initiatives. It could provide solar panels and cookers to villages throughout the region. Or, in keeping with the bank's preference for macro-solutions, it could provide the financing needed to bring industrial-scale solar power to market. A recent study -- led by British Petroleum experts, no less -- found that photovoltaic solar power would be competitive with coal and oil-fired electricity tomorrow, if only someone built a PVC solar factory large enough to capture the economies of scale that come with mass production. BP likes to talk green, but it has declined to build that factory, presumably because it prefers to keep solar off the market in deference to its core business of oil production. But the World Bank could finance that factory, whose projected cost just happens to be approximately $540 million.
Gerald Meier is a professor of economics at Stanford University: Protesters are a mixed lot -- and not consistent. Some protest the environmental policies of the World Bank. Others protest the debt repayment policies of the World Bank. Others protest IMF conditionality. Others protest any "bailing out" of foreign investors. But most use the World Bank and IMF as scapegoats and symbols for their concerns that are loosely linked to vague ideas of "globalization."
Get Salon in your mailbox!