[mobglob-discuss] Tom Hayden - Cancun Report: As Empire Builder, the U.S. Feels the Heat

[Tom Childs]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16746 

Cancun Report: As Empire Builder, the
                       U.S. Feels the Heat
                       By Tom Hayden, AlterNet
September 9, 2003

CANCUN, Sept. 8. * "The Real Cancun" is a pretty trashy film, with
hard-partying American college kids being awakened by mariachi
musicians against the vista of a Hilton hotel designed like the nearby
Mayan ruins. In one scene, its hero, Alan, tells his drinking partner,
"People like what they can't have. So, if you want a girl to really
like
you, just blow her off." 

I cannot recall if George Bush ever got loaded in Cancun, but he seems
to be following Alan's advice. Having blown off the United Nations
over
Iraq, he now hopes that the Security Council will be charmed by his
request for money and troops. And the world-class cad that he is, Bush
is also freezing the status of the poor in the global economy. 

Bush has been spending more in Iraq than on the United Nations' global
anti-poverty initiatives. If $60 billion this year is a conservative
estimate
for Iraq, that's twice what it would take to retire the debt of the
developing nations, and three times the cost of eliminating extreme
hunger, meeting the AIDS crisis, or stopping soil erosion. 

In comparison, the U.S. contribution to the UN global anti-poverty
program is 0.13 percent of our gross economic product, about
one-tenth the percentage spent during the Kennedy Administration in
1962. In the meantime, child labor (10 to 14 year olds) is 14 percent
of
the Brazilian workforce, 13 percent in the Dominican Republic and El
Salvador, 12 percent in Nicaragua, and 11 percent in Bolivia. 

While waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration has
managed to lose most of Europe and Latin America. Bush (and
Monsanto's) battle to impose genetically-altered crops on Europe has
lost American agri-business $1 billion during the past five years. And
$190 billion in U.S. farm subsidies has inflamed discontent from
Brazil
to Mexico. 

Meanwhile, the neo-conservative dream of a permanent American
empire is turning out to be short-lived. In the longer view, of
course,
America (and the West) are rooted in a history of colonialism,
crusades
and the slave trade spanning five centuries. The settling of America
was
an extension of empire, then of manifest destiny, then of global
dominance in the past fifty years. But the recent advocacy of an
American empire began just more than a decade ago, with the fall of
the
Soviet Union. Then came the WTO and talk of a New World Order.
Today that imperial thinking is being seriously challenged once again.


Just as U.S. military unilateralism has failed at the UN, U.S.
economic
unilateralism is being resisted in the WTO. Like Alan in the movie,
Bush
is not likely to get the girl. Instead, the sole superpower is looking
lonely
in Cancun, besieged by forces within and without. 

U.S. trade negotiators are working overtime to produce "momentum"
from the Cancun talks, but with little success. 

Cancun itself, a lavish symbol of distorted development and narco-
trafficking, has elected a Green Party mayor to begin regulating the
flow
of foreign investment. Nevertheless, the U.S. wants to "liberalize"
the
tourism sector, while the European Union hopes to eliminate the need
to
obtain permits for hotels, restaurants and tourist operations.
Cancun's
water supply was privatized by an Enron subsidiary in the
mid-Nineties.
The water, according to environmental specialists, is dirtier than
before
but costs consumers four times as much. There is also a push to open
rich genetic diversity and forests surrounding Cancun to corporate
prospectors under privatization provisions of the Agreement on
Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS). 

In hopes of salvaging a victory in Cancun, the U.S. recently ended its
opposition to a plan for poor countries to obtain generic medicines to
treat HIV and a handful of other life-threatening diseases. But that
deal,
in response to global grassroots pressure, is far from nailed down,
and
will be overshadowed by other conflicts this week. 

The flashpoint at this summit is the disintegration of rural economies
after
a decade of NAFTA and rising U.S. subsidies. Earlier this year, a Los
Angeles Times article titled, "Free Trade Proves Devastating for
Mexican Farmers," described angry protestors who rode on horseback
through the elegant doors of the nation's capital, while farmers
carrying
firebombs and machetes abducted government officials to prevent the
seizure of their land for a $2.3 billion international airport
northeast of
Mexico City. After unprecedented absenteeism in Mexico's July 6
elections, Vicente Fox, the hero of Nineties neo-liberalism, has
conceded his government's failure to heed a "widespread social call
for
deeper and more dynamic change." 

But the wave of grassroots uprisings is not limited to Mexico. 

Even under a friendlier political climate, Brazil's landless movement
(MSN), which represents 1.5 million members, has resumed its direct
action campaign to obtain unoccupied land, and birthed a new campaign
known as "the roofless movement" among the urban homeless. 

In post-apartheid South Africa, movements among "the poors" are
struggling to reconnect electricity and water supplies in slums where
at
least one million people were cut off due to lack of funds. Their
anger
even extends to the governing African National Congress which, they
assert, has voluntarily imposed its own neo-liberal program to please
investors, including cutting taxes on the rich, eliminating currency
exchange controls, and tolerating job losses of 100,000 per year. 

A huge question hovering over Cancun this week is whether the
Zapatistas will challenge the WTO Ministerial meeting or deem it
irrelevent. The social movement triggered by the Zapatista uprising in
Chiapas has filtered throughout Mexico in the past decade. Recently
the
Zapatistas terminated all contact with government negotiators and
political parties, choosing to directly implement a broader
self-government in some 40 "autonomous municipalities" outside state
or
corporate control. 

But with or without the Zapatistas, the Mexican security forces are
"creating an overbearing climate of fear and tension" in this resort
town,
according to Global Exchange's Deborah James. One police
commissioner has vowed to "trade an eye for an eye," while officials
have set aside bullfighting and football stadiums for mass detentions.
A
secretive "watch list" has been prepared by Mexican officials, no
doubt
with FBI assistance, and as a result certain anti- globalization
activists
have been forced to move from their hotels. 

This week, it's a surreal Cancun on display. A Cancun where spin
doctors prepare feel-good press releases in barricaded enclaves of
affluence. As the American empire shudders, as the WTO searches for
consensus to disguise the inner divides, as progressive coalitions and
parties flounder under neo- liberalism, the community-based social
movements push forward, making local history in this interim * holding
to a vision larger than any can presently fulfill. The future is
uncertain, but
they are not going back to either the Monroe Doctrine or the military
dictatorships from which Latin America has emerged. 

They are demonized still as "globalphobics" by WTO promoters, mere
maladjusted parochialists resisting the modern world. In truth, many
of
the local residents and workers protesting the WTO here knew little
about the organization until they heard of its impending arrival. But
they
already knew about privatization and the selling of their resources.
Now
they are connecting the dots between their water bills and the
globalization apparatus of power that controls their lives. 

One of them, Jose Saldivar, coordinates the "Committee of
Bienvenidos" which welcomes delegates from social movements around
the world. He says his friends are not globalphobic at all, especially
those who sweep the streets, clean the hotels, and wash the dishes for
thousands of sunburned and drunken tourists each year. They are
"alternmundistas," Saldivar says, people who believe that an
alternative
world is possible. 

This week thousands of protesters will show the powers-that-be that
people do indeed want what they can't have, and do not like being
blown off. 




--
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