-Caveat Lector- RadTimes # 46 - September, 2000 aka "Shit That Matters" An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ANNOUNCEMENT: RadTimes is now on the web and in audio! See LUVeR Alternative News <www.luver.org> for details. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Breaking news from Prague: <http://prague.indymedia.org/> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --------------- --Dozens injured in Prague clashes --Prague Protests Heating Up --Economist on Prague demos Linked stories: *The Holy Land's poisonous river *Drought Prompts Record Roundups of Wild Horses, Burros ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Begin stories: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dozens injured in Prague clashes <http://www.msnbc.com/news/466957.asp> Czech riot policemen are set alight with Molotov cocktails as a police water cannon hoses them down during clashes outside the congress center in Prague on Tuesday. [photo on web site] PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Sept. 26 Some 5,000 anti-capitalist activists marched on the IMF and World Bank summit Tuesday, throwing firebombs and rocks at riot police who responded with tear gas and water cannons. "STOP THE economic terror now," chanted the activists, who set up barricades in the streets and set them ablaze, filling the skies with black smoke. They demanded an end to the two giant lending institutions they call a menace to humanity. Protest organizers had predicted that 20,000 demonstrators would turn out for the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund prime targets for critics of economic globalization. Police spokeswoman Iva Knolova said at least 40 people were injured, including 30 police officers and 10 protesters, and an undetermined number were arrested. BIG FIGHT WITH POLICE One big fight began down a hill from the communist-era convention center where the finance leaders were meeting. The activists, most of them Europeans, also staged a standoff at a bridge leading to the center. Police in riot gear ordered the protesters to halt their unauthorized demonstration, but some pushed forward, throwing rocks they had made by breaking up a sidewalk. Police fought back. NBC's Dawna Friesen reported from the scene of the protests that the organizers were able to rally at key exit points from Prague's Congress Center, worrying officials in charge of security for the event, which was still taking place inside. "This is a battle for equal justice worldwide," said a naked Swiss man near the bridge, identifying himself only as Rafael. In a throwback to U.S. anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s, some activists waved banners saying "Make love not trade" as they paraded outside the meetings. In Washington, about 200 people took to the streets to protest the meetings in Prague. Police cleared the demonstrators and made about 30 arrests. Americans were among the protesters in Prague, where earlier in the day demonstrators threw stones at a McDonald's outlet in a town square, cracking the glass door and trashing the furniture. "The McDonald's company condemns this expression of vandalism," spokeswoman Drahomira Jindrakova said. VIOLENCE CONDEMNED South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, chairman of the summit, said it was "a pity that it has descended into violence" but added it was unclear what the activists were seeking as they fight economic globalization. "I know what they're against but have no sense of what they're for," Manuel said. Hans Jurgen, a student from Norway, turned out wearing a green hat festooned with dollar signs a walking, talking caricature of globalization's fat cats. "I have children for lunch and I kill people in many countries of the world," Jurgen said. The demonstrators who converged on Tuesday's opening of the annual bank meetings said they were carrying out a repeat of mass protests that disrupted similar summits last year in Seattle and this spring in Washington. But in the days leading up to the confrontation, Czech authorities at the border stopped almost 300 people with arrest records from previous anti-globalization rallies. Czech authorities had mobilized 11,000 police to maintain control. Police said some 5,000 people had turned out for the protest, which if correct meant that the police had more than a 2-1 numerical advantage over the activists. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prague Protests Heating Up <http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=9827> Tamara Straus, AlterNet September 25, 2000 These are trying times for the Czech Republic. Not just because the Czech government has been besieged by corruption scandals and attempts at rapid privatization have largely failed. But because the country's crown jewel, Prague, home to Kafka and the Velvet Revolution, has been inundated by two radically different though symbiotic, delegations of foreigners. The first group comprises 15,000 bankers, executives of multinational companies and finance ministers who have come to Prague to attend the 55th Annual Meeting of the World Bank and Board International Monetary Fund. Their suits are crisp. They tend to speak the language of neoliberal economics. And, as the Czech government had hoped, they are giving the city a financial boost by filling its four-star hotels and restaurants, as well as glossing its reputation as the most cosmopolitan of Central European capitals. The second group is, to put it mildly, a more motley crew. They are young. They are sleeping on the cheap, in hostels, living rooms or in tents in the Sakhova Stadium. And besides sharing a romantically bedraggled dress code, they tend to view the world as being under a ruthless capitalist siege, in need of revolutionary antidotes that they intend to bring to fruition. These are the antiglobalization protesters, who Czech authorities are praying will not make their city better known as Seattle II. But given the first few days of antiglobalization demonstrations and meetings this is unlikely to happen. The seven demonstrations that took place on Saturday and the half dozen that occurred on Sunday have been small in number (ranging from 50-500), peaceful and remarkably free of violent clashes with Prague's specially formed 11,000-member police force. Although there are now anywhere from 2-7,000 antiglobalization protesters in the city, their number is a far cry from the 20-50,000 that had been predicted. This may well be because the Czech border police have been doing their utmost to bar protesters from the country. All last week and this weekend caravans of protesters from Germany, England and other European countries were detained at the borders, often for ten hours at a time, while police searched their vehicles and checked their passports against a master list of "radical insurgents" culled by the FBI and Canadian and European security agencies. On Sunday, a 24-hour standoff took place at the Czech-Austrian border when 1,000 Italian activists coming by train from Venice decided to block the tracks rather then leave without three of their comrades who had been labeled "personas non grata," evidently because their names appeared on the list. Thanks to the cell phone, the activists managed to get in touch with the Italian Embassy in Prague, which sent a deputy to negotiate on their behalf with the Czech police. The train only got rolling again after the activists decided by mutual consent to leave the three "personas non grata" with the embassy deputy who promised to help them join their group in Prague. "I am not at all surprised by this," said Czech legal observer Marek Vesely. "According to our laws, the police do have to explain why you are being detained or what it means that you are a persona non grata." He added: "It now looks like if you attend a demonstration anywhere in the world, your name will be entered on a list and your photograph will be taken." Although protesters who rallied at the train station and in front of the Ministry of Interior on Sunday, were angered by the Czech border police they did not appear to be in the least defeated. "This is a unique event," said Miranda, a dreadlocked 22-year-old from Bristol, England. "Never before has the movement been this international. Never before have Americans been able to get together with Europeans, face-to-face, to trade ideas and tales of action." Indeed the meeting on Saturday at the protesters' "convergence center"an abandoned ship hanger on a scruffy island in the middle of Prague, was truly international. Close to one thousand protesters from Spain, France, Canada, England, Sweden, Finland and the U.S. milled the grounds while the most vigilant gathered around a large map of central Prague to decide their course of action. Like Seattle, the Prague antiglobalists are organizing themselves in "affinity groups" and making decisions by consensus. They have decided to march without a permit to the Prague Congress Center on Tuesday, September 26, the day that the IMF and World Bank meeting formally begins, with the goal of encircling the massive congress center and preventing the delegates form leaving until they "agree to radical reform or abolish their institutions." Such a plan is near impossible, logistically let alone politically, as the congress center, a kind of Stalinist era Getty Museum, is ringed by police and difficult to access. The only direct route to the hall is a four-lane road that links the main part of the city to the congress center by an overpass, known locally as "suicide bridge" for the large number of people who leapt to their death during the communist era. But such details do not seem to bother the youthful protesters. "We are on a fight to be known," said one of them. "We don't care about what's possible and what's not. We want justice and equality for everyone in the world." Not everyone protesting in Prague this week is as buoyantly idealistic as this group loosely organized by INPEG, the Initiative Against Economic Globalization, a Prague-based coalition of mainly foreign activists. Also in town are representatives from 350 nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations who have been holding lectures on the negative repercussions of globalization and meeting with representatives from the IMF and World Bank. On Saturday morning, Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned Czech president, held a forum at the Palace for leaders from environmental, human rights and interfaith groups with world financial leaders. World Bank President James Wolfensohn was there, as was IMF Managing Director Horst Kohler and the billionaire financier George Soros, to discuss "the responsibility of humankind for the development of the poorest areas of the world," as the forum flyer put it. The meeting went smoothly and inconclusively. And although Havel did not make any critical comments on the Bank or the global economic system that many had hoped for, his gesture was not perceived as a failure. What angered activists were comments made by James Wolfensohn at another NGO-Bank session on Friday. "Understand we are not the world government," said Wolfensohn. "Very often people blame us for the politics in a country when they should really blame themselves. It is not me who has the vote. It is you." Such reasoning is unacceptable to veteran anti-IMF and -World Bank activists, who have spent years painstakingly researching the impact of the lending institutions' policies, particularly the IMF's structural economic policies (SAPs) -- on poor nations. Activists argue that World Bank loans for such large scale projects as dams and oil pipelines enrich the Bank and line the coffers of corporations, while causing havoc on poor economies' social infrastructure and environment. They point out that the World Bank has $30 billion in reserves, but refuses to use this money to cancel the debt. In the case of the IMF, there is now close to uniform agreement among critics that macroeconomic remedies, such as currency devaluations, high interest rates and budget cuts, may bring poor countries into global markets but at the expense of instability and further debt. Even insiders like Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, and Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist who has advised the governments of Russia and Poland on privatization, argue that the IMF helped cause the Asian financial crisis of 1997 which spread to Russia a year later. The World Bank and the IMF are thus finding themselves in a tight spot. Their recently released World Development Report is a much-publicized effort to recast themselves as fighters of poverty. To prove this, they are putting an emphasis on the projects that give people the basic tools to benefit from a global economy: education, access to technology and encouragement of stock ownership. But the very statistics they usethat half the world's population lives on $2 a day, that one fifth of the world's people living in the highest income countries have 86 percent of the world GDP, seem to call into question their development economics. Although the leaders of the IMF and World Bank are making dialogue with their critics a priority inviting representatives from such organizations as the Environmental Rights Action Group of Nigeria and the Public Interest Center of India, activist groups so far are not overly impressed. "Globalized economics is nothing but global apartheid," said Sam Koba, a Kenyan from the World Council of Churches. Perhaps the most successful group campaigning against the IMF and the World Bank in Prague is Jubilee 2000, an interfaith group that is calling for the cancellation of third world debt. Unlike the jumble of issues that many antiglobalization groups are airing, Jubilee's goal is clear, correct global economic imbalances through debt forgiveness, which is probably why it is one of the few organizations in the movement that has members in the countries it is fighting for. Jubilee has 20 million members in 150 countries. "We get our message not necessarily through NGOs but through the power of faith and religion," said Liana Cisneros, Jubilee's 2000's coordinator for the Caribbean and Latin America. "In the places I work people understand debt even if they don't have access to the Internet." Cisneros' comment raises one of the thorniest problems for the antiglobalization movement: How to become truly global? At INPEG's convergence center there were almost no African or Asian faces and few activists from Prague. This small number of Czechs, especially among young activists, worries some who realize that the Czech Republic has had its share of economic instability due in part to the IMF's economic recommendations. "You must realize that the Czech people have a tradition of being obedient," said Arnost Novak, a 22-year-old organizer for INPEG and resident of Prague. "It is true that they are less idealistic about capitalism since the 1997 financial crisis. But not enough to be political. Young people here have lots of new entertainment: clubs, cafes, restaurants." Novak adds that the police have been very efficient in disseminating "anti-protester propaganda." For three months alarmist announcements have been made in Czech newspapers and on television to stay clear of protesters, obey cops, and, if possible, leave the city. The city's 1,000 public schools are closed. McDonald's is boarded up. And residents of Prague, no matter how much they admire the nonviolent protests that toppled the communists in 1989, seem to be unmoved by the demands of the antiglobalists. Tuesday is the big day for the antiglobalization demonstrators. INPEG's march to the conference center will be joined by almost all groups in attendance. What this will mean for the success of S26, as the day of the march is called, is unknown. But what is certain is that most Czechs, especially in the government, are hoping the day passes without incident. "Vaclav Klaus wanted the meetings here," said Tereza Brdeckova, a novelist and newspaper critic referring to the former prime minister who was ousted after the 1997 corruption scandal. "Everyone else would have preferred the meetings be canceled." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Economist on Prague demos Angry and effective WASHINGTON, DC The threat of renewed demonstrations against global capitalism hangs over next week's annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank. This new kind of protest is more than a mere nuisance: it is getting its way. Debt and development N30, A16, S11, S26. If you are part of the anti-capitalist resistance, these terms will need no explaining. Each denotes a day of protest against 'corporate-led globalisation'. First came the World Trade Organisation's ill-fated ministerial meeting in Seattle in November 1999; then the spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in April this year; next, the World Economic Forum's gathering in Melbourne on September 11th; and, coming to Prague next week, the main annual meetings of the Bank and the Fund. Each term also connects you to a website where the plans for the demos, and other useful information for would-be protesters, are posted. The approach is the same every time. A variety of ill-defined and sometimes spontaneous 'radical' groups' environmentalists, feminists, anarchists, neo-communists, and assorted non-aligned malcontents, to name only some, join to march on the streets. A 'convergence centre' is proposed, usually a disused warehouse. (As The Economist went to press, the Prague venue had not been announced.) This is where protesters are housed and fed (vegan food preferred); and where they receive medical and legal advice, plus training in 'non-violent' civil protest. The lack of hierarchy is ostentatious. The protesters have no leaders. They join small 'affinity groups'. Despite this, the events are well organised. Possible activities include colourful puppets, street theatre, catchy slogans and lots of noise, and for some (to quote the S26 site) 'pickets, occupations of offices, blockades and shutdowns, appropriating and disposing of luxury consumer goods, sabotaging, wrecking or interfering with capitalist infrastructure, [and] appropriating capitalist wealth and returning it to the working people'. The immediate aim is to shut down, or at least badly disrupt, the meetings of the global elite. Afterwards, the movement evaporates into cyberspace. Seattle saw both the birth and, to date, the high point of this new mode of activism. There had been isolated days of anti-corporate protest before, notably in Britain, but the disruption of the WTO gathering, amid street scenes reminiscent of the 1960s, confirmed Seattle's standing as the birthplace of the 'backlash against globalisation'. Onward and eastward If the protest websites and the elite's contingency planners can be believed, Prague may not be far behind. Organised almost exclusively by European activists, the Ruckus Society and other veterans of America's protests do not plan to attend, demos there could prove more disruptive and more violent than anything so far. There will be around 18,000 delegates, financiers and assorted hangers-on; the Czech interior ministry is expecting some 20,000-25,000 protesters (other estimates say 5,000-10,000). Many would-be protesters have already been denied entry at the border. Even so, this could be the biggest invasion of foreigners since the Russian army arrived in 1968. All these elitists and anti-elitists will be crammed together into Prague's warren of narrow winding streets, a tricky situation for the authorities. The Czech police have been co-operating with the FBI and the British police. Not noted for restraint, they are inexperienced at dealing peacefully with large-scale protest. Some errant officers have reportedly sent death threats to protest organisers. Meanwhile, some of the organising websites sound an ominous note. One of them, <www.destroyIMF.org>, promises a 'mass working-class protest', dismissing Seattle as a 'passive ideological showpiece'. Neo-Nazi skinheads may turn up as well, to fight on one side or the other. As a result the town is preparing for siege. Schools and theatres have been told to close. Officials have advised those without business in Prague, as well as the old and those with small children, to leave. Hospital beds have been set aside. One bank has asked its top people to declare their blood group. Other bigwigs have been advised to leave their spouses at home (usually the annual meetings are an occasion for heavy-duty socialising). Many bankers have just decided to give this year's gathering a miss. Even if all this preparation and anxiety turn out to be overdone, this is far from business as usual, so, whatever happens, the protesters have won a kind of victory. Protest groups are already planning next year's events. These include action in April against the Summit of the Americas gathering in Quebec; a global May Day rally (codeword, M12K01); and, yet again, protests at the next IMF/World Bank annual meetings, this time in Washington in September 2001. What, if anything, does all this signify? Is it, as some claim, the start of a global citizen-activist movement? (If you took that view, you might see Europe's current fuel-tax 'revolt' as part of the trend, despite its anti-green, middle-class character.) Or is it, in the words of Naomi Klein, an anti-corporate sympathiser and author of a recent book deploring the power of corporate brands, merely 'a movement of meeting-stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead'? The protesters are certainly not part of an intellectually coherent movement. They represent a diverse set of groups, often with very differing agendas, and sometimes with mutually contradictory ones. Almost all they have in common is a loathing of the established economic order, and of the institutions, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, which they regard as either running it or serving it. The League for a Revolutionary Communist International sums up the all-encompassing disaffection pretty well in a 19-page manifesto demanding an end to debt, poverty and capitalist exploitation; for good measure, it also wants to liberate advances in genetics and pharmaceuticals from the tyranny of patent rights and to 'eliminate the meaningless and harmful marketing of useless products'. Blinkered, as yet Many of the protesters know little about the organisations they are attacking, but not all of them, by any means, are in it merely to vent incoherent rage or have a fun day out. The more thoughtful among them recognise that street protests are only a convenient tactic in a larger war, and that if their movement is to grow it will need a vision, positive proposals, that is, as well as a list of things it hates. So far, this vision is lacking, though a few ambitious types are working on it. The International Forum on Globalisation, based in San Francisco, has been preparing a document that it hopes will win the support of a wide range of activist groups. According to John Cavanagh, head of the Institute for Policy Studies, a radical think-tank based in Washington, DC, this manifesto would outline a new 'global democracy' based on human rights and ecological sustainability. It would also define new rules for globalisation. (For instance, certain goods and services, such as bulk water and living things, should not be subject to patents and trade rules.) And it would demand new bodies. The Fund, the Bank and the WTO should be shrunk or shut down. The UN, which is deemed more accountable and democratic, should be souped up. Whether any agenda, even one so general, could be adopted by such a rag-bag of protesters is unclear. An effort by Vaclav Havel earlier this year to broker a meeting between the protesters and the boss of the World Bank foundered because the activists could not agree on whether such negotiations were a good idea: in fact, they had no way of actually making any decision. Who should represent a disparate collection of websites, all of which take pride in their lack of leaders? (Mr Havel has since managed to set up a forum on September 23rd that will be attended by Bank and Fund officials and by assorted opponents of globalisation.) Nonetheless, it would be a big mistake to dismiss this global militant tendency as nothing more than a public nuisance, with little potential to change things. It already has changed things, and not just the cocktail schedule for the upcoming meetings. Protests organised through the Internet succeeded in scuttling the OECD's planned Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998; then came the greater victory in Seattle, where the hoped-for launch of global trade talks was aborted. It is still unclear when, or whether, that round will start. Also, many of the groups have already swayed the decisions of firms and official institutions. Global Exchange, for instance, is an outfit of 40 people based in San Francisco, and an avid believer in street protest. It reckons it bullied Starbucks into promising to sell 'fair trade' coffee beans in its cafes, starting next month. ("Fair trade" coffee is supposedly bought at a price that offers peasant producers a "living wage", rather than at the 'exploitative' price paid for commercial coffee.) Starbucks says it had been thinking about doing this anyway. Similarly, 'anti-sweatshop' campaigns, mostly in America and mostly student-led, have had effects well beyond the university campus. A coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), student groups and UNITE, the textile workers' union, for instance, recently sued clothing importers, including Calvin Klein and Gap, over working conditions in the American commonwealth of Saipan in the Pacific. Faced with litigation and extended public campaigns against their brands, 17 companies settled (others, including Gap, are still fighting the case). The deal includes promises to improve working conditions. The factories will be monitored by yet another group, Verite, based in Massachusetts, and part of a growing industry of organisations dedicated to inspecting labour conditions in third-world factories. Activist groups have been just as successful in causing big international agencies to bend. A World Bank project in China, which involved moving poor ethnic Chinese into lands that were traditionally Tibetan, was abandoned after a political furor led by a relatively small group of influential pro-Tibetan activists. Similarly, the Bank had a tough fight to fund an oil pipeline through Cameroon because of activists' efforts. Technology of complaint The Internet has proved a crucial tool in organising these groups for protest; it has also directly furnished the protesters, once organised, with a potent weapon. E-mail makes it much easier not only to gather activists and disseminate information, but also to bombard a target with protests from around the world. As Debra Spar of the Harvard Business School points out, the activists have globalised faster than the firms they target. Global Exchange's online anti-Gap campus-organising kit has pro forma letters to send to the company, anti-Gap flyers and suggested slogans and chants. All are easily downloaded. It is hardly surprising that firms are often wrong-footed. The activists have also raised the profile of 'backlash' issues, notably, labour and environmental conditions in trade, and debt relief for the poorest countries. This has dramatically increased the influence of mainstream NGOs, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and Oxfam. Such groups have traditionally had some say (albeit less than they would have wished) in policymaking. Assaulted by unruly protesters, firms and governments are suddenly eager to do business with the respectable face of dissent. In the Bretton Woods institutions, in particular, the shift is striking. Public protest has accelerated change on several fronts, notably debt relief. The rallies, human chains and petitions for debt cancellation organised by the Jubilee 2000 campaign applied enormous political pressure for debt write-downs. As a result, groups such as Oxfam were all but co-opted into designing the debt-relief strategies. Next week is likely to see more measures announced to speed up the process, so that governments can say they will keep the promise they made in 1999 that at least 20 poor countries will see their debt burdens lifted this year. The IMF, long regarded as impermeable to outsiders, now runs seminars to teach NGOs the nuts and bolts of country-programme design, so that they can better monitor what the Fund is doing and (presumably) understand the rationale for the Fund's loan conditions. Horst Kohler, the IMF's new boss, has been courting NGOs. Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank's boss, has long fawned in their direction, but in the Bank too the pace of bowing down has been stepped up. In Prague this year a programme of meetings has been designed for non-government, non-corporate groups. At last count well over 300 had signed up. This raises the interesting possibility that radical groups will try to prevent slightly less radical groups from attending their meetings. Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, has gone further. He has a board of NGOs (including some fairly radical ones) to advise him, and he explicitly wants to position UNDP as an honest broker, arbitrating the interests of firms, government and civil society in individual developing countries. Presuming too much? The increasing clout of NGOs, respectable and not so respectable, raises an important question: who elected Oxfam, or, for that matter, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International? Bodies such as these are, to varying degrees, extorting admissions of fault from law-abiding companies and changes in policy from democratically elected governments. They may claim to be acting in the interests of the people,but then so do the objects of their criticism, governments and the despised international institutions. In the West, governments and their agencies are, in the end, accountable to voters. Who holds the activists accountable? Some politicians are beginning to press this point. The Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank sponsored by the British government, recently proposed a code of conduct for NGOs that would include certification by a regulator. For now, though, governments and international institutions would rather bend at least part of the way to the NGOs' demands than question their credentials. There could be no objection, of course, to the influence of NGOs and protesters if they were merely stating their case. Many protesters are out to do more than that, up to and including 'sabotaging, wrecking or interfering with capitalist infrastructure'. When they get their way, that looks likes a defeat for democracy rather than a victory. Then again, even this might be all right if the concessions won by protesters genuinely advanced the cause of the world's poor, whose interests most protesters claim to defend. This too is very much in doubt. Forcing higher labour standards on factories in Saipan, for instance, may simply cause the 'sweatshops' to move on, leaving the workers without jobs. Poor countries cannot afford rich-country standards of labour regulation; people in poor countries will bear the cost of denying this fact. Similarly, the furor over Tibet simply led China to withdraw its loan request. The Chinese decided to fund the project themselves, presumably with less regard for the environment and human rights. Even debt relief is capable of doing more harm than good, as when it channels new capital to countries whose economic policies are in disarray. A more complicated issue is the World Bank's thinking on poverty and development. Recently, the organisation has undergone a pronounced shift, clearly visible in its latest World Development Report, the Bank's flagship publication. Poverty is now described as a 'multidimensional' problem that includes powerlessness, voicelessness, vulnerability and fear, as well as mere lack of food, shelter and other economic necessities. Combating poverty therefore requires not only economic growth, it is argued, but also 'security' and 'empowerment'. Empowering poor people, says the Bank, means strengthening their ability to shape decisions that affect their lives' by removing discrimination, promoting equity (for instance, between the sexes) and ensuring that government institutions are more open, accountable and oriented towards the poor. The Bank reckons it should no longer impose reform strategies on its clients. They should be designed mainly by poor countries themselves on the basis of a national dialogue with various civil groups. In part this 'fuller' account of development reflects a shift in thinking that was under way before the backlash began. Some economists were already becoming more sympathetic to the view, almost universal before the 1980s, that growth by itself is not enough to reduce third-world poverty; and a consensus (broader than the one on growth and poverty) was already forming around the idea that the Bank's traditional lending conditions are not the best way to promote economic reform. But the NGO critics, scores of whom were invited to discuss the new report while it was in preparation, gave these intellectual tendencies a mighty push. Again, whether the developing countries will benefit is very much in doubt. Empowerment, supposing the idea is taken seriously, may distract governments and the Bank alike from the simpler pro-growth tasks that they already appear to find impossibly difficult. And it seems odd for the Bank to demand that third-world governments, often these days democratically elected, should design their reforms alongside civil groups that are unelected, unaccountable and very often unrepresentative. But these are not points to worry the protesters as long as they enjoy the sympathy of many people in the West, as they appear to. Many of the issues they raise reflect popular concern about the hard edges of globalisation, fears, genuine if muddled, about leaving the poor behind, harming the environment, caring about profits more than people, unleashing dubious genetically modified foods, and the rest. The radicals on the streets are voicing an organised and extremist expression of these widely shared anxieties. Along with mainstream NGOs, the protesters are prevailing over firms, international institutions and governments partly because, for now, they do reflect that broader mood. If their continuing success stimulates rather than satisfies their appetite for power, global economic integration may be at greater risk than many suppose. ---- Links to sites mentioned (the Ruckus Society, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, the International Forum on Globalization and Global Exchange. Or visit the raucous public protest sites: A16 and S11): <http://ruckus.org/> <http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/lrci.html> <http://www.ifg.org/> <http://www.a16.org/> <http://www.s11.org/> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linked stories: ******************** The Holy Land's poisonous river <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_941000/941317.stm> -- Israel's Kishon river is so polluted that fish swimming in it die in three minutes. ******************** Drought Prompts Record Roundups of Wild Horses, Burros <http://www.wildhorseandburro.blm.gov/> September 21, 2000 (ENS) - The numbers of wild horses and burros put up for adoption have almost doubled this year. Grasshopper infestations, severe drought and devastating wildfires have depleted forage and water supplies on the rangelands. ******************** ====================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ====================================================== "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." -J. Krishnamurti ______________________________________________________________ To subscribe/unsubscribe or for a sample copy or a list of back issues, send appropriate email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. ______________________________________________________________ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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