Globalization & Its Discontents

"I define globalization as the freedom of our corporations to invest where and when we want, to produce what we want, to buy and sell where we want, and to keep all the restrictions through labor law or other political regulations as slight as possible."

- Percy Barnevik, Vice President of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum is the place where the heads of the world's richest corporations and governments meet to carve up the world for their own private profit.

This is the social arena in which the deals are made to poison the world's air through the trade in pollution allowances, plow the world's soil with genetically engineered crops that no sane person wants, privatize the
world's water supply, patent genetic sequences of the world's plants and animals and privatize their reproduction in order to "own" their offspring.

This is the forum in which the billionaires meet partners to set up global sweatshops manufacturing sneakers and designer clothes - this vast Texas chain store massacre - and scheme to arm the heavens, irradiate the earth,
mass-dredge and sonarize the seas killing the whales and dolphins, and ravage the earth for oil, diamonds and gold with nary a concern for anything but their own profits.

The World Economic Forum is the meeting place for the men and women who own everything and who seem so reasonable individually, but who are destroying the planet.

We Greens refuse to watch silently as the members of the World Economic Forum toast their latest "humanitarian" gestures: A pittance here, a crumb there, while serving up cluster bombs and depleted uranium and tear gas and destruction for all who would oppose their control.

Welcome to the "grande baille" of the New World Order - declared by George Bush, Sr. on September 11th, 1990 - a date that will live in infamy for many reasons, and not just its most recent visitation.

We Greens refuse to be silent as these "pillars of society" feast on their billions and enjoy the finest health care, as people right here in New York City are thrown off even the most minimal Medicaid coverage. We refuse to be
still while they tear up the Bill of Rights, and as their structural adjustment programs ravage huge areas of the world, including cities right here in the United States, decimating adequate and affordable housing, the environment, healthy foods, higher education, meaningful jobs, any semblance of free universal health coverage, and all the good things in life.

The Green Party USA is proud to stand against such institutions as the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the North America Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA), the G-8 goverments, General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), TRIPS, and the entire retinue and alphabet soup of the New World Order. We were there in Seattle, we were there in Quebec, we were there in Sweden, and Davos, and Genoa, and before all that we were there in Nigeria, and Los Angeles, and WE WON'T BE SILENCED.

To their extensive global violence we counterpose our principle of nonviolence. To their bombing and destruction we counterpose vast social movements to empower ourselves and wrest back control over our own lives. To their system of exploitation and profits über alles we Greens say, "Another World IS Possible" based on human need, creativity and love, not corporate greed. The future will be what we the people struggle to make it.

- January 29, 2002

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