Bringing it all back home: Jim Shultz offers some strategies to carry our resistance forward on a local level - Local Resistance - globalization with justice

New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Jim Shultz

The movement for globalization with justice has clearly accomplished its first objective -- to get the attention of the powerful. Global economic policies that were once worked out in polite summits of the world elite are now debated on college campuses, in labor halls and most notably in streets all over the world.

However, this global movement must do more than just disrupt economic summits. We must declare what we are 'for' as well as what we are 'against', in particular, targeting the legal agreements which seek to bind us to the 'globalization for the wealthy' theology and replacing them with accords based on economic justice. Here are some ways in which we might use democracy as our tool to create such a strategy.

Make it real

Economic globalization has as its highest order the protection of return on capital investment and eagerly sacrifices the rights of workers, consumers and cultures as well as protection of the environment and public health. However, most people probably don't think much about globalization at all. The best way to bring it home to people isn't with abstract theory or ideological rhetoric, but with real stories about real people.

No example illustrates the enduring power of a good story more clearly than Cochabamba, Bolivia's public revolt against privatization of its public water system. Here the evils of economic globalization, and the valiant fight against them, were played out in living color. The World Bank used all the powers at its disposal to pressure the Bolivian Government to lease off its water system to a transnational corporation and it did so, to a subsidiary of the powerful, US-based, Bechtel Corporation. Within weeks Bechtel had doubled and tripled people's water rates, sending a mass movement of urban and rural water users into the streets. This culminated in a weeklong general strike, the forced departure of the corporation and the return of the water system to public hands. In December 2001 Bechtel announced it was suing the Bolivian government for $25. million for breaking the water contract (see box).

During the water wars, Tanya Paredes, a mother who supports her four children by knitting baby clothes, became an international symbol after it was reported that her 300-per-cent water bill increase totaled more than what it cost to feed her family for a week. Even people who have never heard of the World Bank and don't have feelings one way or the other towards Bechtel could grasp in an instant that something about globalization had gone horribly wrong.

Make concrete demands

Protest and criticism gets the attention of governments, corporations, and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, but getting them to take action requires specific, carefully calculated demands. The Cochabamba water revolt had a very specific demand: cancellation of the Bechtel contract. Now we need to carry that same strategy to a higher level, into international forums such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Trade agreements like the FTAA are akin to constitutions and it is worth taking a strategic page from the drafters of the US Constitution with the device of a Bill of Rights. In effect a Bill of Rights says that regardless of whatever else has been negotiated, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and so forth, supersede all other clauses. Thus, rather than getting bogged down in the detail of 500 pages of legalese, we might do better to demand a Bill of Rights that protects natural resources, labor, consumer and indigenous rights, with a strong method of recourse if any of those rights are violated by any other provision.

A good opening demand might. deal with the FTAA's 'democracy clause'. As currently drafted, the clause gives member nations the happy label of 'democracy' solely on the basis of whether they elect their governments. This makes a great fig leaf for repressive regimes. Thus, last April, as he was at President Bush's side signing the agreement, the Bolivian President, Hugo Banzer, was also ordering troops to break up a peaceful protest march to the nation's capital. Despite its flaws, the European Union (EU) agreement at least has teeth when it comes to human rights. Turkey, for example, chomping at the bit to enter the EU, will first have to abolish its death penalty and clean up its prisons and criminal-justice system. A demand for an FTAA democracy clause with enforcable human-rights requirements could be a rallying point throughout the Americas.

Take local action

It is much easier to mobilize people to take action locally, where contact is face to face and where the issues at hand are directly linked to people's lives. How do we create, in both rich countries and poor, real opportunities for people to take local action to demand globalization with justice? Two examples, one from California and one from Latin America, point to some interesting possibilities.

This year in California, State Senator Sheila Kuehl introduced a bill requiring state agencies to make a thorough review of how trade agreements including NAFTA, the WTO, and the FTAA would affect state laws dealing with labor and environmental protection. With the credibility of a state seal, citizens of the state would have access to a full list of all the hard-won public protections that might be undone in the name of free trade and corporate investment. As a matter of policy, what makes more sense than entering into such agreements open-eyed as to the effects?