Global Policy Forum

By Jorge Jorquera

The world's giant transnational corporations, and the governments and multilateral institutions that cling to them, are globalising the wrong things, things that are of benefit to them and no one else. And they're refusing to globalise the right things, which would benefit all of us.

Finance sector liberalisation has opened borders to the free flow of capital, so that an estimated $1.5 trillion churns through world currency markets each day. But 90 per cent of this is speculative, of benefit only to the giant hedge funds and banks and, as the peoples of Asia found during the financial crisis of 1997, prone to fly out of a country with little warning but much damage.

World Trade Organisation agreements have promoted free trade. But, while southern economies have had to open up to northern companies' investment, goods and services, Europe and the US are allowed to maintain enormous barriers to the south's main exports, including textiles and agriculture. The last round of free-trade talks will cost the least-developed countries $600million by 2004, according to the United Nations Development Program.

Neo-liberal, market-first economic policies have spread to governments in every corner of the world. But the means by which these policies have been forced on the south - through the International Monetary Fund structural adjustment program - have generated economic stagnation, poverty and inequality. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, spends more on servicing its $300 billion debt than it does on health and education for its children.

Culture, ideas, theories and communication have also become interlinked and interdependent. But the culture is a facile, junk-food Hollywood monoculture pumped out by the giant news and entertainment companies, such as Disney, Time Warner and News Corporation. And the ideas and theories are all too frequently nothing more than advertisements and PR campaigns, whether in politics, economics or social theory.

Wealth, meanwhile, is not being globalised; quite the opposite, it's being concentrated. The world's three richest men, Bill Gates (who is attending the World Economic Forum today), Warren Buffet and Paul Allen, own assets equivalent to that owned by the 600million people in the world's 48 least-developed countries.

Technology, similarly, is not being spread; it's tightly controlled. Ninety per cent of the world's patents are held in the north, primarily by high-tech companies such as Microsoft, Monsanto and Merck. The WTO's agreement on trade-related intellectual property rights will ensure it stays that way - it was, after all, written by the Intellectual Property Committee, a coalition of 13 US technology companies.

Even the Internet, globalisation's icon, is only increasing inequalities between rich and poor. Half the world's population have never made or received a phone call, let alone surfed the Net; lacking the money for even basic needs, they're not exactly in the market for PCs or Internet service providers.

And while capital can roam the globe, most of the world's people cannot. The borders remain closed to them.

Far from being a liberating process for the world, globalisation has only enhanced the power of the transnational corporation and the wealth of its shareholders. According to the UNDP, 500 corporations now control 70 per cent of the world's trade and 80 per cent of its foreign investment.

Fortunately, there is not just one process of globalisation. There are two. When thousands protest outside the WEF today, they will noisily and vigorously reject one, and just as determinedly uphold another.

The globalisation we reject, which is dominant but failing, is the globalisation of capital, of corporate power. The second globalisation, the rising one, the one S11 is part of, is driven by awakening people's movements all over the world which are rejecting corporate domination and advancing new models of economic and social development of their own.

This is the globalisation that raised its voice in Seattle in November against the WTO; in Washington in April against the World Bank and the IMF; in Chiangmai, Thailand, in May against the Asian Development Bank; and now in Melbourne today against the WEF.

This is the globalisation of solidarity, of people's power. Choose which globalisation you wish to support.

Jorge Jorquera is an S11 Alliance media spokesman and the Melbourne secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party.

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