GLOBALIZATION: QUEBEC SUMMIT HIDES AN IRON FIST BEHIND A WORD
In French In SpanishBy Brian Becker
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
-- Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian archbishop
The late Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara's now famous utterance has taken on a new poignancy with the announcement that Quebec's archbishop will be excluded from the official activities of the Summit of the Americas set for Quebec City, in Quebec, Canada, starting April 17.
Summit planners want this summit meeting to confirm the next step in the "globalization" of both North and South America by backing the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
The bankers and corporate barons decided to censure Quebec Archbishop Maurice Couture because he didn't limit his intervention to simply praying for the victims of "globalization." Instead, the archbishop chose to show solidarity with tens of thousands of students and workers protesting the forced layoffs, union busting, wage slashing, land theft and privatization of vital social services that are the heart of the proposed FTAA treaty.
BEWARE CERTAIN WORDS
If it has excelled at anything, modern-day corporate culture has become the master at advertising and political propaganda. A handful of corporate media monopolies that dominate the air waves and newspapers can mass produce and widely distribute carefully chosen words, phrases and slogans, using them to distort the realities that they describe.
The word "globalization" sounds neutral, benign or even democratic. But globalization is in fact a form of class war by the rich and powerful against the poor. It is a form of corporate violence against working people and their labor unions.
On the environmental front, globalization is a systematic assault to eliminate anti-pollution regulations imposed on the oil, mining and logging industries.
Globalization is also a war against the development strategies of the so-called Third World countries that have nationalized and "protected" home industries so that they would not be overrun or destroyed by more powerful transnational corporations from the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy or Canada.
Globalization is not simply an economic policy that favors corporate profit over workers' rights and the environment. It is also economic domination enforced by war and the threat of war.
THE LINK BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND IMPERIALIST WAR
The U.S./NATO demonization of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and attack on Yugoslavia best show how economic imperialism is organically linked to military imperialism. This is what is most important to really understanding the phenomenon of globalization.
"For globalization to work, America must not be afraid to act as the almighty superpower that it is ...the hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist-- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
These are the words of the foremost advocate of globalization, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, explaining the real but unstated reason for NATO's war against the Yugoslav government. (New York Times, March 28, 1999)
Milosevic was the leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia. His government had cooperated with the International Monetary Fund's globalization program in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR and the other socialist governments in eastern Europe, Milosevic changed economic strategies.
He began taking steps to slow down and resist the wholesale privatization of the state-owned or socialized industry, banking and trade as demanded by the IMF and the World Bank. This made him the target of all-out hostility from the globalizers on Wall Street.
Anti-Milosevic rants in the Western corporate media reached new levels of fury by 1994. The propaganda focused public attention on alleged "ethnic cleansing" by Serbs in Bosnia or later Kosovo. But that was to fool the public into thinking that the coming war against Yugoslavia was for humanitarian purposes.
The real story was located in the fine print.
"Milosevic is harking back to the political control promised by that old communist star on his presidency building ... he is revoking some privatization and free market measures," the Christian Science Monitor wrote on June 6, 1996. A month later, the July 18, 1996, New York Times complained about Milosevic's determination to "keep state controls [of industry] and his refusal to allow privatization."
"Milosevic failed to understand the message of the fall of the Berlin wall ... while other communist politicians accepted the Western model ... Milosevic went the other way," was the even more explicit message carried in the Aug. 4, 1996, Washington Post.
The globalizers are driven to militarily crush those who dare resist their demands to privatize the industries, collective farming lands, and service sectors of their economies. "War is merely an extension of politics, but by other means," according to famed dictum of the 19th century Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz. And the politics of the current era is the concentrated economic interests of the biggest transnational corporations and banks.
Resistance to these policies could be contagious among the poor and downtrodden, who make up the majority of the world's people. That's what Thomas Friedman meant when he wrote that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist" of the Pentagon war machine.
NATO eventually dropped 23,000 bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia during the 1999 war. U.S. and NATO troops took over Kosovo in June 1999.
Then the United States and the European Union promised to lift economic sanctions on Yugoslavia and Serbia only if the people "unelected" Milosevic and replaced his government with a pro-IMF administration. The CIA poured in $70 million for the electoral opposition during the Yugoslav presidential campaign last September. Surprise, surprise, Milosevic lost his plurality and the election to a pro-IMF candidate.
The campaign against Yugoslavia was designed as a clear message to any who resist the IMF's "globalization" conditions. If poor countries dare resist they will encounter every form of pressure.
The U.S. government and the IMF announced that Yugoslavia would have economic sanctions lifted and be eligible for new IMF loans to rebuild their war-torn country only if Milosevic was arrested by March 31. On that day masked police and elite commandos arrived to arrest him.
CAPITALISTS WAGE CLASS WAR
It is no wonder that tens of thousands of workers and students will be protesting outside the Summit of the Americas April 18-22.
Globalization is a form of class warfare. It is violence by the rich and powerful against everyone else.
The consequences are staggering. Karl Marx's prediction in "The Communist Manifesto" that the rich will get richer while the poor will get poorer is confirmed in today's statistics.
The top 200 transnational corporations have almost twice the economic clout of the poorest four-fifths of humanity. The combined revenues of just General Motors and Ford--the two biggest automobile companies in the world--exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product for all of sub-Saharan Africa.
Transnational corporations hold 90 percent of all technology and product patents worldwide.
The top 200 corporations' combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of 182 countries. That's all the countries of the world minus the biggest nine imperialist countries.
The 10 richest people in the world own wealth equivalent to the total production of the 50 poorest countries.
The top 447 billionaires and mega-millionaires have fortunes greater than that of half of humanity, or the 3 billion poorest people.
The three richest capitalists in the United States--Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Paul Allen--have wealth equal to the combined income and savings of the world's 600 million poorest people.
Globalization in the hands of the capitalist class does not simply mean the spread of uniform high technology, computers and industry throughout the world.
It means the strengthening of the power of Capital over working people.
It is the stranglehold of a peculiar institutional structure that entitles a tiny handful to amass great fortunes. This tiny handful privately possesses the products that are created by the collective labor of working people in society.
Workers get wages, while the corporate capitalists privately hold and own the products and thus the profits created by the collective work performed by others.
Resistance to a system that accumulates wealth at one pole and misery at the other is inevitable. The class warfare of the bosses and bankers must be answered with the class resistance of working people.
The property used to produce wealth in society can either be privately owned for the benefit of the owners and investors or it can be publicly owned. The two systems are diametrically different.
The former serves the capitalists. The latter is free to meet society's needs.
Will the priority be corporate profits or people's needs? In its basic form this is the question: What direction for society--capitalism or socialism?
posted 19 April 2001
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