Globalization and its Discontents

1. Globalization and its Discontents Money makes the world go round

2. I. Major concern of all organizations are the SAPs • Require currency devaluation that reduce the price of a country’s exports. • Massive cutbacks in education, health services and public infrastructure. • Stress on international competitiveness rather than social priorities • Stress building an economic environment that is conducive to foreign direct investment. • Often involves privatization of land and national companies, e.g. communications and infrastructural companies. • Debt seen as a lever that compels many countries to open their economies to global competition. • SAPs also seen as taking over the control of national policies.

3. II. The Effects of these Changes are Diverse and often Invisible, since they seem to emanate from ‘Economic Imperatives’ • Increasing polarities of wealth and poverty. • Decreasing government regulation of environmental, health and safety issues. • Increasing privatization of common property in small-scale, rural communities. • Emphases on productivity and growth as major criteria of viability of communities. • Emphasis on the individual as the source of autonomy, poverty increasingly defined as individual failure.

4. III. Responses to ‘the Washington Consensus’ have also been diverse • Student movements • Jubilee 2000 • Anti-Debt movements • Peace Movements • Fair Trade • Human Rights Movements • Anti-Dam Movements • Squatters’ Movements

5. IV. Movements for Land Reform and Against Privatization of the Commons: • Zapatista Movement in Chiapas, Mexico • Sem Terra, the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil • Via Campesina, a peasant union covering 37 countries. • Confederation Paysanne, from France, also against GMCs, and MacDonalds.