-Caveat Lector- -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Out on the streets, we are putting the demo back into democracy Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 16:53:35 +0200 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: "Activist Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: http://get.to/activist To: "Activist Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Activist Mailing List - http://get.to/activist PLEASE visit the following URL and add your vote. http://www.gogreece.com/vote/votesite.asp?ID=567 The Activist Mailing List made it to No.2 in the "Best of 1998" in its category. It is currently at No 1 but with a small difference. Please vote! It only takes a few seconds! ===================== The GUARDIAN (London)Thursday January 6, 2000 Home-made revolution Out on the streets, we are putting the demo back into democracy By George Monbiot A few months ago, I dropped my pager in a puddle. Water was gurgling around inside it; the display scrambled then disappeared. Two days later, it recovered completely. Since then I have trodden on it and dropped it on the pavement, yet I have never succeeded in harming it. My radio, by contrast, falls apart whenever I have the temerity to turn it on. The longer I keep hold of my pager, the more money the manufacturers make, as they get paid every time someone leaves a message. The longer I keep hold of my radio, the less profitable the manufacturer becomes. It is astonishing how powerless consumers remain after decades of "consumer democracy". When coal was valued above children, eight-year-olds were sent to extract it. When food was expensive, men and women were transported for stealing a loaf of bread, or blinded for poaching a rabbit. Black people were exchangeable for rifles, beer and sugar. No sane and compassionate human being would lament the passing of these inverted values. But far from liberating us, the decline in the cost of resources has merely introduced us to a new captivity. To maintain the value of production, companies and governments had to encourage us to consume more. They have been spectacularly successful. Risen from slaves to workers to citizens, we are now reduced to consumers. And the world's assets are stripped to keep the mill grinding. Ecologists predicted that oil, copper and nickel would soon be exhausted. They were wrong. Paradoxically, the renewable resources - soil, fresh water, fisheries and forests - have disappeared first, as consumer demand outstrips biological supply. The consequences for the poorest are grave. They can live without oil and copper: but not without water and soil. Now the ex-citizens of the richer world are in danger of slipping in status again, from consumers to commodities. Our genes have already been seized and patented. If germline gene therapy - altering heritable characteristics - becomes commercially viable, our offspring will be the subjects of fierce commercial competition. We will find ourselves obliged to earn the money to improve them. The slave trade was justified by racism: this new human traffic will be driven by an even more virulent form of discrimination: genism. Those who can buy will be able to claim, with some justification, that they are biologically distinct from those who cannot: they won't wish to breed or even mix with the genetically unwashed. These processes looked inexorable. But people all over the world have begun to rediscover their citizenship. They recognise that governments are happy to shove us, as so much coke, into the corporate furnace, only because we let them. A handful of scruffy activists helped reduce the value of Britain's road-building programme from 23bn to 4bn in just four years. Two unemployed dissidents forced McDonald's to try to sue for peace after it mistakenly assumed that it could crush them in court. Monsanto, once the world's most bullish biotech company, charged into a wall of opposition, and broke its corporate skull. First the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, then the World Trade Organisation's attempt to write a charter for corporate rule, were exposed and delayed. Activists have realised that they can achieve far more through confrontation with power than through cooperation. Voluntary organisations and trade unions which have been negotiating for years to try to soften the blows delivered by the corporate giant have found themselves outflanked, as campaigners put the demo back into democracy. More quietly, but just as importantly, trading relationships are beginning to shift. While governments have been attempting to engineer a single, harmonised global market, throughout Europe and the US citizens' groups are breaking the market up. Organic box schemes and farmers' markets have begun to democratise commercial encounters, reducing the scale of business until the power of producers and consumers is roughly equivalent, reintroducing accountability to the food chain. In farming, forestry and fishing, companies are finding themselves obliged to seek a licence to trade, submitting their products to independent certification by bodies such as the Soil Association and the Forest Stewardship Council. Though governments are ever more reluctant to regulate, citizens seem to be able to force corporations to shoulder their responsibilities. However, most of the world's key institutions have been infiltrated by corporate lobbyists. Bodies such as the Transatlantic Business Dialogue and the International Chamber of Commerce are allowed to write the rules governing global relationships between producers and consumers. Binding bilateral agreements, already approved, pose even greater threats to democracy. But the homespun revolution which will make the old world order impossible to sustain has already begun. It will, mostly, be quiet, local and, I hope, bloodless, occasionally building up to massive confrontations of the kind which sent governments scurrying for cover in Seattle. ================================= _____________________________________________________ * The Activist * http://get.to/activist This is not about the world that we inherited from our forefathers, It is about the world we have borrowed from our children !! _____________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ Applying to college this year? Apply online at Embark.com and enter the Embark.com Tuition Sweepstakes! You could win $80,000 for tuition to the college of your dreams! 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