Title: OT: VERY IMPORTANT: FW: [globalnews] Linking Economic Justice and Peace in DC 9/25
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From: Curtis Lang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 09:09:49 -0400
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Subject: [globalnews] Linking Economic Justice and Peace in DC 9/25
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002
From: Starhawk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Linking the Bank and the War: Why go To Washington?
By Starhawk
In November of 1969, President Nixon was preparing to use nuclear weapons
against Hanoi and Haiphong. What stopped him were the anti-war
mobilizations of that autumn. There were 'too many people in the street.'
This September, as Bush continues to push for an invasion of Iraq, to
support Sharon's seige of Palestine, and to reinforce the endless 'war on
terror', the streets of Washington DC will again be filled with protestors.
A mass mobilization has been called for September 25-29, when the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund hold their annual Fall meetings.
The protests will focus on issues of economic justice, but they are also a
general expression of our opposition to the Bush gang and their policies.
If they are large and successful, they too could serve as a deterrent to
Bush's escalation of his various wars, provided that we make clear
connections between the issues of economic justice and peace.
What does global justice have to do with peace? Everything. The war on
terror and the threatened war in the Middle East are integral outgrowths of
the global corporate capitalist agenda.
That system has based its legitimacy on a fiction: that by opening the
world's resources and peoples to unchecked corporate exploitation, removing
governments from their responsibilities as regulators and providers of
social services, and releasing corporations from any community
accountability, it can provide the good life for all. Endlessly expanding
wealth will bring universal democracy and harmony-and you can be a part of
it!
But in reality, most people in the world are worse off than they were
twenty years ago. The environment deteriorates and governments prove unable
to grapple with serious issues such as global warming. Third world
countries struggle under crushing loads of debt, and suffer further from
IMF policies that enforce privatization of state resources and services and
cutbacks in health, social welfare and education. Argentina, the IMF's
'poster child', is in economic ruin. Africa is more deeply impoverished
than it was twenty years ago. In industrialized countries, policies of
privatization, deregulation, corporate license and withdrawal of public
support for social programs result in reduced services, increased prices,
blackouts, brownouts, and unemployment, not to mention Enron, WorldCom, and
all the rest. The promise now rings false to more and more people. Its
legitimacy has successfully been eroded by campaigns of education, public
information, demonstrations and direct action, and by its own flaws.
The system requires a new basis of legitimacy in order to retain power.
Since September 11, that basis has been fear. If the promises of the system
no longer seduce us, we may still cling to it out of fear of a larger
enemy. An enemy is such a useful thing. It justifies the erosion of our
freedoms and huge expenditures on armaments and the military. It keeps us
from looking too closely at what our own leaders are doing, and focuses our
anxieties and discontents on a foreign menace. An enemy allows us to
periodically demonstrate the scope and firepower of the US Military, just
in case anyone in the world still had lingering doubts about who is the top
global superpower.
It is no accident that the enemy now wears a Muslim face. The power base of
the Bush gang is oil. Oil is the life blood of the global corporate
capitalist system. Only cheap oil can subsidize the transport of goods that
make it possible for corporations to roam the globe in search of the
cheapest labor and most lax regulations. An endlessly expanding economy
requires endless oil reserves.
To maintain their control, the oil barons need to maintain our dependence
on oil, undercutting the development of alternative fuels and renewable
sources of energy, denying the facts of global warming and of oil's
environmental costs. Much of the world's oil is under the Middle East, so
American control must be maintained there. The world's largest untapped
reserves of oil are in central Asia: hence the invasion of Afghanistan.
Israel acts as a surrogate for U.S. military power, maintaining a harsh and
humiliating control over Palestine as an ongoing warning to the rest of the
Arab and Muslim world. A new mythology postulating a 'clash of
civilizations' reworks old stereotypes of a progressive, democratic West in
conflict with a regressive, primitive, autocratic East-when in reality,
repressive forces can be found on both sides.
The mobilization needs to make these connections.
How do we delegitimize fear in a world in which we have real enemies? Not
by pretending the world is safe, or by denying that there are regimes that
pose the threat of violence. But by challenging the idea that safety can be
assured by military backing for systems that create gross inequalities and
mass despair. People's desires for lives of dignity and hope cannot be
stamped out by force. Real security cannot be achieved by the hegemony of
U.S. military might backing global corporate control. Global justice is the
solution to global security These issues need to be faced on a global
stage. Some voices in the movement have been suggesting that resources are
better used locally than in going to mass mobilizations. While local
organizing is always important, now is not the moment to pull back into a
local focus. For this is the historic moment when the Bush forces will
either win overarching control or be stymied. We are facing national and
global policies that threaten our basic liberties and undermine anything we
can achieve on a local level. It's a global system-its center of power is
in Washington, DC, and that is the place to confront it. And the time to
confront it is now.
Now-when the false promises of corporate globalization are more and more
evident and its legitimacy is faltering. Now-when the Bush junta is pushing
its warmongering agenda on an increasingly unsympathetic public. Now-when
we most need to show the power holders and the world that there is a strong
US movement that is not willing to march lockstep into the war frenzy.
Now-when we still have a chance to prevent the next round of slaughter. Now
is the moment to fill the streets in an exuberant uprising against the
politics of fear and the policies of greed-and to recognize that they are
two faces of the same system, and to disrupt it in as many unruly and
joyful ways as our imaginations can conceive. For systems that depend on
fear are on shaky ground.
We can refuse to be ruled by fear ourselves, to let fear narrow our choices
and constrict our imagination. Courage feels good. When we act in spite of
fear, we feel good about ourselves. When we plan and act with courage, when
we choose our boldest and most creative visions, we evoke the opposite of
fear, which is love, the tremor that can bring the fortress down.
http://www.starhawk.org
The mobilization in Washington DC is from September 25-30.
For more information, see:
AntiCapitalist Convergence Main Day of action: 9/27 http://www.
abolishthebank.org
Mobilization for Global Justice Main Day of action: 9/28
http://www.globalizethis.org - 202-452-5912
Schedule of events:
CLIP
Sept 25-27 End Corporate Rule Teach-In: Global Struggles Against the IMF &
World Bank organized by 50 Years is Enough and others (see
http://www.50years.org)
CLIP
Sept. 27th Anti-Capitalist Convergence Action (see
http://www.abolishthebank.org)
Sept. 28th-29th IMF & World Bank Group Annual meetings
CLIP
>From Washington to Quito Join us for Corporate Fall!
http://www.globalizethis.org
202-452-5912
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Be the change you want to see in the world.
--Gandhi
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