Until September11 prospects seemed rosy for the popular movement in North America. Years of organisational and political efforts had succeeded in bringing many social movements together in the struggle against neoliberalism and this was taking place at various levels: local, continental and international. “North-North” and “North-South” solidarities were well under way, particularly concerning the neoliberal project of establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
And then came the events we all know.

The shock was terrible, particularly in the media who lost no time in demonizing the entire social movement. As for governments ,in the name of national security they tried to push through a whole series of freedom-restricting legislation that is aimed directly at popular movements. True, it is too soon to predict the long-term consequences of this change of direction. It would be strange if this vast social movement stopped opposing neoliberal policies and their disastrous consequences on people. At the same time, the struggle against neoliberalism has acquired another dimension: the struggle for peace. In fact, the present strategy of the United States is to transform the “hunt after Bin Laden” into a general offensive to reinforce US domination over the rest of the world. However, most of the social movements are not prepared to back this new imperialistic adventure. This is the turbulent situation that the “world as seen by its peoples” is at present experiencing in North America.





*Executive Director - Alternatives, Action and Communication Network for International Development (Montreal)


1) After the bubble

In North America, 2001 saw the end of the long economic boom of the 1990s.
Leading economic sectors like the “traditional” industries were affected (it is estimated that 1.5 million jobs were lost). In this situation, governments and large corporations have been hoping to transform the current recession into a new offensive to consolidate neoliberalism.


The new economy: myths and realities

According to the evidence, the growth of the 1990s that Alan Greenspan, President of the US Federal Reserve Bank, announced as the start of a “new era”, had relaunched American capitalism. However, since the beginning of 2001, this did not seem to be happening:
 The growth had been based on a speculative explosion which was not related to productivity and investment. Even the advanced technology sectors were blown up by speculators. In fact, the economy was suffering from excess capacity (the utilization rate dropped from 88 per cent in 1995 to 63.4 per cent in 2001).
 The uncontrolled mergers that followed a gruelling struggle between companies and the creation of mega-corporations, far from stabilizing the market had the opposite effect. From 1997 to 2001, the profit rate has fallen (from 858 billion dollars to 761 billion).
 The average wage in 1999 was still 140 per cent less than that of 1972. Out of the 12 million jobs created since 1995, 71 per cent of them were in trade and services where low wages predominate. This “economic apartheid” is creating a steep rise in indebtedness, both for individuals and for firms, which leaves whole swathes of society vulnerable during a recession.

In the short-term, the problem could worsen if foreign capital, which has been attracted by high interest rates and the exaggerated value of the American dollar, decides to withdraw. In 1995, foreign capital represented only 8 per cent of all investment in the U.S.A., but in 2000 this percentage had risen to 26 per cent. The enormous trade deficit (450 billion dollars a year, or 4.5 per cent of the GNP), cannot continue unless capital is coming in at more or less the same rate.














(Source: Left Business Observer, February 2000 )

A new recession

When George Bush became President at the beginning of 2001, he faced some serious problems.
 Widespread layoffs had hit people hard, causing the official unemployment rate to rise to 6 per cent. If the number of people imprisoned (nearly two million) and other “invisible” unemployed were taken into account, the rate would be significantly higher.
 NASDAQ, the high-technology index, had fallen by 66 per cent in two years. And the “benefits” from integrating the Americas had run up against severe difficulties, particularly in Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil - to the extent that several US financial institutions feared for their solvency.

To reverse this trend, Bush launched a programme of investments in oil and the nuclear industry, a return gift to the corporations that massively financed his electoral campaign. At the same time, in the name of the “energy crisis”, the US administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol which would limit polluting emissions. Bush also re-launched the arms race, as a kind of “military Keynesianism”. But this budgetary redistribution only benefits certain sectors of the economy: those that are heavy on capital but relatively inefficient in terms of providing new jobs.

One does not have to subscribe to a conspiracy theory to see that the attacks in New York and Washington occurred at a very convenient moment. The President himself has said that the situation was an “opportunity”. Evidently, in the short-term, he has recovered his standings by becoming the “patriotic” president. In fact he has been able to impose changes which would have been unacceptable before the shock of September 11, including drastic reductions in “social payments”, i.e. public investment in health, education and social services.

There has also been a return to the offensive in remodelling the Americas to the profit of the United States.

Economic apartheid in the United States

 1% of the population has an income greater than that of 95% of the population;
 400 individuals possess 12% of the GNP, as much as 100 million Americans;
 Since 1990, indebtedness has tripled (from 185 billion to 584 billion dollars). The personal savings rate during the same period has dropped from 7% to 2%.
 The average salary of a CEO is 326 times that of the average worker’s wage (10.6 million dollars compared with 25,300 dollars). The minimum basic wage is 20% less than it had been in 1968.
 44.2 million people have no medical insurance, an increase of 13.6% compared with 1989.

Source: United for a Fair Economy, Economic Apartheid Data Center, October 2001

The relaunch of the neoliberal offensive

This offensive got under way in January 1994 with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico and Canada. Soon after negotiations were started to include the 34 countries of the two hemispheres (every country in the Americas except for Cuba) in a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. To a large extent these initiatives have enabled the United States to reinforce its domination over what was already its backyard. Contrary to what was announced at the time, these negotiations have little to do with “business” or “free trade”. As Dorval Brunelle explains, the objective, in the framework of the Americas, is to “strengthen the liberalization of the internal markets and to make it more difficult for public authorities to maintain its prerogatives in defending economic and social rights.” In the more or less long term, the United States would also like to dismantle public service enterprises. Meanwhile, the tendency has been for Mexico and Canada to align their social policies with those of the United States. Thus, the relatively more generous system of unemployment insurance that existed in Canada before NAFTA came into effect has been reduced to the very low American level (payments for unemployment insurance have got down from 75 per cent to 36 per cent of the salary, almost the same as in the United States). There is a striking number of take-overs of Canadian and Mexican companies by American firms. The latter have relocated many of their factories to the free trade zones in Northern Mexico where they can get cheap labour. The sectors that benefit from a greater access to the American market take up almost all the investment and are mostly the low-wage sectors, which explains the fall of 40 per cent in the average hourly wage since 1991. The Mexican and Canadian ruling classes prefer to operate in the shadow of the US giant: better to be a flunkey upstairs with the rich than confront their own poor classes!


3) States in crisis

While all this has been going on, the ruling classes in North America have been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy of various degrees. People increasingly think that those who rule them are all “on the same side”. There is also a crisis of values: consumerism and individualism have loudly been proclaiming that the supreme happiness is the possession of material goods. On the other hand, there has been a marked return to various religious fundamentalisms and their authoritarian and conformist ideologies. In the wake of the events of September 11, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Christian Right, was affirming that the United States had been punished for having “tolerated homosexuals, lesbians and aborters”. Meanwhile, under the umbrella of globalization, parliaments have been turned into registration offices. The tendency is to accentuate coercion and repression.

Political institutions losing legitimacy

At the 2000 presidential elections, George W. Bush was victorious with fewer votes than his Democratic adversary, Al Gore. This was as a result of the undemocratic election legislation in which the great “colleges” constituted by each of the States are those that select the winner. The confrontation was finally settled by the Supreme Court of the United States, most of whose members were nominated by Republican administrations before 1992. Worse still, the election was marred by fraud, notably in Florida where measures were taken to exclude tens of thousands of citizens, mostly Afro-Americans, from voting. The facts were already worrying enough, apart from this episode.

Those elected depend on election machines that are capable of mobilizing hundreds of millions of dollars. The last presidential campaign cost three billion dollars: 40 per cent more than in 1996. Eighty per cent of the financing of political parties comes from 1 per cent of the population. Forty-seven per cent of the population who earn less than $50,000 a year participated in the elections. And the U.S. is the only Western country that has taken away the right to vote from thousands of citizens, “guilty” of having infringed the penal code, at some time or other (more than 13 per cent of Afro-Americans, according to the Human Rights Watch).

“Faux-Democracy”

The single candidate electoral system excludes third parties to a large extent. Voting becomes trapped between two huge parties, like the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States. Thus political tendencies that have considerable support (10 to 15 per cent and more) are excluded, whereas in almost all the other democracies they have access to political institutions. Despite numerous calls to change this undemocratic system, nothing has changed because the status quo strongly favours the defenders of “order and property”. Another aspect of the crisis of legitimacy is the levelling of the great parties. The Democratic Party, traditionally supported by working people, has been transformed. There is no longer any fundamental difference between it and the Republican Party, traditionally the party of the right, business circles and the military-industrial complex.

The rise of the “hard” right

The hard right has been in the ascent and it is linked to the Christian fundamentalist movement. It is composed of a wide range of groups, some of which are not ideologically far removed from the extreme rightwing militias like those who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma a few years ago. Its ideology is a populist ragbag (against the Federal State), anti the poor (against social programmes) and racist (against Afro-Americans, the Jews and the Muslims). The fundamentalists also get their strength from a number of “causes”: the struggle against the right to abortion, against homosexuals and lesbians, against the separation between religion and the State (the only religion that exists is of course Christianity). Over the last decade, the hard right has become firmly entrenched in the Republican Party in order to infiltrate the State at the highest level and also to impose an ideological shift to the right. Several of the leaders of the current Bush administration, John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, comes from this stable.


Punish and criminalize

In the wake of the legitimacy crisis, the excluded become a “dangerous class”. For some years now, the American political establishment have been establishing a “security consensus”. The phenomenal rise in the number of prisoners has resulted in two million people now being incarcerated (as against 1.4 million in 1994). Apart from prisons, State terrorism is exercised through capital punishment. In Texas, since George W. Bush was elected (in 1994), 140 people have been executed. Excluding Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Iran, the United States is the only country in the world that allows the execution of minors or the mentally challenged. But repression does not only take place in prisons. Everyday life is plagued by all kinds of systems that enable the government to open files on citizens. Gated communities surrounded by high walls, which people cannot enter unless they are invited, are becoming more and more common. The new measures taken since September 11 are reinforcing this process and are particularly aimed against immigrants and refugees. More than 10,000 people have been interrogated, the great majority of them people of Arab and/or Muslim origin, and 2,000 have been imprisoned. The concepts of habeas corpus and presumed innocence have been eliminated. More recently, in the waves of the struggle against globalization, police operations in general have become more violent, as we saw in Seattle (November 1999) and Quebec City (April 2001). In the latter city, where people are used to protesting peacefully, the demonstration against the Summit of the Americas was subject to unprecedented repression. For the first time in Canada police used plastic bullets, as we have been used to seeing in Palestine or Northern Ireland. In this way an ideology and practice of “national security” has been developed, like the one imposed under Senator McCarthy in the 1950s.


4) Strengths and weaknesses of the people’s movement

Over the last few years large swaths of public opinion are increasingly aware of the demands and criticisms expressed by a vast movement of people, a sort of coalition of coalitions that developed between Seattle (November 1999) and Quebec (April 2001). But since September 11, there has been some uncertainty. It is yet to be seen whether this mood will last or whether it is an ephemeral nationalist reaction.


The happy surprise of Seattle

Throughout the 1980s, the people’s movement was rudely shaken. As a result of repression and anti-union legislation, trade-union membership dropped from 31% in 1980 to 13%. However, at the beginning of the 1990s, there were signs of change. Young people, environmentalists and some committed Christians once again began to question capitalism, as it “really existed”. Inspired by the Zapatistas, dissidents in the US saw in the Chiapas movement a gigantic NO to triumphant neoliberalism. The symbol was all the more striking because the Zapatista insurrection coincided with the the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) coming into effect. Their action had a radicalizing effect. A whole constellation of networks developed and they were decentralized, mobile and militant. It brought together environmentalists, students, human rights groups. But it was November 1999 in Seattle that it became evident for all to see: 50,000 demonstrations - young ecological and pacifist “turtles”, together with the teamsters and other workers from progressive leaning unions. The union movement did indeed converge with the “new” movements which created the mass nature of the demonstrations of Seattle.

A few months later, the anti-globalization movements returned to the attack in several US cities, making symbolic use of the meetings of institutions at the heart of globalization, including the congresses of the Republican and Democratic Parties. It seemed that something new had happened at Seattle, which brought a truly international perspective to local resistance. But the North American anti-globalization movement still has some big weaknesses, such as the weak participation of Afro-American communities and other minorities.


The renewal of the unions

The union movement has changed, particularly within the powerful AFL-CIO, whose new President, John Sweeny, is linked to the militant wing. In 1995, the Canadian Automobile Workers, which is the most militant union in Canada, organised a series of rotating strikes linking union demands to social questions (the right to health, to education, to good quality public services). In 1997, 200,000 American workers launched a strike against UPS, a transport and communication multinational. Their resistance was looked on favourably by the public. In powerful unions, notably the Teamsters, new leadership emerged, which opposed the traditional, “business” unionism and its pro-employers, pro-government stance. Another important factor was the development of “people/unions/students” coalitions, like the Jobs with Justice network, which succeeded in bringing together thousands of local unions and community groups in the large industrial centres of the country.

In other places, students came together in “Anti-Sweatshop Committees” (United Students against Sweatshops) in various university campuses and organised campaigns against multinationals, like Nike, Reebock and other brand names popular among young people. Ultimately, however, the American union movement has not yet succeeded in changing power relationships. It is true that 400,000 new members registered with AFL-CIO in 2000, but during the same period, 600,000 unionized jobs were eliminated, particularly after the relocation of factories, usually to Mexico.


Quebec and the rainbow alliance

The dynamics of rainbow alliances bringing together trade unions, community organisations, young people, feminists and environmentalists was seen again in 2001 in Quebec. At the local level, the Quebec Women’s Federation (FFQ) mobilized people on a massive scale and this triggered off the movement. Thousands of women and men responded to the Federation’s call and filled the streets in all the towns of Quebec to protest against the poverty created by neoliberal policies and against the violence committed against women. The preparation of the People’s Summit, which had been convened to oppose the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), provided the opportunity for a huge education campaign and popular mobilization. For some time, “hegemony” changed sides: the demands of the movement were supported by the general public. A ringing “NO to the FTAA!” was to be heard throughout society, accompanied by a reconstruction programme of the Americas which was drawn up together with people’s organisations in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, etc. Encouraged by this success, a large part of the people’s movement concluded that it was necessary to build broad coalitions, on both a sociological and ideological base, combining mass mobilization with education and awareness-raising work in order to lay the foundations for a democratic, leftwing proposal on behalf of all citizens.


Declaration of the People’s Summit of the Americas (extracts)

We live in an Americas marked by intolerable inequalities and unjustifiable political and economic asymmetries. Half of the population of 800 million, of whom almost 500 million are Latin American, live in poverty. The south has a debt of $792 billion US; Canada and the United States hold 80% of the economic might.

WHAT WE WANT
 We demand the absolute respect of human rights which are universal, equal and indivisible We want to build bridges between the peoples of the Americas, draw on the pluralism of our histories and our cultures and to strengthen each other in the exercising of a representative and participatory democracy..
 We want complete respect for workers rights, trade union rights and collective bargaining. We want to ensure the primacy of human rights and collectives rights as defined in international instruments over commercial agreements.
 We want states that promote the common good and that are able to intervene actively to ensure the respect of rights. We want states to strengthen democracy, to ensure the production and distribution of wealth, to guarantee universal and free access to quality public education, and to health care particularly concerning women’s reproductive rights. We want states to eliminate violence against women and children and to ensure respect for the environment on behalf of the current and future generations.
 We want socially productive and ecologically responsible investment. The rules applied across the continent should encourage foreign investors who will guarantee the creation of quality jobs, sustainable production and economic stability, while blocking speculative investments.
 We call upon the peoples of the Americas to intensify their mobilisation to fight the FTAA project and to build other integration alternatives based on democracy, social justice and sustainable development.

NO TO THE FTAA! ANOTHER AMERICAS IS POSSIBLE!

Québec City, April, 2001

Rediscovering politics

The massive mobilization of people created by the social movement has to a large degree raised the level of politicization of a population who for some time seemed to have succumbed to the TINA syndrome! However, as is traditional in the United States but to a great extent in Canada too, the social movement had been built up without a project for a political alternative. At the present time, many young activists do not trust what they know as “politics”. They have a natural affinity for concepts such as direct action, direct democracy, non-violent civil disobedience. However, without depreciating the importance of mobilization and direct action, a large number of activists, both “new” and “old”, believe that a way must be found to re-occupy the political field.

During the last presidential campaign in the United States, popular sectors came together in a coalition around the candidature of Ralph Nader, a veteran campaigner in the social movements. Three million people voted for him and his anti neoliberal programme. The search goes on to find the right formula for political action, at the same time as considering what should be put forward as political alternatives, because what has already been done should not be repeated. For this reason, North American activists are closely following what is going on elsewhere in the world, particularly in Brazil:

“The popular participation governments in Brazil want to go beyond this old style of anti-democratic government which concentrates power in a few hands and ignores the great majority of the population. The idea is that the people themselves must become protagonists in their own history. Ways must be found to combat the abuse of power and favouritism and delegate power to the population.”


The return to witch-hunting

The ruling classes in North America have done everything to capitalize on the new “post-September 11 climate” Their spokesmen will be letting all the “witches” out of the cupboards, even disinterring Senator Joseph McCarthy. This offensive has caused many to take pause, including part of the American trade union movement, whose leadership has supported the “crusade against terrorism”. A number of demonstrations, including strikes, have been postponed in a climate that is hostile to social movements and fermented by the paranoia of the media. However, we should not yet be depressed, says Jeremy Bretcher, an activist who has strong roots in the new social movements:

“It should be recalled that the popularity of Bush senior increased after the “victory” in Kuwait, as has happened with his heir today. That did not prevent him, one year later, in the middle of a recession, to lose the elections. The demonstrations at Seattle, which showed the desire of globalization “from below” came just after the “victory” of the bombs on Serbia. Whether Bin Laden and other Bushes have other projects or not, the fundamental conflict today remains that between “globalization from above” and “globalization from below.”

Author: Pierre Beaudet