I’m feeling wistful as we approach the tenth anniversary of the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in late November 1999 — what many of us simply call “Seattle”. It was the beginning of an era of strong anti-globalization protests in the US, which most people have never heard about, often accompanied by illegal and sometimes brutal police repression, which most people have never heard about. We protested against the displacement and emiseration of people and environment around the world that so-called “free trade” was causing, orchestrated by Bechtel, MAI, WTO, IMF, FTAA, NAFTA, and other international treaties, corporations, and organizations, which most people have never heard about.
It was a complex story to tell, and the press wouldn’t help — there were no official sources. Even to sympathetic ears it could sound too incredible to be true, or even like a crackpot conspiracy theory. If we had only had John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man ten years ago.
As the title suggests, Perkins was contracted to kill the economies of developing countries — in a way which both enriched US corporations and made those countries subsurvient to US interests. Perkins pushed countries to take out development loans he knew they could not repay, justified to international lenders like the World Bank based on his inflated economic growth projections. People in-country who might object were bribed or coerced.
Once the country predictably started missing payments, they lost more sovereignty, becoming more US “business friendly” in exchange for refinancing their debt, often in a cycle of IMF “structural adjustment” decried by the anti-globalization movement. In case you missed it, “business friendly” means that US corporations can exploit and profit from the labor and natural resources of a country even more cheaply, for example by suspending environmental regulation for mining or oil drilling, or paramilitary suppression of labor unions,
Where did the loan money go? Perkins and his company, and the other big ones like Bechtel and Halliburton, were the designated contractors for the development projects. The same companies whose hit men arranged the unaffordable loans also were the beneficiaries of those loans! And to make things even more interesting, managers and CEOs of those same development corporations frequently held powerful goverment positions (Vice President Cheney) where they could direct clandestine government services like the NSA and CIA, and to complete the cycle, Perkins was secretly recruited and trained as an economic hit man by the US Government, nearly three decades before Seattle.
Perkins’ book confirmed what we were protesting and more, and he supplied a critical missing piece for me. I never could figure out why the World Bank, with a poverty-alleviation mission, made loans which often bought things poor people didn’t really need (like US military hardware), funded dam-building projects which displaced people without their permission or benefit, and generally made a lot of bad loans which led inevitably to a date with the IMF loan shark. Were they just stupid? Cynical? If Confessions is right, they made stupid loans because they were manipulated by well-trained people like Perkins.
We’ve come a long way since 1999, from a time when nonviolent protest of “free trade” could be dangerous, to a time when our President and Secretary of State both made election-season comments critical of “free trade”. But the wealthy powerful elites Perkins wrote about are still in place, and still trying to enrich themselves and control the world without getting caught at it. Seeing through eyes educated by Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, whether one believes Perkins completely or not, can help us see what was invisible before, and act more responsibly toward our shared humanity and planet.
I have some concerns with Confessions which I’ll share in part 2, and also want to emphatically say that everyone should read this book. It is written for normal people — not academics or leftists. It is a story of conscience and transformation yet also spy-novel fascinating and terrifyingly, specifically informative — full of things most people have never heard about.
For more about the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations, search the web for WTO protest Seattle 1999. Perkins released a new book, Hoodwinked, in early November.
Thanks very much for the review of “Confessions of an Economic Hitman.” I’m looking forward to Part 2 of the review. I just purchased the DVD dramtization of the “Battle in Seattle” from a folding Blockbuster store in Milwaukee to get a sense of what happened in the streets, but I can tell the book promises much more depth on world realities that led many Americans to protest in Seattle. I’m also reminded that David Korten (author of “When Corporations Rule the World ” and recently “The Great Turning”) began as an international aid specialist before he realized how these aid programs really worked.
Milwaukee Area Greens had a strong anti-globalization practice in the 1990s, thanks mostly to Jim Carpenter, who led the anti-NAFTA, anti-GATT cause with Greens, linking with labor here (The Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign). He once imitated an investor looking for “opportunities” in cheap foreign markets to expose a global-economy business conference here in town. We also reminded people how important indigenous leadership was in fighting “free trade” initiatives, not only the sovereign powers Indian nations might bring to bear against “free trade” policies and dominance, but also the importance of the 1994 Chiapas uprising against the implementation of NAFTA in Mexico.
My friend Grace Boggs put out an interesting piece (see below), commenting on what’s happened in the movement since Seattle, getting ready now for the Copenhagen Climate Talks (see below). For those who don’t know, Grace is a long-time activist and writer in Detroit, co-author of “Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century,” mentor to Detroit Summer and the Boggs Center to Nurture Leadership. Though some would say she is the elder stateswoman on the American Left, she is a strong supporter of local sovereignty initiatives, not top-down solutions (who once said, at the First National Green Gathering in Amberst, 1987, that the only Left remaining in this country was the Church-Left).
LIVING FOR CHANGE
Climate-Change Movement Builds At Copenhagen
By Grace Lee Boggs
“Climate-change activists at Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents the unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to become a resource grab of colossal proportions. Not only will these ‘market-based solutions’ fail to solve the climate crisis, but the failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate change–as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading schemes.
“But activists at Copenhagen won’t simply say no to all this. They will aggressively advance solutions that simultaneously reduce emissions and narrow inequality. Unlike at previous summits, where alternatives seemed like an afterthought, in Copenhagen, the alternatives will take center stage.” (Naomi Klein. “Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up,” The Nation, Nov. 30, 2009)
Ten years ago the movement against corporate globalization and market-based economics took off when 50,000 Americans, including steelworkers, women, people of color, environmentalists and just plain citizens, closed down the WTO at the “Battle of Seattle.”
Since 1999 this movement has been gaining depth and breadth in response to skyrocketing economic inequality, the catastrophic breakdown/meltdown of the world and American economy, and greenhouse emissions on a scale that threatens to extinguish all life on Earth.
Yet the U.S. Congress and President Obama, always more accommodating to right-wing than liberal and left forces, continue to offer market-based solutions like carbon-trading. while the only other alternative seems to be more government regulation.
Meanwhile, however, at the grassroots more democratic and participatory alternatives are being created or explored.
Naomi Klein cites some of these in her Nation article. They include local sustainable agriculture, which is bursting out all over; smaller, decentralized projects like those in Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and many other cities; leaving fossil fuels in the ground as Peruvian peasant communities are doing; “climate-debt reparations” by rich countries to poor ones.
For example, the city-state of Bremen, Germany is spending about $1 million a year to help its partners in Pune, India, become more energy efficient by giving them digesters that convert local waste products and plant matter into burnable biogas. This is the form that “Solidarity” is taking in the 21st century, as contrasted with Marx’s 19th century “Workers of the World Unite.”
At Copenhagen some activists will also engage in non-violent civil disobedience.
The main aim of non-violent civil disobedience is not to influence those in power. It is to arouse the conscience of the people, especially of the American people who have been and still are mainly responsible for the greenhouse gases which are threatening all life on earth, just as they have been responsible for racism since our founding.
The struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not only a struggle against corporate polluters. It is a struggle for the hearts and minds of the American people who are constantly being distracted from the life and death questions of war and global warming by “reality”shows, football, and the search for bargains. It is a struggle to help the American people recognize that in living more simply so that others can simply live, we can grow our souls instead of a polluting, life threatening economy.
Movement building in this period requires actions that can bring about this kind of radical value shift or transformation.
Fifty years ago a relatively few activists practicing non-violent civil disobedience in the struggle against racism gave birth to the civil rights movement, which in turn inspired all the great humanizing movements of the 1960s.
Last March, writers and activists Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry organized a mass act of civil disobedience against a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C. near the White House. 2500 demonstrators joined them from around the country. To preempt the action, a promise was made to convert the plant from coal to natural gas.
But there remain more than 600 coal-burning plants that need to be closed down by acts of civil disobedience, just as 50 years ago there were thousands of segregated lunch counters, swimming pools, libraries and other public places.
http://www.boggscenter.org
Hey glad you liked part 1. As a participant in the misnamed anti-globalization protest scene, I have many complaints with the popularized “Battle in Seattle” movie, for example you won’t see consensus practice or a spokescouncil anywhere — but its genius is that it is accessible to people who aren’t already street activists! After checking it out, I recommend http://www.realbattleinseattle.org/ to fill in some of the cracks, and for documentaries “This is what Democracy Looks Like” is the classic I think, and if you’re into displaying black flags or circled-A’s, “Breaking the Spell” is probably for you.
Another WTO/Seattle/1999 resource is fascinating in part because it is authored by a traditionally pro-government, pro-military think tank: the RAND corporation. Ask your favorite web search about Netwar in the Emerald City.