PRIVATIZATION OF BASIC NECESSITIES
DISSOLVES THE BASIS OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Interview with Maude Barlow

[German radio broadcast a 7-part conversation series titled “Total global” that discussed globalization and possible alternatives in connection with the World Social Forum in January 2004 in Mumbai (Bombay), India. This interview with Maude Barlow, a spokesperson of the International Forum on Globalization and chairperson of the Council of Canadians, broadcast on March 7, 2004 was published in: Zeit-Fragen, Nr. 19, May 17, 2004 and is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,  http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/.]

The nation state as an organizational principle of societies and markets is increasingly becoming history. Capitalism has broken its limits and initiated a far-reaching reorganization of national societies. This new world order is on the point of taking its historical place. Worldwide corporations are increasingly political actors in this new world order, not only states. How should relations between old and new holders of political power in the new world order be described?

Maude Barlow: That is a marvelous question and irritates everyone who sees political actions realized in strong governments. This is very clear when politicians are anxious about privatizing access instead of supporting everyone’s access to health care, education and clean water. They were elected to support universal access. With the privatization of social property, politicians abolish the most important basis of civil society.

THE NEW POLITICAL ELITES AS A GLOBAL MONARCHY

Their approach is not easy to understand. Firstly, international trade agreements are signed. These agreements create the legitimation transferring national decision-making authorities to international organizations. Transnational corporations govern these international organizations. Politicians now sit on their boards of directors; one hand washes the other. Thus transnational corporations retain control over important social resources through the roundabout way of international agreements and increase their profit at the expense of the general public. This common goal unites all worldwide political and economic elites whether from a country of the so-called first or third world. These new political elites are not oriented in the needs of the population and don’t want to know anything about the long-term effects of their own policy. Moreover they are well organized. They travel together, visit one another, driving through the slums in luxury coaches or journeying to 5-star hotels in helicopters for joint celebrations.

I recall a conference in Manila where colors were poured into seawater so it glimmered dark blue in the sunlight. This new elite that could be described as a global monarchy stages itself this way.

In contrast, resistance through networks and coalitions beyond national borders, historical experiences, cultures and classes is vital.

The response to the global monarchy is a worldwide global justice or anti-globalization movement. The development and direction of this movement is hard to foresee.

Let us discuss briefly this new elite. How should this new elite be characterized? What is its origin? Where does it gain its power? How is it organized? How does it use its power in connection with states and international organizations?

The old political elites always tried to form a consensus between the most different groups. Each economic elite was only one among many. The old political elites exercised power by producing this consensus again and again. In contrast, the new class of politicians comes from the economic elite itself. For example, George Bush first gained power with the help of oil conglomerates. Berlosconi was previously an economic tycoon. The Mexican president Vicente Fox functioned as vice-president of Coca Cola. Paul Martin, Canada’s new prime minister, owns many shipping companies. They all come from the economy and are economic leaders of their countries. They are traditionally wealthy or became rich in the new economy. Producing a consensus is no longer necessary for them. As a new reality, businessmen with economic power hold political offices. This is an important distinction to the career politician who comes from a party, is politically engaged and perhaps becomes rich during his career.

TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS DETERMINE THEMES OF POLITICS

The political themes have also changed with the new political class. Transnational corporations determine the themes of politics more than ever today. The well-organized economic lobby dictates its government program to governments. Transnational corporations govern the conferences of the World Trade Organization de facto up to the national parliaments.

Consider for example the conference on sustainable development and environmental protection in the summer of 2003 in South Africa. In questions of worldwide conservation, this new alliance between transnational corporations, entrepreneur politicians and the international trade bureaucracy enforced their demands. Deregulation, privatization and the sale of social or state property to transnational corporations are pursued with the slogans of freedom of the market and free trade. These are the real substantive goals of this new global monarchy.

Obviously all politicians do not support these goals. However in reality when a politician champions preventing privatization, he or she realizes that no possibilities exist any more for opposition in the traditional political framework. These possibilities do not exist any more because the international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have made their rules into the worldwide standards of political conduct.

A European politician summarized this as follows: “In the present crossroads, the way left is blocked by a wall while the way right is very open.” In official politics, no one can change anything regardless of the engagement of the individual politician. After a short time on the stage of official politics, even the most engaged activist must help carry out an opposite policy. Despite all excuses, he is ultimately only a marionette of the governing economic elite because of actual practical necessities.

Take for example, the case of the former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He carried out deregulation and privatization in Canada with the slogan "free trade". Today after his term in office ended, he sits on all kinds of boards of directors of international corporations and earns millions upon millions of dollars every year. He is a fabulously rich man that he wasn’t when he began in politics. This is because he pleased the international economic elite and carried out their political goals with impressive results. Since the beginning of the privatization policy, Canada has registered the highest increase of child poverty. But like Brian Mulroney, none of these politicians has ever looked back. They are like bomber pilots who turn away, change course and never want to know what damages they inflicted after dropping their bombs.

As activists, we try to understand these new relations between the global economic elite and politics and find ways to react to the new organization of political power. This does not mean that the old nation state does not form any structures of rule. However this new organization exists and changes everything. This instrumentalization of the traditional political institutions of the state by a new economic elite obviously has an economic background. 45,000 multinational corporations exist today compared to 7,000 twenty years ago. The leading 200 corporations are so powerful that their combined annual sales surpass the total economic output of 182 of the 191 countries of the world. 53 corporations and only 47 states comprise the 100 largest economies of the world. Walmart, the second largest corporation of the world, has a greater economic volume than the national economies of 178 countries. To understand these globalized corporations as political actors, one must ask how they use their economic power. The orientation and organization of corporations has changed in the last 15 years. National businesses first became multinational and then transnational businesses.

Let me give an example how these transnational corporations relate worldwide to states. The North American Free Trade Agreement called NAFTA is an example. Transnational corporations were given the right to sue a state for hindering investments by a signatory state. Canada had prohibited cross-border or international trade with MMT, an additive in fuels, for reasons of health and environmental protection. This additive is found in groundwater and poisons it. All parliamentary parties agreed. MMT was long prohibited in many European states and in nearly all American states. If a Canadian firm had produced this additive, that would have been its end. However an American corporation was involved. On the basis of the new MMT regulation, this corporation sued the Canadian state for several million dollars compensation on account of lost profits. Canada repealed its law. MMT is today a legal additive to gasoline again. In addition, the Canadian state paid millions upon millions of dollars as indemnification for the one year when the corporation could not sell MMT in Canada. This was still not enough. With an open letter of the prime minister, the Canadian government apologized for the defamation. When a corporation sells MMT to the so-called Third world today, it always refers to the letter of the Canadian government.

WTO DICTATE: DEVELOPING COUNTRIES CANNOT STORE PROVISIONS

Here is another example. In the past, governments in the Third world were measured by how far they provided the population with basic foods. Many governments attempted to increase the production of basic foods and store provisions for bad harvest years. This hoarding as it is called in the world tr4ade agreements is now prohibited. The consequences are clear in Egypt and India. These countries are now forced to sell their best agricultural products on the world market. Productive farmland is reserved for their cultivation. This cultivation must be organized industrially to survive in the competition.

Thus many small farms are ruined. People who could feed themselves are forced to migrate to the cities where they fight for survival in the ever-expanding slums. Today people die of starvation in India and Egypt. In the so-called Irish potato phenomenon of the 19th century, tens of thousands of Irish died of starvation. This new form of colonialism with the same effects as 150 years ago is carried out by a handful of transnational corporations, not by states. Public health systems are dismantled everywhere in the world, pensions are cut and public water supplies and education institutions privatized.

CURRENT POLICY INCREASES POVERTY WORLDWIDE

Is there a difference in the conduct and effects of these multinational corporations in the South and in the rich states of the first world?

The transnational corporations come from industrial countries and are supported and promoted by their governments. These corporations have different possibilities of exercising power. They succeed more in the countries of the so-called third world than in the rich countries. The governments of the third world cannot oppose these transnational conglomerates. Still there are also effects of privatization policy that impact everyone to a certain extent. For a long while, the societies of the North could have been once graphically represented as a great egg. A broad middle class was surrounded above and below by equally large groups of rich and poor.

This constellation has changed. Today there are substantially more poor than rich. From time immemorial, the societies of the third world have resembled a pyramid. I do not compare the poverty of the first and third world because the consequences are very different. Nevertheless a global adjustment is clear. A pyramid as in the South comes out of the egg in the North. The key question is whether a pro-poor policy exists nationally and internationally, not whether poverty exists. Current policy enlarges poverty.

Another process of adjustment between the North and the South is occurring. The elites in the third world and in the first world are similar to one another and work hand in hand. The effects of this policy concern everyone. In a simplified way, one could speak of a first world in the third world and a third world in the first world.

Look at the example of Japan. Now there are many homeless. Ten years ago finding a homeless person was like finding a needle in the haystack. Upon arriving in Japan today, the blue tents where people are lodged are noticeable from a distance. There one meets men in dirty suits with dirty white shirts, still retaining their ties. Once they were businesspersons. Today they spend the night in parks or train stations. They are absolutely superfluous.

This is the new reality that is very extreme in the countries of the South. This reality strikes back on societies of the North. Strong nation states actually arose in the South out of the times of de-colonialization. A kind of industrialization of equalizing development was attempted there with protectionist economic measures. These common experiences shared by all countries of the third world have completely disappeared. Today the countries of the third world exist in an absolute competition to make money by offering the cheapest production location and exporting their best abroad.

How did these strong anti-colonial liberation movements and their states integrated in this international system so successfully in the last 30 years that a government capable of action hardly exists in one country of the third world?

A new economic elite exists in the countries of the so-called third world alongside the economic elite of the first world and enforces the policy of deregulation. As an example, one only needs to glance at the Indian daily newspapers. The papers are filled with pictures of Hollywood actors exclaiming: "Hey, people, look around, everything is fantastic, things are looking up, we are successful in the computer industry, everything will be fine!" The pictures of the endless slums at the edges of the large cities are in direct counterpoint. In the slums, everything suggests total collapse. The contrast is extreme and a result of the rule of the global monarchy in all the countries of the third world, apart from a few exceptions like Lula’s Brazil,

THE NEW FORM OF WESTERN COLONIALISM

Members of this global monarchy are encountered as delegation representatives of their countries during negotiations on world trade. Brilliant young persons from prominent families of their countries speak fluently three or four languages, have studied economics or are lawyers. However they never speak for the population of their countries. Still their decisions often have very negative consequences for people. This is a result of the new form of western colonialism. This is a new form because the current colonialism has nothing to do with the old economic exploitation by military conquest.

Economic plundering by western transnational corporations occurs in our time. Through the international trade agreements, transnational corporations gain the right to patents for seeds, useful plants, life forms and newly discovered genes. Through these agreements, the profitable new rules of the game are established which the indigenous elite supports. If the elite refuses, it will simply be forced to acquiesce by the international political pressure of western states.

This imbalance of power was very striking during the World Trade Organization meeting in Dohar/ Katar. I was present as an observer. This meeting took place only two months after the attack on September 11. The Americans used the political situation to apply massive pressure on everyone. They announced that only states that would sign the new world trade agreement would be allies in the struggle against terrorism. Whoever refused was under massive pressure with the help of the World Bank and the IMF since credits could be cancelled and debts demanded back. India was one of the last countries whose resistance was first broken after 24 hours of constant pressure. The logistic means used by European, Canadian and American negotiating delegations were decisive. All possible information was always available to hundreds or thousands of specialists, bureaucrats, PR-experts, informants, servants and secret service. Sometimes only two representatives of an African or South American country without cell phones negotiated with them.

The countries of the so-called third world first reacted to this two years later in negotiations in Mexican Cancun. There the wealthy countries first refused to dismantle further trade restrictions. This did not mean that they had no divergent interests. Some would have been glad to be the new United States if they were only large and powerful enough. However the breakdown of negotiations in Cancun was a turning point because Euro-American demands were rejected for the first time by an alliance of the South. This did not mean that the rule of transnational corporations was limited or abolished in the countries of the South because the new form of colonialism that could be called economic apartheid still exists. This new form is not maintained by land occupation but by means of one-sided international transnational trade agreements against which the people of the South are powerless.

This new colonialism obviously has an ideology. Is this ideology of combating international terrorism a kind of “good-man-ideology”? Are these atrocities made possible through this ideology?

The terrorism confronting the US is added to this reality. One cannot understand Americans if one doesn’t understand that they are convinced of being in a war. They were attacked and now the whole world feels their reaction. Thus the Americans will build a new missile defense system in North America and massively advance the militarization of outer space. The government has approved $5 trillion for this project in the next 2 to 3 years. This is a completely new stage of militarization. Economic globalization now follows the militarization of outer space. On the governmental website of the military responsible for the conversion of the missile defense system in outer space, this system is said to be necessary since economic globalization has led to a bipartite world in which more and more regions exist that cannot be controlled any more with conventional military means.

To guarantee the US influence and control of these regions, the new defense system in outer space is needed. This is said very openly. Thus we are in a new colonial age whose most important power is the US supported by Canada. Many European states are its accomplices. Under the agenda of combating terrorism, civil rights are restricted so people are held in prisons. This contempt for civil rights in the United States is an excuse for the actions of rulers and elites in countries where there are no civil rights. This is an alarming new consequence of economic globalization.

THE IMPORTANCE OF WATER AS A RESOURCE

On the other side, the privatization even of what were regarded as common goods in the past advances, for example health care, education and water. This is an attack on everything that was considered obvious in the past. However the resistance against this, for example against the privatization of water, is not even a theme in the West. How is this privatization justified and what will be the consequences?

One part of the new agenda and this new reality is that things that were taboo are now sold on the market to the highest bidder. Water is most important because the world has only a limited supply of fresh water, only a half-percent of the total water of the earth. This supply will be consumed, wasted and polluted at such speed that two-thirds of the world’s population in 2025 will be affected in some way by water shortage. Those new elites who currently have power and money have known this for a long time. Whoever controls water supply and distribution will have both enormous wealth and great power. Therefore three European transnational corporations - mammoth bottlers like Nestle, Coca Cola or Pepsi – divide up the worldwide water supply among themselves.

Huge pipelines and building fleets of supertankers are planned to handle water worldwide. Water should be valued and sold, controlled by a cartel of water firms, a kind of OPEC for water. If this cartel controls the worldwide fresh water supply, millions of people will die of thirst or die of starvation as a result of inadequate water for farm cultivation. This is not a fantasy; this is dramatic reality in the near future. The three largest transnational water conglomerates seek to control 70% of American and European freshwater in the next 10 years.

In the third world, there is vehement resistance where these corporations have attempted this robbery. Access to water in the third world means being able to survive even more than in Europe. In the Indian state Keramala, Coca Cola gained the rights over the water supply for the next 99 years. This firm declared to the local population that the water now belonged to them, that water could be taken and then sold on the Indian market. The people are resisting. Women have even recently burned themselves to death in protest. In Bolivia, a civil wear broke out on account of the privatization of water and the transnational corporation Bechtel was driven from the country. The World Bank still attempts today to sue the Bolivian government for several million dollars compensation on the basis of commercial law. The methods and ways of doing business with privatized water and how this privatization can be controlled are unclear.

The corporations do not have to invest a single cent. The World Bank recently raised the financial subsidies for transnational corporations involved in the privatization of water in countries of the third world from $1.3 to $4 billion annually. This is the sum available to transnational corporations to establish profit-oriented water systems. They receive the profit, 20-30% of the water price, and additional special funds from the World Bank. This is actually a form of mass brainwashing. First the public water system is programmed to decay. Then control over water is given to transnational corporations.