Interview with Walden Bello: There Must Be a U-turn to Create Healthy Domestic Markets

Interview with Dr. Walden Bello, executive director of Focus on the Global South HALIFAX, Canada, Jan 15 (IPS) - In 1992, Dr. Walden Bello issued a macro-economic warning about the so-called Asian miracle in his book “Dragons in Distress”. Six years later, the Asian financial crisis Bello predicted swept the region, throwing millions into poverty.Born in the Philippines in 1945, Dr. Bello is the author of more than 10 books, including “People and Power in the Pacific” (1992), “Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty” (1999), “Global Finance: Thinking on regulating speculative capital markets” (2000) and “The Future in the Balance: Essays on globalisation and resistance” (2001).After receiving a Ph.D from Princeton, he was arrested several times in the United States, peacefully protesting the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in his home country. Bello is the executive director of Focus on the Global South and a visiting professor in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Walden Bello spoke by phone from the Philippines with IPS Canada correspondent Chris Arsenault. IPS: There seems to be consensus among economists that globalisation, as practiced by the Bretton Woods institutions, leads to greater income inequality but also to significant GDP growth. As one of Asia’s leading critics of the Bretton Woods model, don’t you feel that growth is necessary to pull people out of poverty, even if inequality is an initial byproduct? Bello: I think that when you aggregate it, in the number of countries where there has been significant GDP growth, on balance, there has been an absolute reduction in poverty. Certainly in the cases of Vietnam and China, there has been an absolute decrease in poverty. However, certain social groups, especially in the rural areas, and lower-class groups in the cities, have gone into even greater poverty. In all countries in South East Asia and East Asia, you have greater inequality in income distribution. In practical terms, a great imbalance has grown between the cities and the countryside; people in the countryside have lost in absolute and relative terms compared to the city. Furthermore, we have had tremendous rates of environmental destruction. The gains in terms of poverty reduction have been counterbalanced by these other trends. I am speaking only about East Asia in this regard; the other caveat I would say in regards to Vietnam is that Vietnam has done a better job in containing these contradictions compared to countries like China. IPS: You have written that, “in the Third World the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of export-oriented production, that it does need to be corrected back towards the domestic market — the balance between the two has been lost in the drive to internationalise our economies.” Is this really true? A lot of economists think the expansion of China’s domestic consumer purchasing power will keep that country’s manufacturing base strong even if its export markets, like the United States, are faced with a recession. Do you think domestic markets in East Asia will be able to absorb current levels of economic activity? Bello: There are certain groups who have gained in income, including the emerging sectors in the cities, especially the coastal cities. To some extent, they act as a supplement to export-orientated production. The driving force is still export markets. To maintain that export edge, you have to be able to keep down your labour costs. Keeping down labour costs continues to be the main factor limiting domestic consumption growth. In China, raising the incomes of people is in severe contradiction with the demand of low wages to continue turning out cheap commodities. There has to be a very significant u-turn to create healthy domestic markets. This turn can only happen with significant measures to redistribute income, to redistribute welfare. This isn’t going to happen so long as you have your eye on being competitive in export markets. IPS: According to the environmental monitoring group the Worldwatch Institute, China now boasts 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. What rate of economic growth would be a good balance between pulling people out of poverty and having some degree of environmental sustainability? Bello: I want to say very strongly that we have to focus on a new paradigm of environmental sustainability. I am not talking about achieving 6-10 percent GDP growth, and just changing the driver from export markets to the domestic economy. I am talking about a whole reorientation. I am really thinking about bringing growth rates, as measured in the traditional way, down to 2-3 percent. You can only do that with significant redistribution of the benefits of growth, so as to fulfill a large number of social demands with a relatively low growth rate. My sense is that, so long as you have good government policies that support equitable distribution, you can achieve higher standards of living, even with growth rates that are not high in traditional terms. Certainly, the kind of 10 percent growth that China has been enjoying is out of the question; even 6-8 percent growth is out. IPS: One position paper from your organisation, Focus on the Global South, touts ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, as a possible regional integration model that might work in South East Asia and other regions. Do you think ALBA would even be possible without large amounts of Venezuelan oil and the petro-dollars that come with it? Basing a regional development strategy around crude oil exports to the U.S. isn’t necessarily the most sustainable practice. Bello: The principles of ALBA, not necessary the wealth base, are what need to be reproduced; not everyone has those petro-dollars and environmentally it’s questionable as a long-run strategy.The less powerful economies should have greater privileges than the more powerful economies, so regional cooperation increases their [lower income countries'] capacity rather than eroding it. ALBA focuses on building a regional market based on import substitution and technology sharing.Certainly there are things that aren’t present in ALBA at the present time that would also be important to reproduce in other regional associations. The lesson we should be taking from ALBA is the move away from free trade towards genuine economic cooperation. IPS: Currently, most observers agree that China is not in a colonial relationship with other smaller and weaker nations in South East Asia. However, China is on track to displace the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2050 and some worry that China could become a metropolis gaining markets and raw materials from a South East Asian hinterland. Do you think China is on course to becoming a neo-colonial power? Bello: Definitely, unless there is more real planning, setting firm the principles of mutual and equitable relationships, on the part of China in terms of its relations with other countries. China needs to create standards and policies for its transnational corporations operating abroad. Unless these things happen, the old colonial relationship could be reproduced. There is tremendous demand in China for raw materials and a whole bunch of other things; China has the capital to export. The structural drives for a new periphery- metropolis are there; they need to be countered by policies, strong counteractive state policies from China. We have the opportunity at this point to have new relations between developing countries and China that do not reproduce the old colonial relationship. But we have to act soon.

What’s wrong with “rights”?

Editorial, Seedling, GRAIN, October, 2007.

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Download the October 2007 issue of Seedling.

Peoples’ rights have long featured prominently in GRAIN’s analyses, deliberations and documents, as well as in those of our partners. As private companies – especially huge transnationals – have extended their control (and ownership) over wider and wider areas of life, peoples and communities around the world have seen how their chance of maintaining a decent and sovereign way of life, with their own values and norms and with respect for the human beings and the environment around them, is vanishing. Actions that were previously considered natural and taken for granted – such as keeping, reproducing and sharing seeds and animals, accessing water, copying a song, sharing information, reproducing medicines, borrowing books without charge from a library, and copying software – are no longer permitted but are becoming criminalised, all in the name of property rights. In this context, the concept of peoples’ rights has become a defensive tool, one to be used as part of the ethical, political and cultural struggles for justice and dignity.

But recently a cruel paradox has emerged: the very concept of rights is being used to impose and expand neoliberalism. Social organisations and NGOs that have attempted to advance certain rights have ended up causing confusion and divisions, and even harming the very interests and welfare of those claiming the rights. Rights regimes have forced many peoples, especially indigenous peoples, to define according to alien values some fundamental aspects of their identity and way of life, such as their art, their medicinal and agricultural knowledge, their tenure systems and so on. These harmful effects are occurring even when the organisations involved are unquestionably committed to the well-being of those they represent.

From GRAIN’s perspective, this process has been especially harmful when it has affected the way people collectively enjoy and manage local natural resources and biodiversity, using knowledge acquired over millennia. We have seen the aggressive expansion of private property over territories and ecosystems, including components as essential as water and air, all carried out in the name of the “right” of local communities to use local natural resources and biodiversity. We seem to be facing a tragic contradiction: the fight for rights – a component common to the struggles of peoples around the world – is being used by states, corporations and international organisations to worsen the conditions of the people involved.

GRAIN believes that we urgently need to reflect on these processes. We need to search for new concepts and ways of thinking that might help us to defend from corporate control the ways of life that people themselves have defined. We see this not as a theoretical exercise, but as a compelling political necessity. The debate needs to be as wide, collective and diverse as possible. Most of all, the debate should take place locally, as close as possible to the actual conditions people face and to the cultural and political strengths people possess.

To encourage this wider debate, GRAIN invited a group of people around the world to reflect on their concepts of rights and how they affect people’s lives and welfare. We raised the same issues with people from Asia, Africa and Latin America. These are some of the questions we put to them: What, if anything, is wrong with “rights”? Do the problems stem from the fact that its intimate corollary – obligations and responsibilities (but see Radha D’Souza’s contribution for a different view even of this point) – has been erased from the debate and our thinking? Or is it because “rights” have been equated with “property”? Or is it because there has been a decades-long attempt to standardise rights? How do we distinguish legitimate rights from illegitimate ones? And how do we socialise rights when most rights regimes and approaches today almost inevitably seem to favour individual rights, even if this is not always fully apparent? What sort of processes and approaches are required to keep biodiversity and knowledge outside the realm of “property rights”? How can collective goods – including public goods – be protected against exploitation by corporations? How can we build forms of social control that do not entail ownership? What are the traditional norms, customary practices or laws that in your community or country or region illustrate another way of viewing the world and defining relationships?

In the following pages we share with you the responses we received from over a dozen panellists from different countries, cultures and contexts. Our contributors have very different perspectives and experiences but they are all profoundly critical of current formal rights regimes. They all identify the expansion of private property and capital as a major source of disruption of the forms of life and coexistence that peoples and communties around the world have built over centuries, saying that this invasion is threatening or destroying their social and cultural relationships, their food sovereignty, their forms of education and their sources of welfare. One way or another, most panellists see the source of all the most serious problems to be the wide physical, cultural, political and social distance of local communities from the people who write legal defintions of rights. They also say that the imposition of formal education and health systems, cultural erosion, and the lack of reflection and discussion around ethical issues are, directly or indirectly, contributing to the increased inequity and the loss of sovereignty and dignity. All in all, the picture that emerges is that the evolution of rights regimes around the world have been clearly harmful to communities. The struggle for rights has not yielded a positive balance.

No clear picture emerges as to the way forward. The views of our panellists vary from those highly sceptical about the prospect of continuing to walk along the old road of appealing to governmental and state processes to those who still believe that it is possible to reform the formal rights systems. Very little was said by our panellists on the linkage between rights and responsibilities, or about the fundamental difference between rights and property, or how collective resources could be protected.

However, two promising lines of discussion seem to have emerged. The first concerns the need to shorten distances – physical, cultural and social – between those who define rules and regulations and those who live under them. In other words, increasing numbers of people, communities and organisations are seeing the need to bring the struggle for rights and dignity as close as possible, turning themselves – and not international or state bodies – into the main agents for building and defining the norms for coexistence, including individual and collective rights and obligations.

The second line of discussion concerns collective rights. Although no clear concept emerged as to how, precisely, they could be defined, several of our panellists mention these rights as a central component of their struggles. One says that a fundamental characteristic of collective rights is that people are not mere beneficaries of these rights but have the capacity to decide how these rights should be exercised. Interpreted in this way, collective rights could be a way in which people and communities construct, in a supportive, reflective and deliberate way, the norms by which they will live together, without being obliged to make these norms comply with standards established, mainly in the interest of capital, in the centres of power.

GRAIN presents the points of view of its panellists as a catalyst for discussion. We agree with some of the observations made and disagree with others. It is evident that key issues – the link between rights and responsibilties, the precise nature of collective rights, the multiple links between the effective exercise of rights and the concrete conditions of everyday life, and others – need further discussion. It is in this spirit that GRAIN supports the call for a long and thorough debate that deals with the fundamental questions, such as values and ethics, and that strengthens the processes of autonomy. If the voices we present in this issue of Seedling contribute to this process, GRAIN will be fully satisfied.

WSF Process 2008 - Call for Day of Action and Mobilistion, January 26, 2008

We are millions of women and men, organisations, networks, movements, trade unions from all parts of the world, we come from villages, regions, rural zones, urban centres, we are of all ages, peoples, cultures, beliefs, but we are united by the strong conviction that

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

With all the richness of our plurality and diversity and our alternatives and proposals, we struggle against neo-liberalism, war, colonialism, racism and patriarchy which produce violence, exploitation, exclusion, poverty, hunger and ecological disaster and deprive people of human rights.

For many years we have been resisting and constructing innovative processes, new cultures of organization and action from the local to the global, in particular within the processes and Charter of Principle of the World Social Forum from which this call emerges.

Aware of the need to set our own agenda and to increase the impact of these thousands of expressions and manifestations, we are committed to strengthening the solidarity and convergence amongst our struggles, campaigns, and constructions of alternatives and alliances.

We commit ourselves to a week of action which will culminate in a Global Day of Mobilisation and Action on January 26

With our diversity which is our strength, we invite all men and women to undertake throughout this week creative actions, activities, events and convergences focusing on the issues and expressed in the ways they choose.

ACT TOGETHER FOR ANOTHER WORLD

Visit the website http://www.wsf2008.net/ to sign the call, read a short history on the day of mobilisation and global action and know how to take part in its preparation.

Visit WSF website. Subscribe:WSF Bulletin

Social Forums around the World.

The Post-Washington Dissensus: the Unraveling of a Doctrine of Development

Walden Bello*, Focus on the Global South

“[World] Bank researchers have…done extremely visible work on globalization, on aid effectiveness, and on growth and poverty. In many ways, they have been the leaders in these issues. But the panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to Bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the Bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the Bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that these preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the Bank’s prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all Bank research. (An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 1998-2005).”

When two studies last year detailed how the World Bank’s research unit had been systematically manipulating data to show that neoliberal market reforms were promoting growth and reducing poverty in developing countries, development circles were not shocked. They merely saw the devastating findings of a study by American University Professor Robin Broad and a report by Princeton University Professor Angus Deaton and former International Monetary Fund chief economist Ken Rogoff as but the latest episode in the collapse of the so-called Washington Consensus.

Taking off from Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark, partisans of this development model during its heyday the 1980’s and early 1990’s claimed that the alternative to the Washington Consensus was TINA-that is, “There is no alternative.” The Washington Consensus broke with economic strategies involving heavy participation by government and positioned the unfettered market as the driver of development.

Imposed on developing countries in the form of “structural adjustment” adjustment programs funded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the Consensus reigned until the late 1990’s, when the evidence became clear that on all key criteria of development-sustained growth, poverty reduction, and reduce inequality-it simply was not delivering. By the first half of this decade, the Consensus had undergone a process of unraveling, although neoliberalism remained the default mode for many economists and technocrats that had lost confidence in it, simply out of inertia.

The former adherents of the Consensus have gone off in divergent directions. Despite frequent references to it, there is, in fact, no “Post-Washington Consensus.”

Washington Consensus Plus

Mindful of the failures of the Washington Consensus, the IMF and the World Bank are now promoting what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has disdainfully described as the “Washington Consensus Plus” approach, that is, that market reforms, while crucial, are not enough. Financial reforms, for instance, must be “sequenced,” if we are to avoid such debacles as the Asian Financial Crisis, which even the Fund now admits was due to massive capital inflows into countries that liberalized without strengthening their “financial infrastructure.” Mindful of the Russian descent into the hell of mafia capitalism in the 1990’s, the two institutions also now talk about the importance of accompanying market reform with institutional and legal reforms that can enforce private property and contracts. Other accompaniments of market reforms are “good governance” and policies to “develop human capital” such as female education.

This mix of market and institutional reforms were consolidated in the first years of this decade in the so-called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP’s). In contrast to what one analyst has described as the “bare knuckle neoliberalism” of structural adjustment programs, PRSP’s were not only more liberal in content but in process: they were supposed to be formulated in consultation with “stakeholders,” including civil society organizations.

Despite its icing of institutional reforms, the core of the PRSP cake remains the same “macroeconomic fundamentals” of trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and commercialization of land and resources at the heart of structural adjustment programs. And community consultation has been limited to well-resourced, liberal non-governmental organizations rather than broad-based social movements. PRSP’s indeed are simply second generation structural adjustment programs that seek to soften the negative impact of reforms. As IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato has admitted, the purpose of institutional reforms is “to make sure that the fruits of growth are widely shared and the poorest people are protected from the costs of adjustment” in order to prevent people from being “tempted to give up on orthodox economic policies and structural reforms.”

Neoconservative Neoliberalism

A second successor to the Washington Consensus is what one might call the “neoconservative neoliberalism.” This approach is essentially the development policy of the Bush administration. The inspiration for this strategy was provided by the famous 2000 report of a congressional commission on multilateral institutions headed by conservative academic Alan Meltzer, which proposed a radical slimming down of the World Bank. It supports-at least rhetorically–debt relief for the poorest countries on the ground that they won’t be able to pay the debt and seeks a shift from loans to grants. However, debt relief and grant aid are conditioned on how governments perform in terms of liberalizing their markets and privatizing their industries, land, and natural resources. Indeed, the main reason for preferring grants is that, in contrast to loans channeled through the World Bank, grants, as Undersecretary of State John Taylor put it, “can be tied more effectively to performance in a way that longer-term loans simply cannot.” Moreover, grants would allow pro-market reforms and aid policy generally to be more directly coordinated with Washington’s security objectives and with the agenda of US corporations. Compared to the original Washington Consensus, neoconservative neoliberalism is, in practice, less doctrinaire, but in an illiberal direction, ready as it is to let the market play second fiddle to Washington’s strategic goals.

Neostructuralism

A third distinctive successor to the Washington Consensus, neostructuralism, moves, in contrast, in a more liberal direction. This is an approach associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) that produced the structuralist theory of underdevelopment in the 1950’s under the leadership of the venerable Argentine economist Raul Prebisch. According to neostructuralism, neoliberal policies have simply been too costly and counterproductive. In fact, there is no trade-off between growth and equity, as the neoliberals claim, but a “synergy.” Less inequality, in fact, would enhance, not obstruct, economic growth by increasing political and macroeconomic stability, boosting the saving capacity of the poor, raising educational levels, and expanding aggregate demand. The neostructuralists thus propose progressive transfer payment policies that redistribute income in ways that increase the human capital or productivity of the poor, including higher spending for health, education, and housing programs. These are the kinds of programs associated with what the Mexican polemicist Jorge Castaneda has called the “Good Left” in Latin America, meaning the governments of Lula in Brazil and the Concertacion alliance in Chile.

Being focused on managing transfer payments to protect and upgrade the capacity of the poor, the neostructuralist approach does not interfere with market forces in production, unlike the policies of the “Bad Left” (meaning Hugo Chavez and friends) that intervene in production, markets, and wage policies. The neostructuralists also embrace globalization, and they say that a key objective of their reforms is to make the country more globally competitive. Because they simultaneously allegedly alleviate income disparities, upgrade the capacity of the poor, and make the work force more globally competitive, neostructuralist reforms are said to hold out the prospect of making globalization more palatable, if not popular. Neostructuralists proudly proclaim that their approach is the “high road” to globalization, in contrast to the “low road” of the neoliberals.

The problem is that neostructuralist reforms have led to what one of its most thoughtful critics, Chilean economist Fernando Leiva, calls the “heterodox paradox,” that is, in the quest for systemic or comprehensive competitiveness, the carefully crafted neostructuralist policies have actually led to “the politico-economic consolidation and regulation of neoliberal ideas and policies.” In the end, neostructuralism, like the Washington Consensus Plus approach, does not fundamentally reverse but simply mitigate the poverty and inequality-creating core neoliberal policies. The Lula government’s targeted anti-poverty program may have reduced the ranks of the poorest of the poor but institutionalized neoliberal policies continue to reproduce massive poverty, inequality, and stagnation in Latin America’s biggest economy.

Global Social Democracy

The more than residual attachment to neoliberalism of neostructuralism is less evident in the case of what we might call Global Social Democracy, an approach that has become identified with people such as economist Jeffrey Sachs, sociologist David Held, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the British charity Oxfam. Unlike the three previous approaches, this perspective acknowledges the fact that growth and equity may be in conflict, and it ostentatiously places equity above growth. It also fundamentally questions the central thesis of neoliberalism: that for all its problems, trade liberalization is beneficial in the long run. Indeed, Stiglitz says that in the long run, trade liberalization may, in fact, lead to a situation where “the majority of citizens may be worse off.”

Moreover, the global social democrats demand fundamental changes in the institutions and rules of global governance such as the IMF, WTO, and the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs). David Held, for instance, calls for the “reform, if not outright abolition, of the TRIPs Agreement,” while Stiglitz, says that “rich countries should simply open up their markets to poorer ones, without reciprocity and without economic or political conditionality.” Also, “middle-income countries should open up their markets to the least developed countries, and should be allowed to extend preferences to one another without extending them to the rich countries, so that they need not fear that imports might kill their nascent industries.”

The global social democrats even see the anti-globalization movement as an ally, with Sachs thanking it “for exposing the hypocrisies and glaring shortcomings of global governance and for ending years of self-congratulation by the rich and powerful.” But globalization is where the global social democrats draw the line. For like classical neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus Plus school, and neostructuralism, global social democracy sees globalization as necessary and fundamentally sound and, if managed well, as bringing benefits to most.

Indeed, the global social democrats see themselves as saving globalization from the neoliberals. This is all the more important because, contrary to an assumption that was gospel truth just a few years ago-that globalization was irreversible–the global social democrats worry that contemporary globalization is, in fact, in danger of being reversed, and they hold up as a cautionary tale about the consequences of such a development the turbulent reversal of the first wave of globalization after 1914.

To Sachs, Held, and Stiglitz, the benefits of globalization outstrip the costs, and what the world needs is a social democratic or “enlightened globalization” where global market integration proceeds but is one that is managed fairly and is accompanied by a progressive “global social integration.” The aim, as Held puts it, is to “provide the basis for a free, fair, and just world economy,” where the “values of efficient and effective global economic processes…function in a manner commensurate with self-determination, democracy, human rights, and environmental sustainability.”

Can Globalization be Humanized?

There are several problems with global social democracy’s attachment to globalization.

First of all, it is questionable that the rapid integration of markets and production that is the essence of the globalization can really take place outside a neoliberal framework whose central prescription is the tearing down of tariffs walls and the elimination of investment restrictions. Slowing down and mitigating this inherently destabilizing process, not reversing it, is the global social democratic agenda. That global social democrats have come to terms with the fundamental tendency of global market forces to spawn poverty and inequality is admitted as much by Sachs who sees social democratic globalization as the “harnessing [of] the remarkable power of trade and investment while acknowledging and addressing limitations through compensatory collective action.”

Secondly, it is likewise questionable that, even if one could conceive of a globalization that takes place in a socially equitable framework, this would, in fact, be desirable. Do people really want to be part of a functionally integrated global economy where the barriers between the national and the international have disappeared? Would they not in fact prefer to be part of economies that are susceptible to local control and are buffered from the vagaries of the international economy? Indeed, the backlash against globalization stems not only from the inequalities and poverty it has created but also the sense of people that they have lost all semblance of control over the economy to impersonal international forces. One of the more resonant themes in the anti-globalization movement is its demand for an end to export-oriented growth and the creation of inwardly-oriented development strategies that are guided by the logic of subsidiarity, where the production of commodities takes place at the local and national level whenever that is possible, thus making the process susceptible to democratic regulation.

The Larger Problem

The fundamental problem with all four successors to the Washington Consensus is their failure to root their analysis in the dynamics of capitalism as a mode of production. Thus they fail to see that neoliberal globalization is not a new, higher stage of capitalism but a desperate and unsuccessful effort to overcome the crises of overaccumulation, overproduction, and stagnation that have overtaken the central capitalist economies since the mid-seventies. By breaking the social democratic capital-labor compromise of the post-World War II period and eliminating national barriers to trade and investment, neoliberal economic policies sought to reverse the long-term squeeze on growth and profitability. This “escape to the global” has taken place against the backdrop of a broader conflict-ridden process marked by renewed inter-imperialist competition among the central capitalist powers, the rise of new capitalist centers, environmental destabilization, heightened exploitation of the South-what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession”-and rising resistance all around.

Globalization has failed to provide capital a escape route from its accumulating crises. With its failure, we are now seeing capitalist elites giving up on it and resorting to nationalist strategies of protection and state-backed competition for global markets and global resources, with the US capitalist class leading the way. This is the context that Jeffrey Sachs and other social democrats fail to appreciate when they advance their utopia: an “enlightened global capitalism” that would both promote and “humanize” globalization.

Late capitalism has an irreversible destructive logic. Instead of engaging in the impossible task of humanizing a failed globalist project, the urgent challenge facing us is managing the retreat from globalization so that it does not provoke the proliferation of runaway conflicts and destabilizing developments such as those that marked the end of the first wave of globalization in 1914.

*Walden Bello is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

Blue October 2007 Call-Out!

Blue October 2007 Call-Out

Dear Water Allies,

Today, one in 6 people lack access to safe, affordable water, and 2 in 5 lack access to adequate sanitation. The United Nations expects these numbers to rise–unless we act now. A vibrant international movement is challenging the corporate control of this precious resource, and defending water as a public good and an inalienable right.

International water activists are preparing to launch the second annual Blue October campaign. Blue October is an international month of action to challenge the corporate control of water and to protect it as a shared natural resource available to all.

As Blue October approaches, we hope you’ll join us in this historic international month of action by organizing activities to draw attention to water issues in your community. Activities can range from the very small and local to national events.

You can help make Blue October 2007 a success by endorsing Blue October and by organizing an action or event, big or small! It could be something symbolic of your support such as sending letters supporting the human right to water, or it could be more ambitious, such as the performance of a ballet for water by your countries national ballet company as happened in Paraguay last year. The possibilities are endless but whatever your capacity, we welcome your solidarity!

There is time to organize, many activities are planned for late in October to coincide with the celebration of the historic victory for the right to water in Uruguay. Put your country on the map!

How to support Blue October 2007?

Visit www.blueoctobercampaign.org

Please organize an activity and share its details with Blue October organizers. You can fill out a form and email it back to organizers. This will ensure that your activity details will be listed on the Blue October website.

Post links from your organization’s website to the common Blue October Website. Go ahead and download any resources posted on our website! The Blue October logos and templates are to be shared and they can be reproduced and customized according to your specific needs.

Around the world, people are taking action throughout October. There are many actions already being planned and we will soon share these with you. Please add your actions to this list.

BACKGROUNDER:
On October 31, 2004, the people of Uruguay voted to amend their constitution to recognize this fundamental right. The Constitution now guarantees that piped water and sanitation be available to all Uruguayans, and it bans for-profit corporations from supplying this public good. Blue October celebrates this historic move by challenging the corporate control of water through global action! 2006 marked the launch of the first Blue October campaign. In total, almost 30 countries were represented and many more activities were organized.

CONTACT Blue October team:
There are a number of people who have volunteered to assist with questions.

Spanish
Marcela Olivera – molivera@democracyctr.org
Roberto Cruz – rcuz@magma.ca

English
Vicki Kaplan - vkaplan@fwwatch.org
Anil Naidoo – anil@canadians.org

French
Sonia Vani - svani@canadians.org

Finally, please fill out the activity information form which can be found on our website and email it back to:

Gigi Kellet – gigi@stopcorporateabuse.org or
Sonia Vani – svani@canadians.org
blueoctober@canadians.org

or answer the following questions as briefly as possible - and translated into English, Spanish and French if you have the capacity.

Name of Organization or Group:
Country:
City:
Organizational Website:
Contact Name:
Contact Email Address:
Contact Telephone Number:
Brief description of organization:
Date of Activity:
Brief Description of Activity:
Time:
Objective of Activity:

Water is a right, not a commodity!