WTO Protests Portend Grave New World

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by Arnaud De Borchgrave

The battle for Seattle over the World Trade Organization's, or WTO's, meetings was the embryonic stage of the struggle against global "timocracy." As defined by Plato, timocracy is a state in which love of wealth and power is the guiding principle of the rulers. It also was Aristotle's idea of a state in which political power is in direct proportion to property ownership.

To the uninitiated in the globalism phenomenon, timocracy appears to be rearing its ugly head. The three executives at the top of the Microsoft ladder now are worth more money than 170 million Americans combined. There are 60 new millionaires each and every day in Silicon Valley alone. Internet-related IPOs, or initial public offerings, appear to be a game for the enrichment of a new "old boys" network. America Online has a bigger valuation than the entire U.S. newspaper industry.

The www.NO2WTO crowd sees a grave new world of rising inequities, both within and between nations, between the "haves" and "have-nots" of what conventional wisdom says is a liberating information revolution. They know it no longer is a world of rising real wages, stable employment and welfare states but of growing disparities between rich and poor, between computer literate and computer illiterate.

There is nothing particularly liberating about long-term male unemployment now being 46 percent of the 4 million jobless in Germany, 62 percent of the unemployed in Italy and 11 percent in the United States -- and these are the advanced countries. Company loyalty is being displaced by the intellectual survival of the fittest as globalism creates a world where anything can be made anywhere in the world and sold everywhere. Both right and left are confused by the retreat of the nation-state before the juggernaut of globalism.

Meanwhile, radicals, labor militants, frustrated Marxists, ecologists and environmentalists are coalescing around the idea that they are the have-nots of the information revolution. And what they see in the advanced countries is even more alarming in the developing world.

Post-Cold War mythology holds that the whole world rejoiced at America's victory and that freedom and democracy have been spreading all over the world ever since. While the haves of the information revolution have been making quantum leaps forward as computers double in power and speed every 12 months, more and more human beings are being made to feel redundant by what increasingly is seen as globalism run amok. They are reminded of their jobless plight by global 24-hour TV news networks now accessible in the remotest villages of the developing world.

If one considered multinational corporations to be national economies, 50 of them would be listed among the world's largest. The assorted malcontents have found a global catalyst to vent their pent-up frustrations. It's what the French call capitalisme sauvage, better known in Russia as "bandit capitalism." They see this as a target with wall-to-wall corruption.

The global backlash against globalism -- increasingly seen as a euphemism for American economic and cultural imperialism -- is only just beginning. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's neo-Marxist wanna-be dictator, well may be a precursor of a worldwide movement determined to level the playing field with the world's only superpower.

In today's seamless global electronic environment, extremists have round a planetary echo chamber, a secure forum to exchange ideas and plans. "Hacktivism" is their weapon of choice. Activists and hackers have pooled their protest techniques. In the run-up to the battle for Seattle, members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater and developers of the FloodNet denial-of-service software put together www.NO2WTO.

Currently under discussion by the hacktivists are plans to "smash WTO." They concede that "a tech workers' union that could counter it and use direct action to shut down the entire global economy does not yet exist."

The People's Global Action, or PGA, was the electronic umbrella organization under which the WTO protest actions of June 18 and Nov. 30 were started. The PGA is nonviolent. The organization for the Seattle protest was entirely Web-based. The "electro-hippies" even urged protesters to help tie up the WTO's Web servers by clicking on a link that continually requests information from their server. But there are 2,000 Websites that now offer ultrasophisticated hacking tools and hundreds of sites with instructions for making bombs.

Global dissidents, Canute-like, believe they can stem the tide of globalism and head off the immense societal changes that now threaten to overwhelm national governments. Britain's minister for e-commerce warned last month that governments have to start thinking and acting in Internet years, which she reckoned will shrink 12 months to three months. Intel's Andy Grove also warned that unless politicians start moving at Net rather than Washington speed, we may see a repetition of the social disaster that followed the mechanization of agriculture. High technology is defining the economic structure of the world. And Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy says government is being rendered largely irrelevant by the speed of change that is accelerating at an ever faster pace. Global corporations are filling the vacuum. The flip side of the global electronic coin was the battle for Seattle. And the protesters' weapon of choice in the years ahead will be the Internet, where logic bombs, Trojan horses, worms, viruses, sniffers, denial of service and malicious code are the weapons that can bring giants to their knees.