Fences and Windows

Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein Page B

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Authors: Naomi Klein
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themselves, they may well find themselves classified as terrorists, and all means to suppress them will become permissible.)
    And sometimes the interference is a complaint to the World Trade Organization that public ownership of a national postal service “discriminates” against a foreign courier company. It’s a trade war waged against countries that decide, democratically, to ban hormone-treated beef or to provide free AIDS drugs to their citizens. It’s the incessant clamouring for tax cuts from business lobbies in every country, based on the ever-present threat that capital will flee if we don’t grant the corporations’ up-to-the-minute wish list. Whatever the methods employed, “free markets” rarely stand by and tolerate truly free peoples.
    When we talk about the relationship between globalization and democracy, we need to look not only at whether nations have won the right to cast ballots every four or five years but also at whether citizens still consider thoseballots meaningful. We must look not only for the presence of electoral democracy but also examine the day-to-day quality and depth of those liberties. Hundreds of thousands take to the streets outside trade meetings not because they oppose trade itself but because the very real need for jobs and investment is systematically being used to undermine all our democracies. The unacceptable trade is the one that erodes sovereign rights in exchange for foreign investment.
    What I dislike most about the trickle-down democracy argument is the dishonour it pays to all the people who fought, and fight still, for genuine democratic change in their countries, whether for the right to vote, or to have access to land, or to form unions. Democracy isn’t the work of the market’s invisible hand; it is the work of real hands. It is often stated, for instance, that the North American Free Trade Agreement is bringing democracy to Mexico. In fact, workers, students, indigenous groups and radical intellectuals are the ones slowly forcing democratic reforms on Mexico’s intransigent elite. NAFTA, by widening the gap between rich and poor, makes their struggle more militant, and more difficult.
    In the place of such messy, disruptive, real-world democratic movements, President Bush offers a calm, soothing lullaby: just relax and wait for your rights to come to you. But contrary to this lethargic vision of trickle-down democracy, globalization in its current form doesn’t bring liberty. Neither does the free market or the ready availability of Big Macs. Real democracy—true decision-making power in the people’s hands—is always demanded, never granted.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas
The leaders may agree, but on the streets of Latin American cities, the debate is raging
    March 2001
    Next Friday, trade ministers from the thirty-four countries negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas will meet in Buenos Aires. Many in Latin America predict that the ministers will be greeted with protests much larger than the ones that exploded in Seattle in 1999.
    The FTAA’s cheerleaders like to pretend that their only critics are white college kids from Harvard and McGill who just don’t understand how much “the poor” are “clamouring” for the FTAA. Will this public display of Latin American opposition to the trade deal change all that? Don’t be silly.
    Mass protests in the developing world don’t register in our discussions about trade in the West. No matter how many people take to the streets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City or São Paulo, defenders of corporate-driven globalization just keep on insisting that every possible objection lobbed their way was dreamed up in Seattle by somebody with newly matted dreadlocks slurping a latte.
    When we talk about trade, we often focus—and rightly so—on who is getting richer and who is getting poorer. But there is another divide at play: which countries are presented as diverse, complicated political cultures where

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