The prophets of a brave new world, captains of industry, have visions grand and great designs. But none have room for me. They see a world where everyone is rich and smart and young. But none have room for me. But if I live to see such things, too late for me they come.
In recent months, more than a million people, most of them young, have protested against a new economic order called globalization. This represents one of the greatest popular movements since the 1960s. Surely never before has the human race enjoyed such amazing capacity. to create wealth and reduce poverty.
Yet never before has the gulf between rich and poor been so vast and inequality so widespread. The facts of globalization are revealing. A small group of powerful individuals are now richer than most of the population of Africa.
Just 200 giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world's economic activity. General Motors is now bigger than Denmark. Ford is bigger than than South Africa. Unseen by shoppers in the high street, the famous brands of almost everything from running shoes to baby clothes are now made in very poor countries with cheap labour, at times bordering on a form of slave labour.
Tiger Woods, the golfer, is paid more money to promote Nike than most of the entire workforce actually making Nike products here in Indonesia. Is this the global village we are told is our future? Or is it merely an old project that used to be run by the divine right of kings and is now run by the divine right of multinational corporations and by the financial institutions and governments that back them?
This film is about these new rulers of the world and especially their impact on one country, Indonesia. Indonesia is where the old imperialism meets the new. This is a country that should not be poor.
It's rich in almost everything. Mountains of copper and gold, oil, timber, and the skills and labour of its people. Colonised by the Dutch in the 16th century, Indonesia was plundered by the West for hundreds of years, a debt that is yet to be paid back.
For hundreds of years, Indonesia has been invaded by the northern countries. Not only Indonesia, but all the colored countries. So that the West becomes strong, prosperous, and dominates finance and trade until now.
Now, the IMF dictates, the World Bank dictates, that a country as rich as this is now transformed into a country of the rich, Indonesia. Because there is no character in the elite. Globalization is used by its champions to suggest a coming together of people of all races, of all countries, and it will relieve poverty, it will distribute wealth. What we're actually seeing is precisely the opposite processes in train, that the poor are becoming markedly poorer, while the very wealthy are becoming staggeringly wealthy.
And here are some of the staggeringly wealthy. This is a wedding in Jakarta. ...of the Indonesian elite, two merchant families are being united. Four years ago, the World Bank called Indonesia a dynamic economic success, a model pupil of the global economy. Among the Versace dresses and diamonds are those who've reaped the benefits of the new global freedoms.
Freedom to watch money make more money. In this respect, they could be any nationality. Outside this wedding, there's another world.
In Indonesia, as many as 70 million people live in extreme poverty. We calculate that it would take an Indonesian worker, like one of the waiters serving here, 400 years to pay for this wedding reception. Less than five miles away is the backyard of the global economy, the site of the dynamic success you don't see. This is a labour camp that's home to workers who make the clothes we buy in the high streets and shopping malls. This is the human price paid for our fashionable trainers, our smart shirts, our jeans with a tag that says Made in Indonesia.
Young people living here who make the famous brands are paid to wear the brand's logo. paid on average the equivalent of 72 pence a day, about a dollar. That's the legal minimum wage in Indonesia. According to the Indonesian government, it's just over half a living wage.
The dormitories are made from breeze blocks and packing cases. When it rains, they flood. There are open sewers and no clean running water.
Many of the children are undernourished and prey to disease. While I was filming here, I caught dengue fever. Carried by the mosquitoes which infest these slums, it kills children.
The conditions here are not very different from workers'camps in other parts of Asia, in Africa and Latin America, where the famous brands are also made cheaply for lucrative Western markets. And this is where they work, in what is called an economic processing zone, which means a vast area of sweatshops. The factories may look modern, but once you step inside, you feel the claustrophobia of the workers, the sheer frenzy of their production, and you see their fatigue. Posing as fashion buyers, we film secretly in this factory. The factories are owned by Taiwanese and Korean contractors who employ cheap labor to make the products of famous brands such as Nike, Reebok and Apple.
We looked at one famous brand, Gap. The working conditions we found are by no means the worst. So you do Gap, of course. Yeah, you do lots of Gap. And I mean, the quality control.
control of gap I think is excellent. We found more than a thousand mostly young women working crowded together under the glare of strip lighting in temperatures that can reach 40 degrees centigrade. The only air conditioning is upstairs where the bosses are.
Working hours can vary and can be increased dramatically when an urgent export order has to be met. We surveyed five factories regarded as typical and I interviewed workers from all over Jakarta. 24 hour shift with just a couple of breaks and then two hours later you start another shift so in in effect you work a 36 hour shift I work long-sleeve from 7.30 am to 7.30 am in the morning. And in the afternoon, I work until 6.30 pm.
Are you given any choice? What would happen if you refused to do this 24 hour shift? Yes, there might be a punishment, but I have never refused. So I'm just afraid.
On these long trips, 24 hour shifts, do you recall what labels you were packing? I remember Gabe and Olivia. Do any of the people from the Gap Company ever visit your factory? Yes, often.
Do they ever ask you about or investigate the working conditions, your working conditions? Yes, they have. But the children are already in contact with the factory.
They can't say anything wrong. It has to be according to the words of the personnel. What have they told you to say? For example, they didn't say anything wrong. This is what the Gap Company calls a code of conduct.
In response to criticism, famous global brands like Gap have come up with these codes. They say the idea is to set standards and protect workers, but how effectively is it enforced? You have to come to Indonesia to really realize what codes of conduct means and that it is almost useless to exercise or to implement codes of conduct here in this country because this government is always campaigning cheap labor here in Indonesia to attract the foreign investment and codes of conduct cannot do anything about that and because Indonesian workers is already very poor and the rate of unemployment here is very, very high so that people will work whatever kind of work they have or how much they pay, they will still work.
The Gap Company stipulates a maximum working week of 60 hours. It says workers may refuse overtime without any threat of penalty. Are there people who do Sixteen hours standing?
Yes. Is that common? If the export has to be completed, the target is that day.
These boxer shorts were made in one of the factories we investigated. Before we left London, we bought a pair at a Gap store in Oxford Street for £8. Out of that £8, an Indonesian worker gets less than £4.
Yeah, I'm kaget. We can see that we can benefit so many entrepreneurs in one shoe. Especially thousands of shoes.
One day is minimal. We have to produce 3000 shoes. That's minimal. Last year, the chief executive of Gap earned more than $5.5 million. The profits of Gap were $1.38 billion, and this is typical of many companies.
In order to protect the workers in this film, we have not named the factories we investigated. In Indonesia, as in other countries which have sweatshop economies, workers who speak out face the danger of victimization from contractual... and violence from anti-trade union forces. Dita Sari, a trade union leader, was herself imprisoned and tortured.
Codes of conduct must be monitored by trade unions. How could you monitor codes of conduct? conducts if trade unions is still weak if the police is surrounding the their activists and if they're facing repression whenever they operate we asked the gap company for an interview but they declined saying It was unfair not to identify the factories. as they couldn't verify our evidence.
We sent them a list of questions and they supplied this statement. GAP says it employs one of the most comprehensive factory monitoring programs in their industry. For some manufacturers, our standards are too tough and we refuse to do business with them. We prefer to work with them to fix the problem. We can't force them to comply.
One of the things that we can do to take action in support of better conditions for people in developing countries is, when we buy anything, ask the retailer where this product comes from, under what conditions. it's produced, write to the company that made the product and say you want assurances that this comes from a factory that treats its workers well, that gives its workers rights to be able to form trade unions etc. And these are some very basic ways in which we can act as informed consumers.
I'm not afraid to bend my back. I'm not afraid of dirt. But how I fear the things I do. For lack of honest word.
Globalization in Asia has a secret history. The great sweatshops and banks and luxury hotels in Indonesia were built on the mass murder of as many as one million people. An episode the West would prefer to forget.
But many people here have not forgotten. In recent years, people all over the country have begun searching for the remains of loved ones murdered when General Suharto seized power in the mid-1960s, aided by the United States and Britain. Until recently, the truth of this episode has remained so secret that this is the only known photograph of the atrocities. One day in early October 1965, a gang of thugs entered this school in Jakarta and beat to death the headmaster.
He was suspected of being a communist. His murder was typical of the slaughter of more than a million... people, teachers, students, civil servants, peasant farmers. Described by the CIA as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, the origins of this terrible episode have been covered in mystery.
Certainly it brought to power General Sahato. But what is now emerging is the extent to which he was secretly backed by the United States and Britain and by Western business leaders. Within a year of the bloodbath, Indonesia's economy was effectively redesigned in America, giving the West access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labor, what President Nixon called the greatest prize in Asia. To Western business, the great value of General Soeharto was that he succeeded in getting rid of the founder of modern Indonesia, Ahmed Soekarno, a nationalist who believed in economic independence for his people. He kept the great Western corporations out of Indonesia and threw out their agents, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It was only when one of his generals, Suharto, seized power that the door was opened. to Asia's greatest prize. When the Suharto regime came in after the pooch, they were able to make a lot of the fact that they were calling the IMF and the World Bank back in. They were going to rescue them, you see, and British propaganda in particular made a lot of this.
You know, the IMF was decent and it was going to bring order and everything was going to be lovely in the Indonesian guard. And as I say, a British diplomat still alive has said to me that was very much part of the deal. Britain and the United States secretly conspired to back General Suharto. The American ambassador assured him that the U.S. government is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing. Thousands were rounded up.
What was not known at the time was later revealed by American officials. The CIA had supplied a list of 5,000 opponents to be assassinated, and embassy officials ticked off their names. names as they were murdered.
The British ambassador recommended a little shooting as an essential preliminary to effective change. In the first few days the British forces in particular purported not really to know what was going on. Of course they knew what was happening.
I mean, there were bodies being washed up on the lawn of the British Consulate in Surabaya. There were bodies floating all over the Malacca Strait and so forth. A man called Hadi Broto, a lieutenant colonel or something, was anxious to take some Indonesian troops from the east coast of Sumatra, from the northeast coast of Sumatra, to... eastern central Java so they could take part in what we now know was this terrible Holocaust really.
He found a Panamanian ship and the ship sailed with troops down the Malacca Strait escorted by two British warships. So the British were directly involved in what you describe as a Holocaust? Well I would count that some sort of involvement wouldn't you? The American press reported these events not as a crime against humanity, but in terms of their economic advantage to the West. Time magazine called them vengeance with a smile, and the West's best news for years.
Others described a gleam of light in Asia. The seeds of globalization were planted in the bloodbath. In 1967, the Time Life Corporation sponsored a conference in Switzerland that planned the corporate takeover of Indonesia.
It was attended by the most powerful businessmen in the world, such as David R. Rockefeller. The giants of Western capitalism were represented. The oil companies, the banks, General Motors, British Leyland, ICI, British American Tobacco, Lemon Brothers, American Express, Siemens. Across the table were Indonesian leaders approved by General Suharto. For Western business, it was the start of the gold rush which later became known as globalization.
No one mentioned the killing of a million people. I've never ever heard of a situation like this for any country where global capital essentially holds a meeting with state and hammers out the conditions of their own entry into the country. The conference went on for three days.
The first day was when the Indonesians spoke and essentially made their case. They divided into five different sections on the second day. Sectoral meetings, mining in one room, food services, light industry in another, banking and finance in another, Chase Manhattan was there, and simultaneously they handled... hammered out policies that were going to be acceptable to these global investors on a sector by sector basis with each of the people going around the table saying this is what we need to see, this, this, this, and they basically designed the legal infrastructure for investment in Indonesia. Was the foreign business community here aware that they were dealing not just with a corrupt, nepotistic dictatorship, but also with a mass murderer?
That's a very general question. Well, no, it's quite specific, actually. Mass murder is mass murder. The fact that many people have died in Indonesia in unfortunate, tragic circumstances, directly or indirectly as a result of the previous regime. It is hugely unfortunate.
Whether a foreign investment had not been here, that would have prevented in any way those events occurring. Nobody has perfect vision on what might have been. Globalization began in Britain in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher dismantled much of manufacturing and poured millions of pounds into building up the arms industry.
Indonesia became an important British arms market and General Suharto was sold everything lethal from fighter aircraft and missiles to warships and machine guns. Unknown to the British public millions of pounds went to the dictator in export credits. In other words a large part of his arms bill was paid by the British taxpayer.
So important was Suharto as a business partner, that the mass murderer was welcomed to London by the Queen. Who are the new rulers of the world? Their empire today is greater than the British Empire ever was.
This is the centre of this new empire, all within a square mile in Washington. Down the road from the White House and the US Treasury is the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These two bodies are the agents of the richest countries on earth, especially the United States.
The World Bank and the IMF were set up near the end of World War II to rebuild the economies of Europe. Later they began offering loans to poor countries, but only if they privatised their economies and allowed... corporations free access to their raw materials and markets.
Debt has really been used as an instrument in order for the IMF and the World Bank to get their policies. implemented in many developing countries. And we're into a situation now where the poorest countries are in a cycle, a vicious cycle of poverty.
They can't get out. And the kind of debt cancellation that's been given still will not allow them to get out of those poverty traps. It's not a question of debt forgiveness, because actually many of the debts were incurred under pressure from the international institutions. or were given inclusion with governments which weren't acting in the interests of their people.
Let me ask you, do you know the difference between Tanzania and Goldman Sachs? Tanzania is a country that has a gross national product of $2.2 billion and shares it between 25 million people. Goldman Sachs is an investment firm which has annual profits of $2.2 billion.
two billion dollars and shares them among 161 partners. That's the world we're living in now. The World Bank says its aim is to help poor people, promoting what it calls global development. It's an ingenious system, a kind of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
The rich get richer on running up debt, cheap labor, and paying as little tax as possible, while the poor get poorer as their jobs and public services are cut back in order to pay just the interest on debt owed by their governments to the World Bank. Here in Indonesia, where most people people are poor, the handouts to the rich have been extraordinary to say the least. Internal documents of the World Bank confirm that up to a third of the bank's loans to the dictatorship of General Suharto went into the pockets of his cronies and corrupt officials. That's around $8 billion.
Globalization means that capital, big money, can be moved anywhere at any time without warning. In 1998, short-term capital was suddenly pulled out of Asia, crippling the miracle economy overnight. When the Indonesian rupiah collapsed from being roughly 2,500 rupiah to the dollar to being what it is now, 10,000 rupiah to the dollar, the costs to Nike for each Indonesian laborer was cut. to 25% of what it had been. And Nike got a great discount on Indonesian labor as a result and did not unilaterally raise Indonesian wages to the same standard they had been prior to the devaluation of the rupiah.
With the economy collapsed and Indonesia on the verge of revolution, Suharto was forced to step down, having already stolen an estimated $15 billion. During his reign of more than 30 years, Suharto had handed out public utilities to his family and cronies. They owned most of the national power grid. Nothing was overlooked, from TV stations to a monopoly on taxis. Driving from Jakarta airport, you even paid a toll to Suharto's daughter.
These unfinished buildings are monuments to corruption on a scale unheard of in modern Asia, to what the World Bank called the miracle economy. The bank presents itself as an economic development agency, focused on the reduction of poverty. But in fact, the bank operated during the entire Cold War as an institution that distributed resources to mostly authoritarian regimes in the Third World that supported the West in the Cold War. So you had the irony of the West claiming that what they were defending in the Cold War was democracy and a certain vision of freedom.
but doing so by upholding dictatorships like Indonesia around the world. What they did was, they had plenty of projects, some of which surely were valuable, many of which were not. Every one of these projects from the Indonesian government officials'point of view was an opportunity to skim, to live a luxurious life, and the accumulated theft over the course of Suharto's new order, roughly three decades, was $10 billion.
dollars that's unaccounted for out of a total of about 30 billion that was loaned. And when I said to the auditor general of the World Bank, what if a group of Indonesian citizens or even the government were to challenge the World Bank in the world court over this loss of money? The citizens who bear the burden of this debt never got the money. Why should it still sit on their shoulders to be repaid? And his response was, we would be bankrupt.
And I said, why? He said, because this has gone on the world over. I went to Washington to interview the chief economist of the World Bank, Nicholas Stern.
I asked him to explain how almost 30% of World Bank loans to Indonesia had been lost or stolen. We simply don't know what that number is. Here's your own internal report, August 1997. I quote, We estimate that at least 20 to 30 percent of Government of Indonesia development budget funds are...
subverted through informal payments to government staff and politicians. That number was plucked out of the air. Lots of times we have to guess with numbers and the person who wrote that was guessing. Somebody comes up with a number. and it gets recycled but the other money it that the I don't have dismissed the issue we just let's not get hung up on one figure which isn't a particularly hard no I mean if it's a third of what the World Bank has put into one country no it's a serious it's a serious question the when you have alone there's a lender and a borrower and they share the responsibility in some way there's there's a strong case that has been made by people who've seen this evidence that that the World Bank was duped by the Suharto regime, claiming that poverty had dropped to 30 million, and in fact poverty was around 60 million.
Let's talk about the harder figures. The income poverty figures are always the most difficult ones to get your hands on. But I think the illiteracy figures and the infant mortality figures are in this case probably more reliable.
And there was some progress ...progress during that 30-year period, significant progress, I mean, cutting illiteracy by half and so on. That's a very important step forward, so let's not lose sight of that. In 1997, the World Bank described the economy under Suharto in a famous report as absolutely dynamic.
doing everything right, terrific, brilliant. You know, by that time, the whole Asian thing had already started to collapse. It wasn't until the following year that the World Bank, for the first time in 30 years, had any anything to say about a regime that is guilty of mass murder?
Why was there such a silence that seemed to a lot of people simply to be complicity with this murderous dictatorship? I think if we look back on our analysis of the economy and the politics at the time, we've got a number of things wrong, and we have to understand that. We're going to get things wrong again.
Not so many people. called the Asian crisis before it happened, we failed along with... That's your job though, isn't it? You're all economists with fantastic degrees and brilliant backgrounds. get it that wrong?
We're going to get it wrong some of the time. I think non-economists get it wrong a lot more often than economists. But this isn't a precise game and there are going to be a number of occasions in the future where we get things wrong too.
So globalization creates debts and debts creates misery, creates unemployment, creates the crisis, creates privatization. A lot of state's enterprise being privatized so people will have to pay pay more to have access for, for instance, like health, education. So it's not natural.
That is not natural. It's designed. So in effect, the money stolen by the Sahato family is being repaid.
Yeah. By? By us. By the children.
Every day more than a hundred million dollars is transferred in debt repayments from the poorest countries on earth to the richest. The poverty of families like this is paying off Indonesia's huge debt. The conditions of the IMF's latest loan include a reduction in subsidies on certain fuel and food.
With this man's monthly wage of less than 40 pounds, he goes on medical treatment for his children who suffer from a serious blood disorder. As prices go up, he cannot even afford the special drugs that keep them alive. My son suffers from a disease.
He has to take blood transfusion every month. If he doesn't take blood transfusion, his lips will be pale. For example, his lips are pale. So, he has to take blood transfusion every month. That's for sure.
I'm not dizzy. If I get sick and can't go to work, what can I do? Maybe we can find a loan to treat my child.
After we get back to work, we'll pay for it. We'll cut the loan. I'm already taking a shower.
If the goods are going up, while the salary is not going up, we automatically surrender to God. Maybe the doctor is like that. We can't do anything about it.
So we just ignore it. What if we force them to... Every morning, we should give the kids sweet tea, but now we don't.
We don't give them milk either. We could at least shout at the government to get the PBI. We demand the government to raise the WMR by 100%. Now, we can meet for medication. Even though we eat with salted fish, but alhamdulillah.
In the global economy, one American corporation dominates the world trade in food grains, while almost half the world's population, like this family, attempt to live on less than $2 a day. What do you say to those 17 million people who call for a complete, and I repeat, complete cancellation of debt as the only way to lift the huge number of poor people in the world out of poverty? I'd say two things. First, what will lift people out of poverty is not canceling their debt, but what policies their countries pursue, whether they educate poor people, whether they give them health.
And so the question, and then what sort of economies they try to run. Do they integrate them into the world economy, or do they run corrupt economies? Those are the primary determinants of how well countries will do.
That is the answer to it. to what determines whether people get out of poverty. It can be done. It has been done.
Should we cancel the debt? Canceling debt is one way of giving resources to poor countries. What I'd like to see is a much greater flow of resources to poor countries. I'd like to see the markets of the industrialized countries opened so that these countries where people are poor and can produce agriculture are able to export.
That's what will get them out of poverty. The statement debt relief is... is the only thing that will get them out of poverty is wrong. It would help, provided it is accompanied by a whole set of other measures. But surely debt, even in one's own life, and especially a poor person's life, is the greatest cause of real poverty.
No. And when you have a country devoting half its budget to paying off a debt, when you have the poorest countries in the world sending out millions... of dollars into the rich world, surely as a priority that debt has to be either relieved substantially or go altogether. Doesn't that make... it just seems common sense to me.
Have I got that wrong? Yeah, you've got it wrong. Let me explain.
Okay. First of all, you are indebted and I am indebted. And I would not be better off if I asked somebody to come and cancel my debt because I'd never be able to borrow again. And debt... Debt is a normal way of borrowing in order to do things, purchase goods, invest, when you don't have the resources.
And they'll generate an income and you'll repay. So the notion that all debts should be cancelled is a bad one. Financial systems operate on the basis of debt that is paid.
The Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, in a very comprehensive report, said, and I quote, the institutions of globalization have yet to seriously address the issue of human rights in a democratic way. democratic fashion. Globalization has caused global conditions of inequality and discrimination."What's your response to that? I simply can't respond because I have no idea what evidence they're referring to. Human globalization has caused discrimination? Yes. I'd have thought it was the opposite. I'd have thought that... So, for instance, they singled out workers in third world economic processing zones. again part of a prescription may not be IMF prescription but certainly part of the global prescription in which it said these workers were prey for exploitation and because unemployment for instance they mentioned Indonesia had been forced down by the so-called economic crisis of the late 90s their human rights were lost Indonesia grew as a result of integrating into the global economy from the 60s on. And incomes in Indonesia rose. It was a dictatorship. Some of their rights were suppressed, and it was a very bad dictatorship. Excuse me, Mr. Fisherman. As you say, some of their rights were repressed. A third of the population of East Timor died or were killed under the Suharto regime. What are you asking me that question for? Do you think we supported the Suharto regime? Don't be. be ridiculous. Well, did you speak out against it? Did your institution, the IMF, speak out? The World Bank didn't. The first time after 30-odd years in there, the first time they spoke out was 1998. What did the IMF say about it? When the IMF went into Indonesia, it insisted on a removal of a host of corrupt practices that began to weaken that regime. It was not an unintended consequence, but it was intended that we went in. and helped remove the corrupt practices in a variety of monopoly areas. And because now the government, as recommended by the IMF, has already cut off a lot of subsidies, not only oil and electricity, but also water and education and subsidies and agriculture. So it means that the workers, if they have sons or daughters, they have to pay for the electricity. have to pay more if they want to put their children to school. Before, of course, people eat three meals a day, but now they have to also make efficiency. So they eat, instead of three, they eat twice a day. Or they reduce the quality of the food. So that's why maybe the level of productivity is getting lower because people are getting poor and getting tired and if you are tired you cannot work properly. you know capitalism is a lovely law and say it don't count as itself when it costs too much to build it at home you just build it cheaper someplace else yeah listen down on the union Two years ago, thousands of protesters from all over the world converged on the American city of Seattle, where the World Trade Organization was meeting. This was news because it happened in America. And yet throughout the world, in Africa, Latin America, Asia, a deeper movement against globalization has been growing for years. But this is not considered news. On every continent, Millions of ordinary people have protested against the power of the IMF and the World Bank and the imposition of Western power. People have marched and petitioned against privatization, against selling off their water. against turning their farms into suppliers for the dinner tables of the rich. Now the protests have spread to Western countries, from Seattle to Melbourne, London to Genoa. The coverage of these events follows a pattern. It seems it's only news when there's violence, even when the great majority of the protesters are peaceful. In contrast, the violence of the economic policies they are protesting about is seldom news. In the weeks and days leading up to May Day in London, the police and the government orchestrated a propaganda campaign. The aim clearly was to alienate the public from the demonstrators by representing them collectively as violent and by suppressing the very issues that have public support. The limits of tolerance are passed when protesters, in the name of some spurious cause, seek to inflict fear, terror, violence and criminal damage on our people and property. To Tony Blair, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Being poorer is a spurious cause. When May Day came, 6,000 police turned part of London's West End into a giant detention camp. I think the issue of violence which we're constantly asked about is our main way in. I think the key to these things is actually getting mass amounts of people involved because the media will put one point of view across time and time again. you know the mindless hooligan side but when you think about the the the mass redundancies the poverty the starvation the the literal raping of a country through through um through through third world debt and what have you now that is violence on a huge scale it's genocide The newest ruler of the world is the World Trade Organization based in Geneva. The Economist magazine calls it an embryo world government, and yet no one has voted for it. the effect of its policies make it illegal for governments to hinder the profits of big business this is known as free trade if there's one feature about the global economy it's the companies have globalized but we haven't regulated the global companies and and that's the change that we've got to put into this ...international system if we're ever going to get rules that are fairer to workers, fairer to the world's poor, fairer to all of those who are affected by this international production system. People can't stand by, they can't be spectators when we're faced with forces like this. They join this movement and the movement starts to gather momentum. Already we've had some extraordinary successes. We managed to stop the implementation of a crazy... idea called the multilateral agreement on investment which would have allowed corporations to sue governments for the removal of any law which they didn't like now that was being promoted that idea by the 29 most powerful countries on earth it was being promoted by all the major multinational corporations and all the big institutions such as the World Trade Organization and a ragged band of dissenters around the world managed to stop it we beat them and if we can beat that we can beat anything what is with the people is the fact that the corporations and the superpower are using more and more fabricated propaganda people can now see through the spin people know they cannot believe anymore what is said and the people are starting to withdraw their support they're starting to say now a government that only protects the pay Pepsi and the coke in the McDonald it's not our government. In rich countries like Britain, globalisation is well advanced. The disastrous selling off of the railways and the creeping privatisation of everything from healthcare to air traffic control. The financial pages celebrate a booming economy. Yet one in five British children grows up in poverty. There are almost 10 million Britons living in poverty. The gap between the rich and the rest gets wider, and this is said to be a spurious cause. All over the world, millions of ordinary people are asking why they have no say in decisions that bring hardship to their lives. They don't accept the view of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that there's no other way. In Britain, the fact that only 25% of the electorate voted for the Blair government is part of this great unease. Why, people ask, should we accept a system of winners and losers, a system that puts a dollar sign on every public... public service and almost every human value, why not abolish the World Bank and the IMF and the World Trade Organisation and replace them with genuine trade and development institutions that are democratically accountable? And why not cancel a debt that condemns nations like Indonesia to poverty and disease? These are dangerous times. The one superpower left in the world has made its ambitions clear. This is a document of the United States Space Command. It says, the globalization of the world economy will continue with a widening between haves and have-nots. It says only military dominance will protect America. America's commercial interests. Why should we accept this? Why should our children have to face these divisions and dangers? None of them is God-given. All of them can be changed.