Global justice not greed

December 17, 2009

Leela Yellesetty reviews two new movies that take on what's behind global poverty and the corporations that profit from it.

IT'S BEEN 10 years since I traveled to Seattle as a high school student to help shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO). Since then, those of us who protested there and at every subsequent world trade summit have been proven right time and again.

The so-called free market, rather than lifting all boats and curing all ills, instead produced a global economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to the latest United Nations numbers, 2.7 billion people around the world survive on less than two dollars a day, and one billion live on less than a dollar a day. Every 3.6 seconds, someone dies of starvation.

You would think that all of this would convince the free trade hucksters that there is a flaw in their model. But as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out, quoting author Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Tragically, the same neoliberal policies that produced this crisis in the first place are now being proposed as solutions. We are assured that micro-lending or another "green revolution" led by agribusiness will solve the problem of hunger, or that cap-and-trade will solve environmental devastation. President Obama fully embraces this continued reliance on market solutions, chastising demonstrators at the G20 summit for "protesting an abstraction."

The Yes Men have gained international notoriety
The Yes Men have gained international notoriety

Obama also perpetuated the fallacy that poor countries bear the primary responsibility for their own impoverishment and economic stagnation. He stated in a speech in Accra, Ghana, earlier this year:

Now, it's easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict...But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father's life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

Two films released in Seattle around the WTO anniversary convincingly set the record straight on the causes of poverty--and explore how things could be different if human need rather than profit was the priority.


PHILIPPE DIAZ'S documentary The End of Poverty? assembles an impressive array of people to speak on the true causes of global poverty. Narrated by Martin Sheen, the film features Nobel Prize-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, along with other noted academics and authors, including William Easterly, Susan George, Chalmers Johnson, Eric Toussaint and former "economic hit man" John Perkins.

Notably, the film gives a prominence to those not normally heard in the mainstream--poor people whose lives have been devastated by the "abstraction" of global capital, and those who are organizing to resist it.

A rejoinder to Jeffrey Sach's smugly titled book The End of Poverty (without a question mark), the film argues that, rather than being a force for good, the governments of the global North are responsible for poverty in the rest of the world.

Interviewees trace the beginnings of global inequality to the 1492 "discovery" of the New World and the subsequent looting, slavery and land confiscation of the colonial powers. A Bolivian activist in the film estimates that 8 million African and indigenous workers died in the Potosi mines during Spain's colonial reign.

The wealthy's theft from poor countries didn't end with the abolishment of slavery, but continued in other ways--from the continued control of land and resources by foreign corporations, to subsidies and trade laws that favor wealthy nations, to corrupt governments bought off by these same powers.

And even under a "free labor" system, slave-like working conditions persist when people have no alternatives. As Jaime de Amorim of the Coordinating Landless People Movement in Brazil notes of the sugarcane industry:

The grower sees the worker as a slave. They haven't rebelled, so today growers have a much easier way to accumulate wealth than during slavery. Back then, the boss was the slave's owner. He had to take care of the slave's health and food. He had to take care of shelter, even if it was the slave's quarters. Today, the boss has no such concerns. He just has to drive the truck to the outskirts of the city. The truck loads up. He takes them back. No more worries.


THE FILM convincingly illustrates how poor countries have been forced into the economic role of exporters of raw materials and importers of food and finished products, thereby rendering them dependent on and subject to the whims of global capital. And as Perkins vividly reminds us, countries that refuse to tow the line when offered the carrot of development aid, loans and bribes are confronted with the stick of sanctions, CIA-backed coups and full-scale military occupations.

Given all this, the debts these countries are forced to repay appear even more absurd and cruel. As Susan George points out:

Let me give you just one statistic, which I worked out in minutes, because otherwise it's incomprehensible. Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest part of the world, is paying $25,000 every minute to Northern creditors. Well, you could build a lot of schools, a lot of hospitals, a lot of job--you could make a lot of job creation, if you were using $25,000 a minute differently from debt repayment. So there's this drain.

And I think people don't understand that it is actually the South that is financing the North. If you look at the flows of money from North to South and then from South to North, what you find is that the South is financing the North to the tune of about $200 billion every year.

Some commentators in the film draw some disappointing conclusions from these statistics--namely that consumption in the North is the root cause of poverty in the South, rather than the drive for profit. Diaz himself made this point in an interview on Democracy Now!:

[F]or us, in the countries of the North, to be able to maintain these great lifestyles we have, we will have to plunge more and more people below the poverty line in the countries of the South, unless, as the same expert says, we can find six more planets with the same resources, you know, because if everybody in the world was living like we live in America, we would need six planets to have everybody, you know, happy and have the same lifestyle.

Yet this statement doesn't paint an accurate picture of what is going on. In the first place, while it's implied, the film neglects to make the obvious point that there is in fact enough food and other resources to go around right now. This excess food is not being consumed by Americans; it is being destroyed because people are too poor to buy it.

While corporations and the wealthy certainly take the deserved lion's share of the blame for global inequality, only one commentator in the film mentions the fact that inequality exists within the U.S. itself. This is no minor detail--one in four children in this country experienced hunger in the last year.

In fact, the largest portion of the North's "consumption" is by industry and the military. As the film points out, the U.S. military budget alone could wipe out hunger overnight. Most of the personal consumption that results from these endeavors is enjoyed by the wealthy, not working people.

This point is important because if working people in the "belly of the beast" actually benefit from U.S. imperial policies, then all we can appeal to is their sense of compassion.

But the film rightly makes the case against a paternalistic attitude toward the poor--stating unequivocally that ending global poverty is not a matter of charity, but of justice. As illustrated by the inspiring struggle against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the poor and oppressed can and always have organized to take back what has been stolen from them.

There is a much stronger case to be made that ordinary people in the U.S. share a common interest with those activists in the global South fighting the same corporate interests that exploit us all--and that international solidarity only strengthens all of our struggles.


IF THE End of Poverty? focuses mainly on the victims of global capitalism, The Yes Men Fix the World takes aim at the perpetrators.

Ever since a satirical WTO Web site around the time of the Seattle protests landed them a real invite to represent the organization at conference, Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno have gained international notoriety for their gutsy impersonations of corporate hacks.

Those who saw the first Yes Men movie are in for more of their cringe-worthy performances exposing the rotten underbelly of capitalist economics. As usual, the audience response makes it all the more disturbing. In one presentation in which they brought in a golden skeleton to illustrate how some loss of human life is an acceptable cost of a profitable opportunity, one man actually praised their analysis as "refreshing" in its honesty.

But as the title implies, in this movie the Yes Men aren't just out to point out what's wrong with the world--they want to fix it. To that end, a number of their most inspired pranks in recent years have served to provide a fleeting illustration of what could happen if the wealthy and powerful actually grew a conscience.

The first prank is Bichlbaum's appearance as a Dow Chemical spokesman on the BBC where he announced live to an audience of millions that Dow was finally accepting full responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal chemical spill, and planned to spend $12 billion to compensate the victims and remediate the site. Red-faced, Dow representatives had to announce that they actually had no such plans.

In a similar move, in the wake of the development frenzy following Hurricane Katrina, the Yes Men managed to get a speaking spot as a representative of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) office, following a speech by Mayor Ray Nagin.

To rousing applause, Bichlbaum announces a reversal of HUD's policy of tearing down low-income housing and claims that, in a move to prevent future flooding, the major oil companies had pledged billions of dollars to help restore the wetlands they had cleared for drilling.

For both of these pranks, the Yes Men were accused in the media of hurting the very people they were trying to help by raising false hopes. In both cases, they went and talked to those people to see if this was the case. One New Orleans contractor summed up the response best when he said, "I'm not angry at them for pulling this joke, I'm angry that it is not for real."

As entertaining and eye-opening as their pranks can be, the Yes Men are fully aware that alone they are not enough--really "fixing the world" will take the efforts of lots of us. The Yes Men themselves have sought to expand their operations in recent years--releasing their secrets online and inviting others to participate and plan their own pranks. Their most ambitious project to date, which involved hundreds of volunteers, was to produce a fake version of the New York Times full of good news for once--with the lead headline "Iraq War Ends."

Ben Davis, who volunteered on this project (dubbed "Because We Want It") reflected on how it marked a departure from a simple publicity stunt:

Even the most engaged art exists, potentially, in two forms--as a part of struggle and as an idealist alternative to struggle. This two-sided nature is a perpetual dilemma. As a project, "Because We Want It" specifically tackles this head on--the virtual future sketched by the articles in the fake New York Times hinges on persistent and sustained popular activism of the old-fashioned kind.

In small type on the inside front page, we read a statement from the editors: a "better world...though still very far away, is finally possible--but only if millions of us demand it, and finally force our government to do its job."

This message has increased relevance in a world growing inequality where millions are starting to realize that, if we want to see real changes, we're going to have to fight for it ourselves. Go out and see both these films to get angry and get inspired. Then the real work begins.

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