[810] in peace2
Fwd: Virtual WTO
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Corrina Chase)
Fri May 25 11:05:48 2001
Message-Id: <200105251505.LAA04571@melbourne-city-street.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 11:06:41 -0400
To: earth-action@mit.edu, peace-list@mit.edu
From: Corrina Chase <corrina@MIT.EDU>
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>
>
> SIMULATING DEMOCRACY CAN BE A VIRTUAL BREEZE
>
> By Norman Solomon
>
> Few media eyebrows went up the other day when the World Bank canceled a
> global meeting set for
> Barcelona in late June -- and shifted it to the Internet. Thousands of
> street demonstrators would have
> been in Spain's big northeastern port city to confront the conference.
> Cyberspace promises to be a much
> more serene location.
>
> The World Bank is eager to portray its decision as magnanimous, sparing
> Barcelona the sort of upheaval
> that has struck Seattle, Prague, Quebec City and other urban hosts of
> international economic summits.
> "A conference on poverty reduction should take place in a peaceful
> atmosphere free from heckling,
> violence and intimidation," says a World Bank official, adding that "it
> is time to take a stand against this
> kind of threat to free expression."
>
> A senior adviser to the huge lending institution offered this
> explanation: "We decided that you can't
> have a meeting of ideas behind a cordon of police officers." Presumably,
> the meeting of ideas will flourish
> behind a cordon of passwords, bytes and pixels.
>
> If hackers can be kept at bay, the few hundred participants in the
Annual
> Bank Conference on
> Development Economics will be able to conduct a lovely forum over the
> Internet. The video conferencing
> system is likely to be state-of-the-art, making possible a modern and
> bloodless way to avoid uninvited
> perspectives.
>
> The World Bank's retreat behind virtual walls may fulfill its goal of
> keeping the riffraff away, with online
> discourse going smoothly, but vital issues remain -- such as policies
> that undercut essential government
> services in poor countries, while promoting privatization and user fees
> for access to health care and
> education.
>
> "The objectives of the World Bank with this failed conference were
simply
> an image-washing operation,"
> said a statement from a Barcelona-based campaign that had worked on
> planning for the demonstrations.
> Now, the World Bank is depicting itself as the injured party.
>
> Protest organizers are derisive about the Bank's media spin: "The
> representatives of the globalized
> capitalism feel threatened by the popular movements against
> globalization. They, who meet in towers
> surrounded by walls and soldiers in order to stay apart from the people
> whom they oppress, wish to
> appear as victims. They, who have at their disposal the resources of the
> planet, complain that those who
> have nothing wanted to have their voice heard."
>
> The World Bank's gambit of seeking refuge in cyberspace should be a
> wake-up call to activists who
> dream that websites and email are paradigm-shattering tools of the
> people. Some who take it for granted
> that "the revolution will not be televised" seem to hope that their
> revolution will be digitized.
>
> But there's nothing inherently democratizing about the Internet. In
fact,
> it has developed into a
> prodigious conduit of political and cultural propaganda, distributed via
> centrally edited mega-networks.
> America Online has 27 million subscribers, the New Internationalist
> magazine noted recently. "They
> spend an incredible 84 percent of their Internet time on AOL alone,
which
> provides a regulated leisure
> and shopping environment dominated by in-house brands -- from Time
> magazine to Madonna's latest
> album."
>
> At the same time that creative advocates for social change are routinely
> putting the Internet to great use,
> powerful elite bodies like the World Bank are touting online innovations
> as democratic models -- while
> striving to elude the reach of progressive grassroots activism.
>
> If, in 1968, the Democratic National Convention had been held in
> cyberspace instead of in Chicago, on
> what streets would the antiwar protests have converged? If, on
> Inauguration Day this year, the
> swearing-in ceremony for George W. Bush had taken place virtually rather
> than at one end of
> Pennsylvania Avenue, where would people have gathered to hold up their
> signs saying "Hail to the
> Thief"?
>
> Top officials of the World Bank are onto something. In a managerial
> world, disruption must be kept to an
> absolute minimum. If global corporatization is to achieve its
> transnational potential, the discourse among
> power brokers and their favorite thinkers can happen everywhere at once
> -- and nowhere in particular. Let the troublemakers try to interfere by
> doing civil disobedience in cyberspace!
>
> In any struggle that concentrates on a battlefield of high-tech
> communications, the long-term advantages
> are heavily weighted toward institutions with billions of dollars behind
> them. Whatever our hopes, no
> technology can make up for a lack of democracy.
>
> *******************
>
> ****************************************************************8
> Perhaps the hackers will use any access to post valid reasons to reconsider
> the effects of some of the policies. The WTO isn't all bad, and the
> delegates do not think they are doing a negative thing. They don't
> understand how they have a negative effect on local economies.
>
------------------------------------
-Corrina Chase
http://web.mit.edu/corrina/tpool/tidepool.html
