THE NEW RULERS OF THE WORLD?

Globalisation. You hear about it on TV and you read about it in the papers. We are all part of one big global village, where national borders and national identities no longer matter. But what is globalisation? And where is this global village?

In some respects you are already living in it. The clothes in your local store were probably stitched together in the factories of Asia. Much of the food in your local supermarket will have been grown in Africa. It's easier than ever to buy music from Mali, read novels from Colombia and watch films from Iran. The world is shrinking.

Globalisation has not only made the world smaller. It has also made it interdependent. An investment decision made in London can spell unemployment for thousands in Indonesia, while a business decision taken in Tokyo can create thousands of new jobs for workers in north-east England.

This might seem a very natural development if you live in a country like Britain, with its long international history as a trading nation and imperial power. Bringing the world closer together may throw up new opportunities for cultural and economic interaction, but it also exposes us to the negative aspects of life on a shrinking planet, whether it be the threat of global warming, the international traffic in women for sexual exploitation or the spread of AIDS throughout Africa and Asia.

More and more people across the world are acknowledging the threats posed by globalisation. Anti-globalisation demonstrations at the World Trade Organisation's Ministerial Meeting in Seattle in November 1999 were reported on TV screens across all continents.

The protestors come from many different countries and many different backgrounds, but they are united by one aim: to ensure that globalisation works in the interests of all the world's people, not just a fortunate few.

...http://pilger.carlton.com/globalisation for a tutorial on various aspects of globalization we don't hear much about in the USA... by distinguished author and filmmaker John Pilger  9/4/01

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Stealing Europe The great European dream has been subverted by corporate power 

By George Monbiot. from ZNet

"If people did not sometimes do silly things," Wittgenstein observed, "nothing intelligent would ever get done." In a world in which intelligence is banned from public life, baring our buttocks at George Bush is one of the few means we possess of expressing our dissent. We are forced, as protesters, to talk through our bums. 

But behind the bottoms lies a profound and complex understanding of some of the dangers the world now faces. The protesters' concerns about climate change, the expansion of NATO and Bush's plans to scrap the anti-ballistic missile treaty are now well-understood. But nearly all commentators and political leaders remain baffled by their opposition to the expansion and better integration of the European Union. 


The enemies of the European project are supposed to be little Englanders and polluting industries. Why on earth should people who describes themselves as radicals, who want to protect the environment, distribute wealth and defend workers' rights, seek to oppose the world's most successful social democratic project? Tragically, though 25,000 peaceful campaigners gathered in Gothenburg for the European summit, their message was killed in the crossfire between a handful of moronic rock-throwers and a thuggish and disorganised police force. Tony Blair was able to dismiss the entire anti-European protest as "an anarchists' travelling circus that goes from summit to summit with the sole purpose of causing as much mayhem as possible." 

It is easy for people of my generation to forget what an extraordinary achievement the establishment of the European Union was. We struggle to understand that until 56 years ago Europe, like the Balkans today, had been engaged in centuries of almost perpetual war. But nearly all the radicals I know are well aware that the union has shifted wealth from its richer to its poorer members, that it has fought discrimination, promoted fairness at work, raised environmental standards and infuriated the rightwing press by regulating companies. So why are so many of them now fighting what has, by and large, been a force for good? They perceive that the great European dream, of mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence, has been subverted. Integration is giving way to colonisation. 

If, like Tony Blair, you believe this claim is groundless, then take a look at a document produced by the the union's most powerful lobby group, the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). It's called "The East-West Win-Win Business Experience", but the title is a little misleading. All the winners appear to live in the west. 

European enlargement, the document reveals, provides an opportunity to solve the "problems" faced by the ERT's members in central and eastern Europe. New member states can be forced to reduce their taxes, prevent "delays in the privatisation process", remove the "restrictions on the purchasing of land by foreign companies" and combat the "dominance of national players" ("national players" are local companies). Nations seeking to join the union must "ensure that programmes to privatise and liberalise local infrastructure continue without delay". 

As an example of how the businesses it represents can prosper in eastern Europe, the ERT cites the case of British American Tobacco, which has "invested" in Hungary. BAT's problem, the document reports, was that "demand for cigarettes in Western Europe, the USA and other developed markets is highly mature. Competition is intense and margins are tight. Growth in profitability and shareholder value must therefore come from other, developing markets. ... With the collapse of Communism and the gradual emergence of a free market economy, Central and Eastern Europe represents a major growth opportunity for BAT." By buying a cigarette factory in Hungary, BAT was able "to gain access to new growth markets, both in Hungary and in other Central and Eastern European countries" and "grow the value of the company."

The European Round Table is no ordinary lobby group. It has little need to call on governments, for governments call on the round table. For the past 17 years it has been the principal architect of European integration and expansion. 

In April 1983 the chief executive of Volvo brought together the heads of 15 other corporations, among them ICI, Unilever, Nestle, Philips and Fiat, to see if they could find a way of "harmonising" trade rules in western Europe. This, they noted, would allow their companies to reach "the scale necessary to resist pressure from non-European competitors." In January 1985, the ERT presented its proposal to the European Commission. Two months later, the European Council commissioned Lord Cockfield to produce the white paper on which the Single European Act would be based. It was precisely what the lobbyists ordered. The round table became the act's enforcer, working closely with the commission to ensure that the single European market was completed in 1992. The ERT, Jacques Delors later noted, was "one of the main driving forces behind the Single Market." 

In 1984, the round table published a paper demanding a tunnel under the English Channel, a roadbridge connecting Denmark to Sweden, a European high speed train system and a new, Europe-wide roadbuilding programme. It got everything it wanted. In 1987, it started proposing some of the key components of European monetary union. The schedule for enlargement agreed at the European summit in Helsinki in 1999 precisely mirrors the sequence suggested by the ERT a few years before. 

In Nice last year, European leaders agreed, as the ERT had requested, to bypass their national parliaments by handing international treaty-making powers to the European Commission. Future trade agreements will be negotiated not by the member states, but principally by the trade commissioner Pascal Lamy. Mr Lamy is a corporation in human form. 

Now the lobby group is seeking what it calls "a minimal regulatory system with the maximum of flexibility". Having harmonised European regulations so that the same big companies can sell the same goods and services everywhere, its new task is to diminish those common rules, to allow these firms to dump their costs onto the environment and other people. It appears to be winning. According to its website, "every six months the ERT makes contact with the government that holds the EU presidency to discuss priorities." Its former secretary-general boasted about phoning European leaders whenever he wanted policy changes. 

All this has been accompanied by the effective abandonment of future social democratic reforms. Thanks in part to Tony Blair's efforts, the EU's proposed "fundamental charter on human rights" appears to have been scuppered. There's now no realistic prospect of harmonising corporate taxes to prevent companies from threatening to move to another part of Europe if their host nation doesn't reduce its rates. While the EU still enforces the progressive measures it has adopted in the past, its new legislative programme is, in effect, confined to helping big business to get bigger. 

In Gothenburg Tony Blair insisted that protesters "must not and will not disrupt the proper workings of democratic organisations." That role has been reserved for corporations. 

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Chasing them into the desert By Katherine Ainger

The airport at Genoa is named after Christopher Columbus. Five hundred and nine years after he set sail for the new world, launching what in today's parlance would be called 'a new trade round' - centuries of genocide, plunder and colonialism - Latin American civil society brought its struggle against globalisation back to the place where it began. Members of the Landless Movement of Brazil (Movimiento Sem Terra - MST) spoke of the massacre of neoliberalism at the Genoa Social Forum.

In the weeks leading up to the summit, plenty of old hands were saying someone would die at Genoa. The signs were clear in the escalating confrontation and militarization of both sides. But the MST could tell you that Carlo Guiliani, the young man shot dead as he protested at the G8 summit last weekend, is not the first casualty of the movement challenging neoliberal globalization around the world.

The MST suffer ongoing persecution for their campaign for land reform in Brazil, their opposition to the World Bank's programme of market-led land reform; their opposition to the corporate control of agriculture through patents on seed; their opposition to the big landowners' farms where cattle for export graze while the campesinos starve. 

Recently three students protesting against World Bank privatization were shot in Port Morseby, Papua New Guinea. Young men fighting World Bank imposed water privatization have been tortured and killed in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

George Bush, Tony Blair, and Clare Short, who portray those who protest the unaccountable institutions of global governance as ignorant, violent enemies of the poor, have not seemed to notice that the poor are leading the protests. A message, dated last April, sent out by members of the African student movement says: 'the anti-globalization movement, which had as one of its sources the persistent anti-structural adjustment student movement in Africa, has finally leaped from the streets of Harare, Addis and Algiers into Washington DC in April and Prague in September last year. [The World Bankers] have been hounded by a truly international youth movement which has carried the African student dead to their door.'

Yet those who run the global economy still seem to think their worst problem is that they can't find a secure place to meet. 

Instead of addressing root causes of the protests which rocked Seattle in late 1999, the World Trade Organization are fleeing to the Qatar desert, way beyond the reach of even the most determined activist. The Chretien administration is now searching desperately for the highest mountain in Canada in which to hold the next G8 summit. 

Their real problem is that their ideological adherence to 'free' trade is casting them not just into the desert, but into the political wilderness. The regime they are implementing is so destructive that it is sparking off a global uprising against neoliberalism. These are the beginnings of a new force that will shape the global political project in the new century.

Broadly, these uprisings can be described as struggles against the co-modification of every aspect of life - water, genes, atmosphere, healthcare, culture, public spaces, land. For each locality, the moment when the people cry 'Enough!' is different - but it is usually the moment when something regarded as central to the culture becomes privatized. For the Zapatistas of Mexico it was the signing of the NAFTA agreement, which outlawed the common ownership of land which Emiliano Zapata, folk hero and revolutionary of 1911, had fought for. For much of South East Asia it was the IMF austerity measures imposed on their shattered economies after the financial crisis of 1997. For South Africa, it is seeing the ANC, former rebels against apartheid, making Faustian pacts with the global economic elite as inequality grows greater, not lesser, in their country. For France it was the integrity of their food culture, and the punitive tariffs on Roquefort cheese imposed by the World Trade Organization. In Britain, it may be the slow sell-off of the National Health Service to private healthcare multinationals.

Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt, in their seminal work Empire, call this grassroots network of struggles, 'the multitude'. It is the mirror opposite of a concentrated strata of power from above, in which decisions that affect billions of human lives get made at a transnational level. The multitude embodies the real world below - a sphere of humanity, nature, culture, diversity - all those factors not reducible to a commodity to be bought and sold in a global marketplace. In fact, the movement is not 'anti-globalization' at all. If anything, it embodies 'globalization from below' - an international multitude which challenges the idea that 'the global surfaces of the world market are interchangable'. 

This is a new force for radical political change, but in a global economy, it does not have a Winter Palace to storm. This is why protesters have been targeting international summit meetings. But if these unaccountable institutions of global governance are losing their legitimacy through citizen action, the movement, particulary in the wake of the Genoa summit, urgently needs to build its own, alternative democratic legitimacy. For democratizing the global economy will ultimately not come through increasingly militant action at summits, but through building an genuine, grassroots legitimacy from below. 

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote: 'Sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It cannot fear the people, their expression, their effective participation in power. It must be accountable to them, must speak frankly to them of its achievements, its mistakes, its miscalculations and its difficulties.'

Instead of now chasing the world leaders into the desert in Qatar, then, the task at hand is to work on building a broad based pro-democracy movement at home. In a million small ways in Britain, that process has already begun. As a result of campaigning by the World Development Movement, the Scottish parliament will be holding the first parliamentary debate in the world over WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which threatens to lock anything deemed a 'service' into privatization. Unions are beginning to organize against GATS; the rank and file are already beginning to rebel over public sector sell offs. Even the Women's Institute is alarmed. Middle England continues to complain about GM crops and the state of the railways, while Scottish crofters have joined the radical, anti-WTO, international peasant farmers' union, Via Campesina - whose largest member is the MST. 

This is the birth of a genuinely popular global uprising against corporate control and the hijacking of democracy. The movement against economic globalization: coming to a town near you. 

Katharine Ainger is editing an issue of the New Internationalist www.newint.org on global resistance. 

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Genoa 7/20 By Starhawk

At this point it’s still not clear to me how many are actually dead. I’ve heard one young man, I’ve heard two, four. I’ve heard that the police shot into the crowd, that someone was clubbed to the ground and, unconscious, run over by a car, I’ve heard it was the White Overalls, the Black Bloc, I don’t know. I know what I saw.

The day started as a spirited, peaceful demonstration. I was on the Piazza Manini with the Women’s Action and Rette Lilliput, a religious ecological network. Both groups were completely committed to nonviolence. My friend and training partner Lisa Fithian was down at the convergence center with the pink block, the group that wanted to do creative, fun, street theater, dancing and music as part of their action. Lisa is a great person to be with in an action: she’s experienced, never panics, moves fast and knows what to look for, has a voice that can carry over a huge crowd and a great ability to move people. I wish she were going to be with us, but I feel like we’ve divided our talents well. I’ll help move the smaller Women’s contingent, help them with ritual and work some magic. Lisa will help the much larger and boisterous Pink Bloc become mobile and coherent. We hope to meet up sometime during the day.

Around 1 pm, the women march from the piazza down to the wall with probably three or four thousand people. The women gather in a circle for a spiral dance, singing "Siamo la luna che move la marea," "We are the moon that moves the tides, we will change the world with our ideas." We brew up a lovely magical cauldron—a big pot full of water from sacred places and whatever else women want to add: rose petals, a hair or two, tobacco from a cigarette., that symbolize the visions we hold of a different world. It’s a sweet, symbolic action—not quite as satisfying, perhaps, as tearing the wall down, but empowering to the women who take part. The police are relaxed, these groups are clearly no threat to anyone. Monica negotiates with the police, and we are allowed to go up to the wall in small groups to pin up underwear—(residents of the Red Zone were threatened with fines if they hung out their laundry during the G8—apparently the site of washing might unnerve the delegates), banners, messages and spill our water under the fence.

(Helicopters buzz the house as I write, the news is discussing violence and nonviolence in Italian, and I stretch my memory of high school French to ask one of the women staying here in a phrase we never covered, "How many people died today?" One, she tells me, and one is in the hospital in critical condition.)

Then the Pink march arrives, trapped in a cross street by our march. We open a lane and let them through. They are delightful, mostly young, some all punked out in wildly colored hair or dreadlocks or bright pink wigs, drumming, dancing, cavorting through the crowd. They turn the corner and filter into the next square down the wall, only a short half-block from the street we’ve occupied.

On our street, everyone is sitting peacefully and having lunch. I walk over to the Pink Block to see what’s going on. I drum for a while with the accordion player. People are milling about—there’s nothing clear that’s happening, when suddenly a line of police has blocked one of the exits. Dancing youth are wildly leaping and stomping in front of them, but that’s all they are doing. Much of the Pink Bloc has moved on, they appear a block or two above the square, with the police now trapped between groups of Pink. I am just thinking that this is not a good situation when a tear gas cannister lands in front of me. I start to move away, back down to the street where the women are. just a mild hit, I wash out my eyes, help a few others whose eyes are streaming and red. Lisa appears, and we go back for another look. This time the gas catches us in a bad situation, with the way back to the street blocked, and another exit up a staircase too full of bodies. I am getting hit heavily, my lungs and eyes burning but I remember that helpful hint from all the trainings we have done. I can breathe, I really can breathe, and fear is the most powerful weapon. Lisa has better eye protection, she takes my hand and leads me out. I wash them out again. This seems like a good moment to leave. I gather up what’s left of the women, Lisa and other’s get the Pink Block together, I begin a drumbeat and we start up the street, which is also up a hill. The march feels powerful and joyful. We are retreating, but in a strong way, moving on to the next action, still together.

The good feeling lasts until we reach the top of the hill. Somehow the Black Bloc have become trapped between the pacifist affinity groups and the police. Monica is on the cell phone, upset and tearful when she learns that the Black Bloc have trashed an old part of the city. "It’s over," she says. "after all our months of work! Let’s go home."

I am trying to find out what the women want to do: Lisa is trying to find out what the Pink Bloc wants to do, when suddenly massive amounts of tear gas fill the square. I am moving away from it, down a side street, trying to convince myself that I can breathe, when I notice that I’m somehow in the midst of the Black Bloc. They run past me, younger, faster, much better equipped, and the police are behind them. I do not want to be here. I’m fifty years old, and I was never very fast even when I was young. For the first time, I come close to panicking.

But below is a side street, and the wind blows the gas away. I can breath. I duck down the alley. Like most of the streets in this hillside area, it winds around the side of ridge, with a sheer drop below, and snakes back to the main street. A small clump of Pink is sheltering there. I join them, we wait as the Black Block thunders by one street away. Lisa appears to tell us that the riot cops are coming up from below. They’re beating people brutally. We check the exits, fearing we’re trapped, but suddenly the street we came in on is clear. I and a few others make a break for it, get across and head up a stairway on the other side. Lisa goes back to see if she can help move the others. Before she can, the police have found the alley. They beat people hard, going for the head. They beat pacifists who approach them with their hands up; they beat women. A battered crowd gathers on the stairs, moves up a level or two. I comfort a young man with a head wound, a woman who is crying, her thigh covered with the blood of her boyfriend who had been taken to the hospital. We are all shaken.

Slowly, a pink contingent gathers on the stairs. We move up and up; in this part of town, half the streets are stairways that rise in endless zig zag flights. Below us, we see contingents of riot cops sweep the streets. The helicopter above move on, following the Black Bloc. Lisa is moving back and forth across the street and back to the square, checking out rumors, trying to figure out what’s going on and where we might go. We eventually make our way back to the square. One of the women has been gassed so badly she’s been vomiting, but she wants to stay. Another women from our contingent was hit in the head by a cop and taken to the hospital. A whole lot of people have been badly hurt, people who clearly and unmistakably are not rock throwing, street fighting youth, people who believed they were going to be in a peaceful and reasonably safe place. Lisa and I had done a training for the women, trying to give them some sense of what they might face on the streets from our experience in other actions. But there’s no real way to prepare for a cop beating a peaceful, non-aggressive, middle-aged woman on the head.

The Pink Bloc begins a long journey back to the other side of town. We’re joined by some of the others from the square and by some of the Italian Pacifist Affinity groups who have been trying to hold space on this side. As we’re trying to make our decision, with translation into English, Italian, Spanish and French, Some of the Black Bloc drifts up from below and asks if they can join us to make our common way to the bottom of the town. Some of the group are angry at the Bloc and unwilling to take the risk of joining with them or being associated with them. Others feel that we should hold solidarity with everyone, and not leave anyone vulnerable to the police. Eventually, the group offers to accept them if they’ll unmask and leave their sticks behind. They won’t do that, they say we should each respect each others’ way of doing things, so they’ll go down alone, letting us go first.

There’s more, mostly a series of moments of being trapped in an intersection here or a stairway there, but after around two or three hours we made it back to the convergence center. I’m far too tired to make sense of this day right now, it’s all I can do to describe it, and it’s after midnight and people have to go to bed. Someone is dead, and the night is not over.

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Fascism in Genoa by Starhawk

(This is the last piece by Starhawk, one of our ZNet Sustainer System commentators, direct from Genoa. If you check the ZNet site for other Genoa reports, and the indymedia coverage which is extensive, you will see that there is a large a mount of evidence on behalf of her various claims.) 

I was there when the carabinieri raided the IndyMedia Center and the Diaz school, in Genoa, at the end of the protest against the G8 meeting. We heard the shouts and screams, couldn't get out the door, ran upstairs and hid, fearing for our lives. Eventually the cops found us, but we were the lucky ones. A Member of Parliament was in our building; lawyers and media arrived. There was some obscure Italian legal reason why the police could be deterred. They withdrew.

But nothing could save our friends across the street, at the school where people were sleeping and where another section of the Independent Media were located. The police entered: the media and the politicians were kept out. And they beat people. They beat people who had been sleeping, who held up their hands in a gesture of innocence and cried out, "Pacifisti! Pacifisti!" They beat the men and the women. They broke bones, smashed teeth, shattered skulls. They left blood on the walls, on the windows, a pool of it in every spot where people had been sleeping. When they had finished their work, they brought in the ambulances. All night long we watched from across the street as the stretchers were carried out, as people were taken to the jail ward of the hospital, or simply to jail. And in the jail, many of them were tortured again, in rooms with pictures of Mussolini on the wall. This really happened. Not back in the nineteen thirties, but on the night of July 21 and the morning of July 22, 2001. Not in some third world country, but in Italy: prosperous, civilized, sunny Italy. And most of the victims are still in the hospital or in jail, as I write this four days later.

I can't adequately describe the shock and the horror of that night. But as terrifying as it was to live through it, what is more frightening still are its implications:

That the police could carry out such a brutal act openly, in the face of lawyers, politicians and the media means that they do not expect to be held accountable for their actions. Which means that they had support from higher up, from more powerful politicians. According to a report published in La Repubblica from a policeman who took part in the raid, when the more democratic factions within the police complained that the Constitution was being violated, they were told, "We don't have anything to be worried about, we're covered."

That those politicians also do not expect to be condemned or driven from office means that they too have support from higher up, ultimately, from Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister, himself.

That they could beat, torture, and falsely arrest Italians means that they do not expect to be held accountable by their own people.

That they could beat, torture and imprison internationals shows that they do not expect to be held accountable by the international community. And indeed, who is going to hold them accountable? George Bush, the unelected, unmandated heir of a coup? Sweden, which just used live ammunition on protestors? Canada, builders of the Wall of Shame? That Berlusconi could support such acts means that he must be certain of support from other international powers, and that these overtly fascist actions are linked to the growing international escalation of repression against protestors.

That the Italian government used tactics learned from Quebec: the wall, the massive use of tear gas, and that the RCMP had observers in Genoa in preparation for next year's meeting in Calgary, means that police repression is also a global network. As we learn from each action, so do they.

That the Italian government are now targeting the organizers of the Genoa Social Forum shows where their agenda was heading all along: the discrediting of the antiglobalization network, the discouraging of peaceful and legal protest as well as direct action. The leader of the Forum has lost his job. Others are fearing for their freedom and safety.

It's hard to make sense of all that happened in Genoa. So much happened so fast, and in the middle of it it was hard to know what was going on. The Black Bloc suddenly appear in the midst of a square that is supposed to be a safe space for peaceful gatherings: the police gas and beat the women and the pacifists and let the Bloc escape. We are having a quiet lunch in the convergence center by the sea, when suddenly tear gas canisters are flying into the eating area and a pitched battle begins directly outside, not a hundred yards away from the main march. Prisoners report being tortured until they agree to shout "Viva il Duce!" The police rationale for the attack on the school was the supposed presence of members of the Black Bloc-but they never attacked the actual Black Bloc encampment, and by the night of the attack most of the Black Bloc had left the city. I'm not an investigative reporter-I'm an activist and once upon a time when life was not so overwhelming I was a novelist. I don't like conspiracy theories but I make sense of the world through stories. Genoa makes sense to me if this is the plot:

"Memo: Italian Security to Italian Government/U.S. and International Advisors:

"Subject: Covert Security Plan for Genova "Top Secret!

"The overt Security Plan for the Genova G8 meeting has been covered in a separate memo. The subject of this memo is the covert plan. 

"Phase One: Lead up to the action: This phase is characterized by two major aspects: the creation of a climate of fear and anticipated violence by the stockpiling of body bags, deployment of missiles, etc. And second, a concerted effort to undermine the popularity of the stronger, radical groups such as the 'Tute Bianca' or White Overalls through smear campaigns, accusations that they cooperate with the police etc. If necessary, we will plant actual bombs to increase the climate of fear.

"Phase Two: Recruitment and infiltration: We will concentrate on infiltrating the Black Bloc and strategically placing provocateurs who will be in positions to instigate attacks, violence, and destruction of private property which will turn the population against the protestors. In addition, we will encourage Fascist groups to run as segments of the Bloc which will then give us an excuse to attack the main body of protestors

"Phase Three: Friday, 20 July. We arm the police and carabinieri with live ammunition rather than rubber or plastic bullets. With luck, deaths will result. Our 'Bloc' can appear strategically near any group we wish to attack, giving us the excuse to gas and beat the 'nonviolent' demonstrators. Protestors should be severely beaten and arrested protestors tortured to deter them from further demonstrations. In addition, our Bloc will instigate the destruction of property, particularly small shops, private cars, and will attack and beat other demonstrators, perhaps even a nun or two, further discrediting the anarchists. A high level of violence and destruction should lessen the numbers expected for Saturday's march.

"Phase Four: Saturday, 21 July. Our strategy here is directed to undermine, divide, and disperse the march. We instigate more property damage and police battles in the morning near the assembly point of the march. One of our factions will attack the Tute Bianca during the march itself. Shortly after noon, we begin a battle just outside the convergence center, near the corner where the march turns north, giving us the excuse to gas the convergence center. We attempt to drive the battle into the march, splitting or disrupting it, and providing the rationale to attack the march with tear gas and other dispersal agents.

"Phase Five: Post-march. We continue the climate of fear with a midnight raid on the main communications center and sleeping quarters of the protestors. Severe force is justified by rumors of Black bloc presence. We uncover 'evidence' of connections between the Genova Social Forum and the bloc, thereby discrediting them. Beatings, arrests and torture will discourage future involvement with protests.

"Phase Six: Sunday, 22 July and beyond: We continue harassment and random arrests of foreigners and suspected protestors. We begin a campaign of accusations against the Genoa Social Forum, connecting them with the Black Bloc, moving against their employment, their credibility, and possibly taking legal action against them. This will also force them to disavow the Black Bloc, further splitting the movement.

This memo is fiction, but I believe it's essentially true. Like a mathematical proof, it has a simple internal consistency that makes sense of the known facts. And there is more and more mounting evidence that the 'black bloc' in Genoa was significantly composed of organized fascist groups working in collaboration with the police. 

If it is true, even partly true, what does it mean to us?

It means that the response to the events in Genoa will determine what level of force can be used against future demonstrations, whether we will see smashed skulls and more deaths in Calgary, and blowtorches in the armpits in the third world.

There are signs, however, that their strategy may backfire. On Monday all over Italy 250,000 people took to the streets. The pressure is on for the Minister of the Interior to resign; Berlusconi's government is threatened. 

There were demonstrations at Italian embassies all over the world. We need to keep the pressure on, to make sure the issue doesn't fade away. Keep calling and writing the embassies. Get your political organization, union, workplace or group of best friends to write and call. Ask your local news media why they are not telling this story. Now is not the moment to be ideological and purist; now is the moment to call in all our allies, set aside our differences, and act in solidarity. For if this level of repression goes unchallenged, no one is safe, not the most legal NGO, not the most reformist organization with the mildest demands. If we don't act now, when a political space remains open to us, we may lose the space to act at all.

Continue to organize and mobilize for the next one. Fear is their most powerful weapon. The fact that they must resort to fascist violence shows that we are a serious threat.

If we want to continue to be a threat, we also need to look critically at our own movement, to identify what we do that leaves us wide open to infiltration and manipulation.

And we need both better preparation and better networks of support for these actions.

The Genoa Social Forum needs support. They've sent out the following call-please answer it.

On Monday the opposition has demanded in Parliament the resignation of the Ministry of Interior and on Tuesday demonstrations in thirty Italian cities are held, with more than 250,000 people participating.

We ask your help for denouncing these threats to democracy and justice. You could act in one or more of the following ways:

1. Write a short statement (or a brief article) in support of the right to protest against the G8, in solidarity with the Genoa Social Forum and the peaceful demonstrators. Please state clearly your affiliation. The texts will be published by the Left daily Il Manifesto, and by other media around the world.

2. Send formal messages of support on behalf of associations, NGOs, media organizations, Universities, etc.

3. Write/sign an international appeal for democracy, justice, respect of human and civil rights. If many of you are interested, we can work together on a text in the next days.

Please send your articles and messages to: redazione@ilmanifesto.it
and to the Genoa Social Forum via San Luca 15/9 - 16124 Genova tel. 010 2461749 fax 010 2461413 e.mail info@genoa-g8.org - webmaster@genoa-g8.org -- 

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Global leaders just don't get it

Many Americans may be wondering what led to the massive demonstrations at the economic summit in Genoa, Italy. The answer: The protesters are convinced that the managers of globalization are taking our world in the wrong direction.

As President Jacques Chirac of France noted during the summit, "One hundred thousand people don't get upset unless there is a problem in their hearts and spirits."

Trade unionists, environmentalists, human-rights advocates, AIDS activists and proponents of Third World debt cancellation fear that corporate globalization is leading to greater inequality, increasing job insecurity, the destruction of our environment and, perhaps most frighteningly, the weakening of our democracies.

In Genoa, eight men gathered to make decisions about how the world would address some of the most critical global problems - the AIDS pandemic, the staggering debt of Third World countries and the massive poverty in developing nations. These leaders insisted they were democratically elected. True, but they represent a total population of about 800 million out of the world's more than 6 billion people.

Africa was allowed only a token representation, even though its problems were high on the agenda.

The summit in Genoa was a meeting of the global rulemakers - a country club world government. The rulemakers' globalization, with its twin banners of unfettered free trade and unmanaged free markets, is a new colonialism that has had devastating effects, both in the Third World and in the industrialized countries.

Each day that these presidents and prime ministers posed for group photos and dined on fine meals in Genoa, more than 19,000 children died worldwide from the effects of the poor country's debt crises, and 8,000 people died of AIDS, according to Christian Aid and Doctors Without Borders.

In the last decade, deaths from preventable disease have risen, not decreased. And the gap between the rich and the poor has grown larger, according to the U.N. Development Program.

From South-Central Los Angeles to Soweto, South Africa, a huge number of the world's people are not benefiting from a global economy that caters to investors and bankers.

The demonstrations grow out of a deep, abiding sense that the global rulemakers, for all their talk, just don't get it. It is unacceptable that our leaders give mere lip service to the desperate plight of the estimated 1.2 billion people who survive on less than $1 day per capita and the nearly 3 billion who survive on less than $2 a day, according to the U.N. Development Program.

The economic policies the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have imposed on more than 80 countries during the last two decades have required severe cutbacks in government spending on health service, education and wage and farm subsidies. As a result, living standards have often plummeted.

President Bush has repeatedly said that the demonstrators are condemning the poor to continuing poverty. The facts show the opposite. Take the example of our neighbor, Mexico. According to the Mexican government, wages in Mexico's manufacturing sector have dropped 10 percent since NAFTA began. And the World Bank reports that inequality in that country has not decreased since Mexico began its market liberalization 15 years ago.

What the summit in Genoa made startlingly clear is that democracy has reached a new low when communication between leaders and their citizens must happen through steel grates, police lines and noxious clouds of tear gas. And the death of a 23-year-old Italian demonstrator, Carlo Giuliani, should give us all pause.

The vast majority of demonstrators want a dialogue. But they want real action, too. Without it, the basic needs of billions of people will go unmet.

....Ted Lewis directs the political and civil rights program at Global Exchange, an international human rights organization based in San Francisco. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org, or by writing to Progressive Media Project, 409 East Main St., Madison, Wis. 53703.

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