Great Myths and False Promises Dominate UN Summit <http://nyc.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=193> by Mark Weisbrot Globalization is once again at the top of the agenda, as the biggest gathering of world leaders in history takes place in New York for the United Nations' millenium summit. But most of the discussion and thinking is taking place inside a very small box, and one that is steeped in popular mythology. The phenomenon itself is vastly misunderstood. Globalization, defined as an increase in international trade and investment, is seen as an inevitable, technologically driven process. It is billed as a natural phenomenon, like the weather, to which we all must adapt if we are to survive and prosper. But this has never been true. The globalization we have seen in recent decades has been driven by a laborious process of rule-making. It is the establishment and enforcement of these rules that allows Timberland shoes, for example, to make their product in China at wages of 22 cents an hour, and then sell it at the local suburban mall. Advances in transportation and communications did not determine this result. Our leaders have carefully rewritten the rules of the game in a way that has driven down wages for the vast majority of American employees. One may agree or disagree with this policy, but it should be understood as a conscious political choice. The same thing could have been done to the salaries of doctors, for example. With much less effort and expense than it has taken to negotiate investment and trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, we could license and regulate the training of doctors in foreign medical schools. By allowing these doctors to practice medicine in the United States, we could lower the salaries of doctors and greatly reduce health care costs, without any loss of quality. Interestingly, the savings to consumers from reducing American doctors' salaries to even those of Europe, where they are not badly paid, would be enormous: about $70 billion a year. This is at least a hundred times more than the efficiency gains from our most comprehensive trade liberalization agreements, such as the one that established the WTO five years ago. But it is unlikely to happen, because doctors, unlike the majority of the US labor force, have enough political clout to protect themselves. As much as globalization has hurt American workers, the results have been far worse for most of the poorer countries of the world. Over the last 20 years, their economic growth has been sharply reduced as they have opened their economies and submitted to Washington's dictates. In Latin America, for example, income per person grew ten times as fast from 1960 to 1980, as compared to the past two decades. In many countries, inequality has also increased. A lot of great promises have been made at the summit, such as halving the number of the world's poor, or halting and reversing the spread of AIDS, over the next 15 years. But there is no reason to take these promises seriously under present arrangements. The real power over the poorer countries resides with IMF and World Bank, who head up a creditor's cartel that is still strong enough to determine what policies most of them will have to follow. And the IMF/World Bank nexus, or "the Wall Street-Treasury complex" as one prominent economist has named it, represents a much more narrow constituency than the General Assembly of the United Nations. That constituency is considerably more interested in preserving the status quo, which is why we have seen so little progress on the crucial issue of debt relief. After four years of talk, only one of the 41 countries promised debt relief by the IMF and World Bank has actually seen even partial debt cancellation. The impoverished and AIDS-stricken countries of sub-Saharan Africa lose $15 billion a year to debt service, and no proposed foreign help will come close to making up for that. Even worse, the big pharmaceutical companies, often with Washington's help, have successfully prevented the spread of cheap generic substitutes for patented anti-AIDS drugs that tens of millions of AIDS victims will never be able to afford. Twenty-five years ago the United Nations called for a New International Economic Order to promote economic development. The poorer countries began to organize, as labor unions do within an industry or country, to demand a better deal. That effort was soon crushed, but recently there have been signs of revival in organizations such as the Group of Fifteen (less developed countries). Now that's the kind of "globalization" that could actually make the world a better place. Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Abuses Will Not Stifle Protest Movement What We Have Learned Since Seattle <http://www.nyc.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=189> By Mark Weisbrot "When protest becomes effective, governments become repressive." Tom Hayden summed it up in an axiom three decades ago, while describing his own trial on conspiracy charges for organizing protests against the Vietnam War. The Seattle protests last December knocked the millennium round of WTO negotiations out of commission, and demonstrators have faced increasingly hostile government actions ever since. This is especially true for those who have kept to their principles of non-violence and no destruction of property-which includes almost everyone who showed up in Washington DC last April to protest the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and in Philadelphia and Los Angeles at the political conventions. The city of Philadelphia upped the ante with the arrest last month of John Sellers on conspiracy charges, and the setting of bail-for misdemeanor charges-at one million dollars. A higher court reduced the bail, which was more typical for a murder suspect than someone who is accused of conspiring to block traffic, to $100,000 on Tuesday. But the message was clear. Sellers heads the Ruckus Society, a group that has trained activists in the techniques of non-violent civil disobedience. The group was instrumental in organizing both the Seattle and Washington, D.C. protests. He was apparently singled out not for anything he had done in Philadelphia, but for who he is. The use of special punishments on the basis of a person's political identity certainly contradicts the principle that we are "a nation of laws, not of men." Philadelphia is not alone. In Washington DC, the police went so far as to close down the meeting center of the organizations that were planning the protests. Philadelphia police staged a similar, almost certainly illegal raid in Philadelphia on a warehouse used for making puppets and other protest props, "preventively arresting" 70 people. Washington police also rounded up hundreds of people on the street one night, including some unlucky tourists, and launched "pre-emptive strikes" against people who looked like they might be on their way to a demonstration. Although there were some scuffles between police and a few protestors in Philadelphia, it is important to understand that police abuses have not been committed in response to violence or even property damage. In Seattle, for example, a handful of people on the fringes of the protests broke windows and overturned trash bins. But the police mostly ignored the window-breakers and let loose their tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets on the thousands of peaceful demonstrators. It may seem inflated to compare these protests to the much larger demonstrations of the Vietnam era, but the Seattle and DC demonstrations were enormously effective. The WTO has yet to recover from the collapse of its millennium round, and last April's protests in Washington gave millions of Americans their first glimpse of the IMF and the World Bank. These two organizations head up a creditor's cartel that controls the major economic decisions for more than 60 countries. They are the most powerful financial institutions in the world, and they have relied on public unawareness for 55 years to maintain-and regularly abuse-their power. The protestors have solid moral authority for invoking the long-standing tradition of non-violent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King once compared such infractions to an ambulance going through a red light on its way to the hospital. The issues raised by the protestors certainly have the moral urgency that King was describing. Fifteen million Africans have already died from AIDS, and our government's policies (together with the IMF, World Bank, and WTO) could cost the lives of millions more. Extracting the maximum debt service from these devastated countries, and protecting US patent holders from the spread of affordable, generic anti-AIDS drugs, appear to remain as these institutions top priorities. At home, we now have nearly two million prisoners languishing behind bars, hundreds of thousands convicted on drug charges for which no civilized society would incarcerate them. These are among the issues that the mostly young people whom Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney described as "a cadre of criminal conspirators" have sought to bring to public attention. Million dollar bail, conspiracy charges, illegal raids, and police abuses are unlikely to be any more effective than tear gas and pepper spray in discouraging these protests. Nor will Mayor Street's threat to prosecute low-grade misdemeanor charges "to the full extent of the law." This was a flagrant violation of civil liberties more commonly seen in countries like Indonesia or Burma than in the United States. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prague braces for anti-globalisation showdown <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2000-09/praguetop090900.shtml> IMF Summit: Protesters who brought Seattle to a standstill and wrecked the world's trade talks head for Czech capital hellbent on causing mayhem By Justin Huggler in Prague 9 September 2000 Ludvic Zifcak was the secret policeman who lit the fuse that toppled Czechoslovakia's Communist regime. In 1989, for reasons that have never been clear, Mr Zifcak, a notorious member of the StB secret police, started the rumour that a student had been killed in protests. The rumour fuelled street demonstrations, prompted the Velvet Revolution. In a bizarre twist, Mr Zifcak is staging a comeback to organise one of the protests that could turn Prague into a battleground later this month when the streets of the Czech capital are taken over by opponents of globalisation. The demonstrations will unite an unlikely array of protesters. With Mr Zifcak will march an assortment of Hitlerite skinheads and those intent on halting global capitalism, who have vowed to turn Prague into "Seattle II". The target is the annual summit of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, held in Prague for the first time on 26 September. For a week demonstrators plan to bring the city to a standstill. Czech sources said some plan to break in and disrupt the meetings. Hospitals have been told to lay in supplies in case of a chemical or biological-weapon terrorist attack. Simultaneous antiglobalisation protests are planned for 26 September in 30 countries including Britain, the United States, France and Germany. Up to 20,000 protesters are expected in Prague itself. The Czechs have drafted in 11,000 police, and 5,000 soldiers will be on stand-by. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 the Czech Republic has been among the most enthusiastic of postcommunist countries embracing capitalism. Securing the IMF and World Bank meetings was seen as something of a coup until it became clear Prague could be brought to a standstill. If the hard left is turning out against capitalism, so is the hard right. Czech neo-Nazi skinheads have said they too will march, prompting fears of clashes between them and anarchist groups. Most protesters will be the same diverse mix of pressure groups and individuals behind November's demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, which first brought the anti-globalism movement to world attention. The protesters back a variety of causes. Jubilee 2000, the British-based group planning a funeral procession through Prague on 23 September for child "victims" of Third World debt, campaigns for the cancelling of the debt. It promised an outpouring of anger on the streets of Prague after the G8 summit in Okinawa failed to cancel Third World debt. Many of the other groups are co-ordinating under the banner of the Initiative against Economic Globalisation (Inpeg), a Czech-based group planning a blockade of the summit. Its organisers say that they oppose the IMF and the World Bank, which they claim forces developing countries to adapt their economies to suit the needs of the West. Inpeg and Jubilee 2000 say they oppose violence and property destruction. The World Bank says it has good relations with many of the protesters, and has invited several groups to join it for meetings during the summit. The Czech President, Vaclav Havel, a globalisation critic, is organising a debate between protesters and IMF and World Bank representatives. Hardline groups descending on Prague include the September 26 Collective and Red Pepper from Britain, the Black Squad Ruckus Society and Earth First from the United States and Projeckt Interkonti and FAU from Germany. Police from various countries are reported to have infiltrated anarchist groups planning violence and Scotland Yard and FBI staff have travelled to Prague to share intelligence with Czech police. Most co-ordination of the anti-globalisation protests is via the mass medium of globalisation: the internet. Estimates of the total number of protesters travelling to Prague for the demonstrations have fallen from original projections of up to 50,000 to between 15,000 and 20,000, apparently because of the cost of getting to the Czech Republic, especially from America, and because many protesters plan to go to the simultaneous "S26" rallies in their own countries. Protesters have chartered coaches and struck deals with travel agents. Coaches are leaving from London, Manchester and Liverpool, and one British travel agent is offering a return flight and three nights' accommodation for GBP300. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Fodors for Free Speechers [IndyMedia] <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0%2C1283%2C38636%2C00.html?tw=wn20000908> [See website for embedded hyperlinks.] by Michelle Delio Sep. 8, 2000, NEW YORK People here are turning to a news source outside the mainstream to get an insider's view on how to survive the United Nations' Millennium Summit. Multi-block areas of Manhattan are being closed off to accommodate both foreign dignitaries and protesters, so locals are participating in the creation of an open-source survivor guide. Many New Yorkers feel that the "open source, open content" Independent Media Center website is doing a better job of getting the real news out than the mainstream media, despite the fact that the city has refused to issue press passes to that group and to other nonprofit sites. "There are going to be 90 or so demonstrations near the United Nations that police will have to close the streets for," said Cindy Magulus, head of human resources for Film Opticals, a special-effects production company. "Not only does the website tell you where the protests will be, especially the unofficial ones, they also are providing great information on how to get around the city by foot and subway," Magulus said. "Frankly I don't think I've ever seen a better source of local information for what really is starting to feel like a crisis." The site has a complete "care package" for marching protestors, including pointers on cheap hotels andrestaurants, detailed city maps, and a list of designated meeting places, along with services for roving reporters, such as copy shops, film processing centers and cafes. Residents have been warned that huge stretches of the city can and will be closed without warning to allow the assembled 150 world leaders free passage through the streets, or to contain any of the protests that are breaking out all over the city. Bike messenger Harim Veracruz says that the IndyMedia site has been "a godsend" for him and his colleagues. "All the messengers are using it," he said. "There's a map of the city, information on who is going to be where, what parts of the city to avoid, how to get from here to there fast, even restaurant recommendations. It's a very helpful site." Veracruz said he's even "gotten educated as to why these people are so angry" by reading some of the political news on the site, and is considering joining a protest walk to the U.N. on Friday. IndyMedia was launched by activists during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle last November; 28 local sites now span the globe from Canada to the Democratic Republic of Congo. IndyMedia websites focus on open-source journalism, which means anyone can publish their words, sounds or images, as long as the story is relevant to the issues the site is covering. Contributors are urged to designate all content "Copy Left", a copyright-free standard defined by open-content licenses. Submitting content is a point-and-click process. "If you have the information onto your computer, you can get it up on IndyMedia in a flash," said Hannah Van Ness, a 67-year-old New York resident who's looking forward to covering some of the United Nation's protests Friday for IndyMedia with her digital video camera and a portable computer. "We want to provide an online forum for discussion and debate, unfiltered by gatekeepers," according to theIndyMedia site. "Like the Socratic town square, only online with text, audio, video and graphics." Sydney and Melbourne residents may be using IndyMedia Australia sites in the coming weeks when the Olympics and World Economic Forum arrive. IndyMedia news sites in those countries are being used to coordinate protests and actions against both events, and to broadcast what participants say are the untold stories about these global gatherings. "If you're tired of teary-eyed, soft-focus coverage of the news, if you want to see the news that journalists are too scared or too lazy to cover, come visit an IndyMedia site," said "Chip," a self-described "angry young Australian." The majority of IndyMedia sites also use open-source software, mainly Linux, for networking and Web hosting. Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is begging residents to use the subway to avoid the many blockades and barricades. "Rudy has a point," said weary New York resident Karen Rivers, who was forced to backtrack 15 blocks downtown in order to enter her apartment. "Chances are you won't find any world leaders on our urine-drenched and litter-decorated platforms waiting for a train." See: <http://www.nyc.indymedia.org/> <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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