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How Capitalism Failed Us.November 25, 2009 / 12:13 PM/ CBSRebecca Solnit is the author of and co-author with her brother David of. This piece originally appeared onNext month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit. There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first. Activists - farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers - around the world will a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history.
November 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they'd execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO's road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain. Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable - and then, suddenly, it wasn't. Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.The mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier: November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation. The fall of the Wall is now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about.
It was not so. Trending News.' I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible,' said Gunter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season. Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter.
From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed. As it happened, those weren't the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn't the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism - and framed that way, our situation didn't look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out.Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn't that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism's triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come.
Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico's jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised - and has now delivered - a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico's majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.The Sucking Sound and the Turning TideFew remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, 'We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.'
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He was ridiculed for describing the 'giant sucking sound' of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did - and then on to China in a financial race to the bottom; while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico's small farmers.Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us.
It's a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year's presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times.After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment - which went from 80% of its loans to about 1% - that it's been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison.
By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane. That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman the people in the streets of Seattle as 'a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix.' He charged, 'What's crazy is that protesters want the W.T.O. To become precisely what they accuse it of already being - a global government. They want it to set more rules - their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else.' Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn't want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO's 'overall goal is to eliminate `trade barriers,' frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures.'
That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed 'Democracy,' pointed one way; the second, labeled 'WTO,' pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it's important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren't just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil. In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone's life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase 'socialism for the rich' truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism's triumph in 1999 were proclaiming 'the end of American capitalism as we knew it' and the 'collapse of finance.'
It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk. Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine's cover story was: and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious. The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan in the New York Times more than a year ago:'In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food.
Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington. And on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers.
Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead.' Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalization had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times this August:'Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.'
The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not the Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest. Futures that WorkThere are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what's the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn't, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us.
The 'we' that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn't the United States itself. As Bill McKibben of President Obama, 'The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won't be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is - as it has been for the last two decades - the United States.' The citizens of the U.S. Need to revolt, again, against their nation's failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it.
That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.Everything is going to change either as takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe. We're already at 390 parts per million.
Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.Remembering how dramatically - and unexpectedly - things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.By Rebecca Solnit:Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.First published on November 25, 2009 / 12:13 PMĀ© 2009 CBS.
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