Speech by Jerry Mander World Affairs Council, San Francisco 4/2/03

Thank you Jane. And thank you to the World Affairs Council. It is great to be with you again, in this wonderful open forum. And thanks especially for the chance to be here with Vandana Shiva, my colleague and friend of ten years now, who has surely been the most brilliant, powerful and inspirational thinker and activist of our entire movement.

My focus today is on the recent report of the International Forum on Globalization… Alternatives to Globalization: A Better World is Possible. It’s a project that 19 members of the IFG board and associates, including Vandana, have been working on over the last three years. It’s a consensus report… i.e., it is not written by any of us individuals, but as a group… and it wasn’t easy. You can probably imagine the difficulties in getting 19 of the world’s most original thinkers, and headstrong ones, to agree on a set of common themes, but we did it, and I think it’s a testament to the trust we all developed over the years.

We hope this report marks a turning point for our movement, from strictly oppositional — what we have called the Paul Revere phase — to a far more pro-active and visionary position. It sets out a positive roadmap for local, national and international policy, but the main goal is to help reverse the powers of currently dominant institutions — global bureaucracies like the WTO, IMF, World Bank plus the global corporations that steer the system. This has left most governments, communities and people largely in service to global corporate priorities, living in what many scholars have lately called "the era of corporate rule", with grave effects on democracy, the environment and human welfare. As we will see, the new IFG report lays out a new set of policies and a new hierarchy of values that put such values as democracy, social equity, environmental sustainability, secure livelihoods, human rights, community control, etc. ahead of the interests of corporate growth and profit as the central focus of the system. Rather than corporate values, we propose the common good.

But before plunging into some of those positive proposals, I want to take 4-5 minutes to respond the questions we’re being asked about the war… and its relationship to globalization which will lead us to the broader issues. I think its important to mention these at the outset, since I think we all walked into the door here today with our minds and hearts worried and aching. And unfortunately there is a relationship that’s worth looking at.

Many anti-war protestors have been saying that military action in Iraq has been an attempt to establish a global empire… but I think that’s slightly off. A global empire already exists and has for decades. It’s an economic empire…economic globalization driven by the U.S. But it’s an empire in decline, which is what makes the situation dangerous. Like other declining empires, going back to Rome, it fights to save itself.

The failure of the global economic empire is already apparent in the extreme economic breakdowns in the many parts of the world that were forced to adopt the model over the last decades, particularly in South America, Africa and Asia — and lately including the U.S., as I will come back to.

It’s a failure that was actually built into the global economic model at the outset, since it was first created at Bretton Woods in 1944… and war won’t save it. But the war has been, I think, a last desperate effort to seize control of crucial resources the system requires (cheap oil in this case, not only from Iraq but by extension, and through intimidation) from all the world’s oil suppliers, from Saudi Arabia to Russia to Venezuela.

The hope is to keep the bloated juggernaut breathing just a little longer, and try and sustain an inherently unsustainable global economic model. It’s a kind of CPR.

Over the years many of us have organized to oppose other significant grabs of global resources… the world’s last forests, minerals, fresh water, genetic materials, biodiversity… but these were not usually threatened by direct military intervention. That job till now has been done just as well by the rules of global corporate bureaucracies like the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF: the Bretton Woods system. But now the stakes are higher.

Please remember, the survival of a globalized economy can only be achieved via an impossible formula: a never-ending, always expanding supply of inexpensive resources, new markets, and cheap labor. But it’s a process that cannot go on forever on a finite planet. Many global resources are already seriously depleted: oil is among them. Markets in many countries are also nearly saturated. People can buy only so many cars, and so much stuff. And cheap labor is less and less willing to be cheap, and to accept the meager bones it is tossed. What they clearly see are corporate CEOs making ten of millions while their own wages decline or stagnate, if they have a job at all. Or else, in the agriculture sector, their small farms are taken over by global corporations, as is happening everywhere on earth. Meanwhile the world’s environmental systems… from climate to water to oceans… are near collapse from the expansive, intrusive pressures of the system.

Most of you can probably recall the way this system has promoted itself, over the last decades. Economic globalization was to be a pancea for all the world’s problems… poverty, war, even environmental degradation. It was going to be bring "freedom" too, equated by globalization advocates with free markets and free trade, that is, corporate freedom. The operating homily was this: "The rising tide will lift all boats."

It has not worked out. Even many of the former proponents of globalization — the likes of George Soros (global financier), Joseph Stiglitz (former World Bank official), even Henry Kissinger (who has something to say about everything) have lately been admitting the system doesn’t work. Even the World Bank and IMF’s own reports have begun to acknowledge the failure.

Let me quickly read 1 or 2 of them:

The first is from the World Bank; a report called "The Simultaneous Evolution of Growth and Inequality", 1999:

"Globalization appears to increase poverty and inequality…The costs of adjusting to greater openness are borne exclusively by the poor, regardless of how long the adjustment takes."

But this one is my favorite. It’s from a CIA report, "Global Trends 2015", 2000:

"The rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats…[It will] spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today…[Globalization’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide…Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it."

Quick. Somebody pass that report to Condaleeza Rice

The failure of globalization has been most clear in the countries that bought the vision whole: Argentina, Thailand, among others in the Third World. Rather than solving problems of poverty and equity, globalization’s interventions have widened the gaps between rich and poor within countries and among countries, while concentrating the power and growth of global corporations, the only true beneficiaries of the process. We are now at the point where… of the one hundred largest economies in the world, 53 are now global corporations, larger than countries like Sweden and Norway, South Africa and Mexico, Belgium and Egypt, etc. The 200 largest global corporations now control nearly 30% of global economic activity, but they employ only one half of one percent of the global workforce, as monopoly and efficiencies of scale reduce employment and keep salaries down. Right now the average CEO of an American company makes nearly 500 times the wage of the average assembly line or office worker. So much for the rising tide that lifts all boats. Apparently it lifts only yachts.

And now, stock market declines, reductions in new investment, and increased unemployment — have made failure more visible and tangible. Unfortunately, this is what the U.S. and the globalizers can never admit. Rather than opt for sustainable models, they mask the failures, and delay its full onset with war. It’s a short term strategy. The larger truth is that any model which relies on never-ending depletion of resources, plus always increasing consumption, plus hopes that a working class or poverty class will forever accept its servitude, is inherently unsustainable.

So much for the bad news.

* * *

The good news begins with the fact that over the last dozen years or so, millions of people have been on the streets in protest. Tens of millions of farmers in India and elsewhere have protested the WTO rules that destroy small farms, drive people off land, and convert the lands to corporate monocultures for export markets. Over the last decade we have also seen millions of landless peasants in Brazil and in Africa, mounting massive campaigns for their land rights. None of this is reported in U.S. media. Similar numbers of workers in Europe have protested the declines of their wages, as corporations pit them in direct competition with poorer workers in Asia. (The Asian wages, by the way, do not increase toward the European level — which is what the theorists said would happen — because low wages in Third World countries are their only comparative advantage… If wages went up, corporations would not go to those places.) Meanwhile, England is actually advertising that it has the lowest wages in Europe.

Even before Seattle, hundreds of groups were hard at work to define an alternative system. This activity has accelerated enormously in recent years. We have seen impressive gatherings three years in a row at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil… more than 100,000 people this year.

These were not protest gatherings, but working meetings, to define and articulate a new set of priorities, including direct democracy, environmental sustainability, social equity, human rights, cultural and biological diversity, protection of the commons, jobs and livelihoods, and institutionalizing the precautionary principle. Those were exactly the specific core values incorporated by the International Forum on Globalization in our recent report. Instead of self interest, the common good. The time has never been more crucial or appropriate for the articulation of new pathways. In addition to the ten years of protest activity and the evident failure of the system to provide for human needs and the environment, there have been some spectacular new political developments in other countries.

The election of Lula as President in Brazil — the world’s eighth largest economy — who ran on an anti-globalization platform; the election of Gutierrez in Ecuador, who also ran against the IMF and World Bank; the near victories of alternative candidates in Costa Rica and Bolivia. The Chavez regime in Venezuela. We have virtually an entire continent in protest against unworkable globalization formulas. Similar political trends are beginning to appear in Africa and Asia.

And course there is the war. The situation in Iraq suggests yet one more compelling reason for the rapid introduction of viable alternative visions.

So, now let me turn finally to the specifics of the new report, and mention just a few of the main points… But I urge you to pick up the whole document out in the lobby.

1. What to do about the Bretton Woods system: the WTO, IMF, World Bank?
   
   The consensus view is that the Bretton Woods institutions are hopelessly flawed, in strict service to an economic — we should say ideological — model that believes that corporations should be at the helm of global economic governance, and effectively political governance. So all global rules now support that process. Attempts to fix that system around the margins will fail.
   
   Of course we do recognize the need for international bodies of some kind to deal with specific tasks, such as environmental crises — like climate change or ocean pollution — or trade in pernicious goods or arms, or dispute resolution mechanisms, or agreements about the global commons. But, where international agreement is desirable, we feel that the United Nations is the one international body with the potential, if dramatically reformed, to operate on a positive set of priorities. The UN’s original mandate was far different from the Bretton Woods system. It emphasized democracy, peace, equity, human rights, security, sustainability, the rights to livelihoods, etc. Nothing about the freedom of finance or corporations. But the UN has lately become the target of the same global corporations that rule the WTO. Some UN programs, such as its "global corporate compact," need to be abandoned to maintain some degree of democratic control. But we don’t believe the UN is inherently flawed, only operationally, and is probably the best instrument to negotiate, manage and supervise useful agreements among nations. One major new worry, however, is that the new U.S. unilateralism may soon turn into a campaign by the Bush administration to undermine the UN system as not suiting our purposes. We hope everyone will fight that.



2. Emphasizing localization rather than globalization
   
   The central conceit of the globalization model is that by removing economic and political sovereignty from nation-states, communities, subregions, etc., and putting the power into absentee authorities that operate globally via giant corporations and bureaucracies…that everyone benefits.
   
   So countries that had once fought to achieve some degree of self-reliance in basic needs — food, energy, materials, water — to feed and care for their own people, have been forced by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO structural adjustment programs to drop self-reliance as a goal and convert their economies to export-oriented monocultures run by giant global corporations. So where peoples and countries could once feed themselves, — with farmers on the land and small producers in a mixed economy — security has been traded-in for dependency on global corporations and markets. This has left many small, poor nations vulnerable to the whims and vagueries of a distant global commodity pricing system they cannot control, and has brought increased poverty, landlessness and homelessness everywhere on Earth. The emphasis must be reversed away from the global to the local.
   
   The political operating principal for this reversal is the concept of subsidiarity — a deliberate bias in all local, national and international rule-making to favor local self-reliance wherever such a choice is possible. All decisions should be taken at the lowest level of governing authority competent to deal with them. Power should not move outward to the global but inward, closer to the people most affected by decisions. Though international trade will always exist, it should not be the raison d’ etre for the system, only its last resort or its marginal luxury.
   
   Such a shift will not be easy, as global corporations have nothing to gain from it and will fight it. Any nation that can grow its own food and eat it, or share it in local markets, is anathema to an economic design that depends on large-scale centralized economic processes over long distance to sustain its bloated growth. The report offers hundreds of ideas on how to reverse this… everything from reversing tax and subsidy and tariff policies, to consciously shortening shipping distances for all activity, to reinstituting regulations that control the speed and kind of investment, and the movement of capital in and out of a community or nation. Perhaps we can discuss these later.



3. What should we do about corporate power?
   
   The central viewpoint is that corporations should no longer be the dominant economic and political institution that rules the world. Among the dozens of ideas for how to reverse that power are such as these six: 1) rechartering — redefining the rules controlling corporate structures and operations; 2) limiting corporate mobility, and the mobility of their finances — so they may no longer leave communities for lower wage or more deregulated terrain, and they many not expatriate profits; 3) requiring that boards of directors represent all community stakeholders in corporate governance — environmentalists, labor, consumers, public health advocates, etc.; 4) eliminating the protective mantle of legal "personhood", by which corporations gain the rights of individuals, but not the responsibilities; 5) eliminating "limited liability" for investors, which now shields shareholders from negative acts of the company; and 6) the introduction of the "death penalty" for corporations that do particularly egregious harms, among dozens of other proposals focussed on transparency, accountability, environmental and social behaviors.



4. What to do about unsustainable global operating systems?
   
   By these we mean the central operating systems of society: energy, transport, agriculture, food systems, manufacturing. For these we have called upon the great work of such people as Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, Fritjof Capra, and others, as well as indigenous farmers, for whom sustainability was never a problem until outsiders impacted their lands. This is an area where solutions are obvious and quickly achievable; only the political will needs to change. In energy, for example… this is an area which could be fixed very quickly… by abandoning the oil economy entirely — thus eliminating terrible environmental problems, and expensive wars — and quickly substituting already developed technologies of wind, solar, hydrogen, small scale hydro…etc…All of them are capable of control by smaller communities, and none of them cause the kinds of problems we now face.
   
   We also need to change the dominant measuring systems by which societies gauge their successes…Gross Domestic Product, for example, rates such activities as cutting down forests, or going to war, or adding to fossil fuel consumption as "positive economic indicators" when they actually deplete chances for a sustainable future. Such measures ignore the values of conservation, unpaid labor in care of children or the infirm, restoration activities and the like. We strongly favor alternative measuring systems like the Genuine Progress Indicator, created by Redefining Progress, which counts war and forest clearcuts as a depletion of our future.



5. Finally… and I will be quick about it… we address the crucial question about how citizens can regain control of the commons… the global commons like clean air, oceans, the atmosphere, the broadcast spectrum… all of them our common heritage… but all of them to some degree privatized or impacted by waste dumps. The WTO recently asserted that its own rules take precedence over any international agreements to protect these commons, including the Kyoto Protocol on climate, the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and others. If this is sustained, it essentially ends the effectiveness of these agreements.
   
   Local or community commons, refer primarily to land, water, forests, minerals, and human and plant genetic materials, including indigenous seeds. Until recently it was nearly unthinkable that such crucial life-sustaining elements as fresh water, or seeds, or genetic building blocks of life could ever be subject to privatization, commodification and global trade regimes. But they are. The WTO and such other agreements as NAFTA have subordinated national rules that protect these commons.
   
   A third area is what we have called the modern commons — government services managed in behalf of all people, rich and poor. These include public education, broadcast, transport, sanitation, water delivery, energy, security systems and jails, social security and welfare, et. al. Under the new proposed rules in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the WTO, all of these will be subject to privatization, control by global corporations and subjected to standards of profit-making. Don’t be surprised to soon find Mitsubishi running public schools, Enron running social security or Disney parcelling out our drinking water, at a high price.
   
   The IFG report makes a series of specific demands to reverse all these processes and bring control of the commons back to communities.

So, in closing, let me say that the IFG report on alternatives does not represent the end of a process, but its beginning. The full report and its proposals are being circulated among activists, academics and public policy officials on all continents. Over the next three years, IFG plans a series of regional gatherings to explore these positive proposals with local groups, revise them, and then to republish a much longer document with a more comprehensive plan, and hopefully practical means of achieving them. The goal is global consensus for local empowerment. The first of these meetings is scheduled for Fall 2003 in South America. Subsequent gatherings will take place in South Asia, Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Europe and the United States.

Thank you so much for your kind attention.