Posted on 15-9-2003
Free
Trade Is War
By Naomi Klein, The Nation, 13 September 2003
Note: PlaNet TV (click on PTV in index bar to left) programme
`Trade War 21' also covers the topic of Trade's dark side.
On Monday, seven antiprivatization activists
were arrested in Soweto for blocking the installation of prepaid
water meters. The meters are a privatized answer to the fact
that millions of poor South Africans cannot pay their water
bills.
The new gadgets work like pay-as-you-go cell
phones, only instead of having a dead phone when you run out
of money, you have dead people, sickened by drinking cholera-infested
water.
On the same day South Africa's "water
warriors" were locked up, Argentina's negotiations with
the International Monetary Fund bogged down. The sticking point
was rate hikes for privatized utility companies. In a country
where 50 percent of the population is living in poverty, the
IMF is demanding that multinational water and electricity companies
be allowed to increase their rates by a staggering 30 percent.
At trade summits, debates about privatization
can seem wonkish and abstract. On the ground, they are as clear
and urgent as the right to survive.
After September 11, right-wing pundits couldn't
bury the globalization movement fast enough. We were gleefully
informed that in times of war, no one would care about frivolous
issues like water privatization. Much of the US antiwar movement
fell into a related trap: Now was not the time to focus on divisive
economic debates, it was time to come together to call for peace.
All this nonsense ends in Cancún this week,
when thousands of activists converge to declare that the brutal
economic model advanced by the World Trade Organization is itself
a form of war.
War because privatization and deregulation
kill--by pushing up prices on necessities like water and medicines
and pushing down prices on raw commodities like coffee, making
small farms unsustainable. War because those who resist and
"refuse to disappear," as the Zapatistas say, are
routinely arrested, beaten and even killed. War because when
this kind of low-intensity repression fails to clear the path
to corporate liberation, the real wars begin.
The global antiwar protests that surprised
the world on February 15 grew out of the networks built by years
of globalization activism, from Indymedia to the World Social
Forum. And despite attempts to keep the movements separate,
their only future lies in the convergence represented by Cancún.
Past movements have tried to fight wars without confronting
the economic interests behind them, or to win economic justice
without confronting military power. Today's activists, already
experts at following the money, aren't making the same mistake.
Take Rachel Corrie. Although she is engraved
in our minds as the 23-year-old in an orange jacket with the
courage to face down Israeli bulldozers, Corrie had already
glimpsed a larger threat looming behind the military hardware.
"I think it is counterproductive to only draw attention
to crisis points--the demolition of houses, shootings, overt
violence," she wrote in one of her last e-mails. "So
much of what happens in Rafah is related to this slow elimination
of people's ability to survive.... Water, in particular, seems
critical and invisible." The 1999 Battle of Seattle was
Corrie's first big protest. When she arrived in Gaza, she had
already trained herself not only to see the repression on the
surface but to dig deeper, to search for the economic interests
served by the Israeli attacks. This digging--interrupted by
her murder--led Corrie to the wells in nearby settlements, which
she suspected of diverting precious water from Gaza to Israeli
agricultural land.
Similarly, when Washington started handing
out reconstruction contracts in Iraq, veterans of the globalization
debate spotted the underlying agenda in the familiar names of
deregulation and privatization pushers Bechtel and Halliburton.
If these guys are leading the charge, it means Iraq is being
sold off, not rebuilt. Even those who opposed the war exclusively
for how it was waged (without UN approval, with insufficient
evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat) now cannot help
but see why it was waged: to implement the very same policies
being protested in Cancún--mass privatization, unrestricted
access for multinationals and drastic public-sector cutbacks.
As Robert Fisk recently wrote in The Independent, Paul Bremer's
uniform says it all: "a business suit and combat boots."
Occupied Iraq is being turned into a twisted
laboratory for freebase free-market economics, much as Chile
was for Milton Friedman's "Chicago boys" after the
1973 coup. Friedman called it "shock treatment," though,
as in Iraq, it was actually armed robbery of the shellshocked.
Speaking of Chile, the Bush Administration
has let it be known that if the Cancún meetings fail, it will
simply barrel ahead with more bilateral free-trade deals, like
the one just signed with Chile. Insignificant in economic terms,
the deal's real power is as a wedge: Already, Washington is
using it to bully Brazil and Argentina into supporting the Free
Trade Area of the Americas or risk being left behind.
Thirty years have passed since that other
September 11, when Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the
CIA, brought the free market to Chile "with blood and fire,"
as they say in Latin America. That terror is paying dividends
to this day: The left never recovered, and Chile remains the
most pliant country in the region, willing to do Washington's
bidding even as its neighbors reject neoliberalism at the ballot
box and on the streets.
In August 1976, an article appeared in this
magazine written by Orlando Letelier, former foreign affairs
minister in Salvador Allende's overthrown government. Letelier
was frustrated with an international community that professed
horror at Pinochet's human rights abuses but supported his free-market
policies, refusing to see "the brutal force required to
achieve these goals. Repression for the majorities and 'economic
freedom' for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides
of the same coin." Less than a month later, Letelier was
killed by a car bomb in Washington, DC.
The greatest enemies of terror never lose
sight of the economic interests served by violence, or the violence
of capitalism itself. Letelier understood that. So did Rachel
Corrie. As our movements converge in Cancún, so must we.
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