[Hi folks, enjoyed this piece, thought I would pass it on, not =convinced
about the publication date though ... John.]
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Published in the February 18, 2002 issue of The Nation
<http://www.thenation.com/> 
Another World Is Possible 
by Susan George PARIS -- For a magic moment, the citizens' movement was no
longer on the defensive. From Seattle to Genoa, via Washington, Prague,
Quebec, Nice and a dozen other destinations, the dispiriting decades of
unbridled corporate greed and freewheeling financial markets seemed to be
drawing to an ignominious close, smothered under their own sheer awfulness.
Or if such a perception was mere wishful thinking and a bit premature, at
least neoliberalism was under credible and forceful attack. 
Negatively labeled "antiglobalization" by the media but known to its
thousands of participants and millions of sympathizers as the movement for
global justice, the nebula of protest and proposals was coalescing and
gaining strength. The corporate and political elites could no longer meet in
plush peace and confidential quiet to do their deals, and were obliged to
retreat to fortresses whose defenses the demonstrators regularly stormed
both physically and ideologically. The winds of history were blowing in a
new and refreshing direction. 
Then came September 11. Like the rest of the world, Europeans were shocked
and horrified, especially by the sheer scale of the destruction and the
potent symbolism of the targets, but in another and admittedly limited
sense, we'd been there before. We'd had bombs in our metros, terrorist
attacks on our railways and exploding cars in our streets, not to mention
centuries of wars, invasions and occupations. 
As the initial trauma wore off, we also tried to analyze what precisely lay
behind the attacks and to ask political as well as moral questions. While
everyone agreed that nothing could justify the terrorist attacks on the
United States, some also recalled another September 11 when the
American-sponsored coup d'état in Chile brought down the democratically
elected Allende government, ushering in a fascist regime that murdered and
"disappeared" thousands. American support for the contras in Nicaragua; the
training of Latin American torturers in North America; the attacks against
weak and defenseless countries like Panama, Grenada and Sudan; the bombing
and blockading of Iraq leaving civilians dead and maimed but Saddam Hussein
firmly in place--all these were remembered and discussed, as was the crucial
US role in the endlessly destructive Israel-Palestine war. 
While the prestigious French daily Le Monde headlined "We Are All
Americans," others felt that this assertion very much depended on "which"
Americans. Yes, without question, if it meant mourning for the victims and
their families; no, if it meant unqualified support for the corporate,
financial and government elites, and for business as usual. 
Nor were we surprised when these same elites in Europe, our neoliberal
corporate adversaries and their domestics, instantly seized upon the
atrocities to advance their cause. By the morning of the 12th they had
already sharpened their sticks. Using crude, faulty but sometimes effective
logic in an attempt to intimidate and criminalize the citizens' movement,
they declared, "You're antiglobalization, therefore you're anti-American,
therefore you're on the side of the terrorists." For weeks, the media
gleefully and unrelentingly framed their coverage and their questions in
that light alone. 
So we've had to explain incessantly why such arguments are not just wrong
but pernicious, and we've refused them the pleasure of painting us into the
villain's corner they had reserved for us. We reject as well the
"antiglobalization" label and, in order to counter accusations of
"anti-Americanism," stress our ties with our American friends in the global
justice movement. We've also continued to mobilize, and on that score, it's
gratifying to report that September 11 has had relatively little long-term
impact. Although virtually unreported in the mainstream press and, alas,
with zero effect on the negotiations themselves, the recent WTO ministerial
meeting in Doha, Qatar, brought far more people into the streets than had
gathered in Seattle. Decentralized demonstrations were organized in at least
thirty countries, including forty locations in France and twenty-five in
Germany. 
The demonstrations in Laeken at the end of the Belgian EU presidency in
December brought out tens of thousands, including a large number of trade
unionists, with almost no violence (one or two shattered bank windows). On
January 19, ATTAC-France (ATTAC is an acronym for the Association for the
Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens, whose program now
reaches well beyond the push for the so-called Tobin Tax, the proposed small
tax on international currency transactions) filled to overflowing the
largest rock concert hall in Paris for the kickoff of the upcoming
presidential and legislative election season. While we have no intention of
becoming a party, we do promise to harass all the candidates unmercifully
around our issues. Next month, ATTAC-Hungary will be launched, the fortieth
country to join this international movement. The CGIL, Italy's largest and
most progressive trade union, recently decided to become a "founding
institutional member" of ATTAC-Italy. Kids all over Europe asked their
parents to give them the airfare to Porto Alegre for Christmas so they could
attend the historic international citizens' gathering there January
31-February 5. 
We know that for Americans, the backlash of the terrorist attacks has been
far more powerful and the aftermath more lingering. With flags flying on
every corner, the obligatory rallying around President George W. Bush no
matter what he decides, and a kind of suffocating and frequently phony
patriotism dominating the debate, it's clear that the pressure is
considerable. 
Allow me still to argue that it's time to pull ourselves together, pull up
our socks and pull together--take your pick of metaphors, but also take
heart: September 11 is not the end of the world. History may even be handing
us a radically new moment, one we did not choose but ours to seize. Our
message is more relevant today than it was on the eve of September 11. 
The emotions the atrocities awakened in all the rich Western countries
caused me briefly to entertain the naïve hope that their leadership might
finally recognize the gravity of the situation and provide an appropriate
response. I should have known better. Those who hold our futures in their
hands are not serious. They see no farther than the noses of their bombers.
Frightening though the prospect may seem, citizens must accept the risk of
being serious in their place. 
What does "being serious" mean? For starters, recognizing what our
leadership refuses to admit: that terrorist nihilism is one response to
poverty, despair and hopelessness. I don't mean to imply that redistribution
of resources and aid programs, however well conceived, could have stopped
bin Laden and his immediate followers. They care nothing about the poverty
of their own compatriots, but they do know that terrorism thrives in the
rich soil of exclusion and victimhood. 
On September 10, half the world was already living, if one can call it that,
on less than $2 a day, with a fifth surviving on half of that. Thirty
thousand children were already dying needless deaths daily. Inequality is
exploding both within and among nations, and perhaps contrary to the poor of
the nineteenth century, today's poor know they are poor. The plausible
fantasies of Western television constantly remind them of their own failure
to capture the material rewards of modernity. 
The only rational response to global problems is global solutions. "Foreign
direct investment," the panacea of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, consists mostly of mergers and acquisitions that result in
harmful economic concentration and job losses, and in any case such
investment flows to only a dozen or so countries. The UN target of 0.7
percent of the wealthy countries' GNP for development aid is never going to
be met, and we should stop pretending that it will be, because this
particular pot of money is shrinking by some 5 percent a year. What
resources do exist are unaccompanied by control over the local elites, who
all too frequently use them for their own ends, a recipe for waste,
corruption and inefficiency. What's needed is to ratchet up our efforts to
the international level and launch a global Marshall Plan, financed by
various international tax instruments (including but not confined to
Tobin-type taxes) and made conditional on genuine civil society
participation and rigorous auditing. Debt relief ought to be a precondition
of a properly functioning world system; otherwise the debtors are competing
on the "level playing field" the neoliberals never tire of extolling with
lead in their sneakers. 
The cash is out there. It can be found not only by taxing financial
transactions but in tax havens where, as Bush himself has proven, it's
possible to identify, target and close down accounts belonging to anyone the
United States identifies as a terrorist--so why not the accounts of drug
barons and traffickers in women, children, endangered species and armaments?
Thanks to these same cozy locations in the Caribbean and other fiscal
paradises, taxes on transnational corporations are undermined while taxes on
labor and consumption contribute far more than their fair share. 
"Free trade" as managed by the World Trade Organization and reinvigorated at
the recent negotiations in Doha is largely the freedom of the fox in the
henhouse. Despite the advance on generic drugs for pandemics like AIDS,
tuberculosis and malaria, the South's needs are shelved and the
transnationals continue to run the show according to their own preferred
rules. 
None of the profound changes we call for will, however, happen
spontaneously, and our present elites certainly don't want them. Clearly the
shock of September was not great enough to force them to change their minds
and their behavior. 
So, American friends, where does all this leave us? First of all, please
bring the United States back. We need you, the world needs you. Although
people on every continent are joining in this struggle, there are no
guarantees we can win. Without a strong US movement, in the bastion of
corporate and financial-market-driven globalization, we are in fact likely
to fail. 
I hope not to be misunderstood in saying that September 11 must not lead to
an unhealthy inwardness and self-preoccupation but to tough-minded analysis
followed by outward-looking action. The adversary hasn't changed since
September 11. That adversary is still "Davos" and everything Davos stands
for, whether meeting in the mountains or on the banks of the Hudson. Homo
davosiensis wants all the resources, all the wealth, all the power and all
the freedom to extend his ascendancy across time and space. This means that
we too must be world-spanners and history-inventors, right now. As we say in
French, l'histoire ne repasse pas les plats--"History doesn't offer second
helpings"--so we'd better deal with what's on our plate now, which is world
poverty, inequality, exploitation and hopelessness. How? 
The great Chinese general Sun Tzu said 2,400 years ago, "Do not do what you
would most like to do. Do what your adversary would least like you to do."
In Porto Alegre, people from all over the world will be trying to determine
what the adversary least wants and how to deliver it. In New York, we hope
you will be supremely inconveniencing the Davos mob, denying it whatever it
may want just now and in future (one thing it does want is for violence to
spoil the proceedings and attract exclusive media attention, so watch out
for agents provocateurs). 
Personally, I have not been so hopeful in decades. The mood is changing.
People no longer believe that the unjust world order is inevitable. To
Margaret Thatcher's TINA--"There is no alternative"--they are replying that
there are thousands of them. Now it's up to us all, especially to Americans,
to prove that, as we say in ATTAC, "Another world is possible." And urgent. 
Susan George is associate director of the Transnational Institute
<http://www.tni.org/> in Amsterdam and vice president of ATTAC-France
<http://attac.org/indexen.htm>. Her most recent book in English is The
Lugano Report (Pluto). 

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