Last weekend, 12,000 people marched through the streets of New York City to protest the corporate executives who each paid $27,000 for the privilege of planning the course of the world economy. Participants at the World Economic Forum brag that they gave birth to the WTO, an organization that has been instrumental in advancing international trade policies that have led to the enrichment of western multinational corporations and the financial destruction of countries like Argentina and Jamaica. The WEF is indicative of the non-democratic, unaccountable processes by which corporations manipulate and circumvent national and international laws in their pursuit of profit. These are the people who, in the words of one participant, tell the IMF what to do. The neo-liberal policies that the WEF advocates – deregulation, free trade, the opening of capital markets to foreign investment and export-led growth – have led to the polarization of wealth and increasing inequality in both developing nations and in first world nations like the US. These policies have decimated domestic agriculture in Argentina, Jamaica and Mexico by flooding these countries with cheap imports from the US industrial agriculture corporations, and, in doing so, have forced workers to relocate and take low-wage, exploitative jobs for pennies in factories and sweatshops. The profits multinationals have realized on this model have been astounding, but the benefits never trickle down to ordinary workers either here or abroad. Contrary to the secretive, unilateral agenda imposed on the world by the rich and powerful at the WEF, in the streets last weekend there was an explosion of democracy. People of all races, nationalities, classes and political beliefs marched in solidarity in the belief that a better world is possible. We marched for a world not run for the sole purpose of profit and a world where the concerns of governments are human needs and the equitable distribution of resources instead of massive spending for an undeclared and open-ended war on anyone and everyone we don’t like.
