inchiesta sui moviumenti globali "assolutamente da leggere"

[Alessandro Marescotti <a.marescotti@peacelink.it>]

Ciao,
invio con un po' di ritardo questo articolo in inglese speditomi da Mario 
Pianta. Chiedo a Sabrina (safusar@tin.it), Francesco (francesco@href.org) o 
a qualche volontario di tradurlo per tutti. Il primo che decide di farlo 
comunichi agli altri per evitare doppioni. Grazie. Alessandro

Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 12:25:13 +0100
To: Alessandro Marescotti <a.marescotti@peacelink.it>
From: Mario Pianta <pianta@isrds.rm.cnr.it>
Subject: Re: PeaceLink compie dieci anni

Carissimi
vi passo quest'eccellente inchiesta sui movimenti globali del Financial 
Times uscita da qualche giorno.
E' ASSOLUTAMENTE DA LEGGERE
Ciao
Mario
Usala per la tua rete...

Counter-Capitalism
Globalisation's children strike back
James Harding uncovers the workings of the anti-globalisation movement.
Published: September 10 2001 18:42GMT | Last Updated: October 15 2001 18:56GMT
Part One: the mosquitoes begin to swarm.
Just on the outskirts of respectable Washington DC, across town from the 
steel and glass headquarters of the World Bank, there is a clapboard 
two-storey house.
On the ground floor, a neighbourhood lawyer offers "divorce specials", 
personal injury suits and "walk-in deals for car wrecks". Up the flimsy 
wooden staircase to the side of the building, Soren Ambrose is trying to 
dismantle the world's financial architecture.
Ambrose, a chubby 38-year-old with sandy hair and a scruffy blond beard, 
does not look like much of a threat to the world order. He wears creased 
olive-green khakis with a red, black and turquoise shirt of African cloth, 
which in another part of Washington might be used as ethnic cushion covers. 
The second-hand computer on his desk is surrounded by newspaper clippings, 
a pile of old campaign leaflets and a scattering of print-outs off the 
internet.
The only son of a suburban Chicago couple - his father is a management 
consultant and his mother is a retired librarian - Ambrose came late to 
activism. He flirted with protest at junior high school in the late 1970s, 
but in 1981 swapped politics for partying: "I went to college and took 
drugs and drank," he laughs.
When Ambrose was working on a doctorate in African literature, he went for 
a fortnight to Nigeria: "I met writers at the university there who did not 
have enough money to buy their own books. They were not so interested in 
language. They were interested in economics."
Ken Saro-Wiwa, the playright leading what was to become a global fight 
against Shell's oil operations in his native Ogoniland, was his host. 
Ambrose abandoned his dissertation half-written.
He returned to the US and took up full-time campaigning. Initially with the 
Nicaragua Network, he was soon involved with 50 Years is Enough, a 
coalition put together by a handful of development economists, ex-aid 
workers, former missionaries and environmentalists seeking to combat the 
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
the sequel to Seattle
 From half a dozen groups five years ago, it now draws support from more 
than 200 member organisations.
Next week, from the converted bedrooms which serve as offices, Ambrose and 
the 50 Years director who also happens to be his wife, Njoki Njoroge Njehu, 
will put together the final plans for what is shaping up to be the sequel 
to Seattle: a protest by tens of thousands of people against the World Bank 
and the IMF in Washington on the weekend of September 29-30.
"I was only in Nigeria for two weeks," says Ambrose, with an infectious 
chuckle, "but it turned into this big thing."
Soren Ambrose is what most people would call an anti-globalisation 
activist. To some world leaders, people like him are part of a movement 
that can no longer be ignored. Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister 
manoeuvring to become president, reached out to anti-globalisation 
activists by offering support for the so-called Tobin tax. Gerhard 
Schroder, the German chancellor, has since said he too is interested in the 
nearly 30-year-old idea of putting a levy on foreign exchange transactions 
to pass on to the world's poor. For the bosses of giant companies who have 
had to come to terms with life under constant attack, such as Phil Knight 
of Nike and Lord Browne of BP, the campaigners are forcing fundamental 
changes to corporate life.
To others, Ambrose is the new enemy. He is put in the bracket of what Peter 
Sutherland, the former European Commissioner, calls "foolish protesters". 
He is one of those campaigners against further free trade who President 
George W. Bush says threatens to wreck global prosperity. He participates 
in the kinds of demonstrations overrun by riotous thugs that British prime 
minister Tony Blair says are an attack on democracy.
Either way, people in business and politics are right to take the likes of 
Ambrose seriously. He is one of tens of thousands of committed activists at 
the nexus of a global political movement embracing tens of millions of people.
Just over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the "End of 
History" promised by Francis Fukuyama, who argued free market liberalism 
had triumphed forever, there is a growing sense that global capitalism is 
once again fighting to win the argument.
In the last 18 months, a million people have taken to the streets in what 
has become a rolling mobilisation. In 1999, just 25 turned up to protest at 
the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Washington. Last year, it was 30,000. 
At the end of this month, activists are predicting more than 50,000.
Taken together, the string of protests since Seattle in 1999, which have 
torn through Washington, Melbourne, Prague, Seoul, Nice, Barcelona, 
Washington DC, Quebec City, Gothenburg and Genoa, have cost more than $250m 
in security precautions, damage and lost business. Hundreds have been 
injured, several shot and one young man has been killed.
largest petition in history
Campaigners for debt relief for the world's poorest countries last year put 
together the largest petition in history, gathering 24m names - more than 
the number of people who signed the condolence books for Princess Diana 
worldwide.
Voter turnout may be plummetting in Europe and the US, but political 
activism is enjoying a resurgence not seen since the Vietnam War. At Attac, 
the Tobin tax advocates who have 30,000 paid-up followers across Europe, 
the intellectual campaigners say "the demonstrations make one think very 
much of the days of May 1968 in Paris".
Tom Hayden, the ideologue of the American left who was one of the Chicago 
Seven accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic 
National Convention, says: "There is a spirit which I have not seen since 
1960. People are emerging from invisibility after many years."
Protests now threaten to halt the global momentum of open markets and free 
capital, stopping the World Trade Organisation's effort to launch a new 
trade round for the second time in Doha, Qatar, in November. The world's 
most powerful politicians are in retreat, withdrawing to remote spots such 
as Kananaskis in the Canadian Rockies for the next Group of Eight summit.
The irony, of course, is that anti-globalisation activism is gathering 
momentum just as global capitalism looks prone to a bout of cyclical 
weakness. Anti-globalisation has been a backlash against a surging world 
economy. A recession could change the nature of activism, fuelling 
counter-capitalist feeling among some while making others more defensive 
about the companies which put food on the family table.
"The big risk," according to Anne Krueger, deputy managing director of the 
IMF, is that "a slackening or slowdown in the rate of economic growth could 
lead to a sufficient downturn in economic activity to trigger a backlash 
among those who are now silent, but not necessarily supportive, of 
globalisation. Protectionism, in the guise of anti-globalisation, could 
return and reverse liberalisation and "the long period of successful 
economic growth that the world has enjoyed".
Over the past two months, the FT has been compiling a report on the 
anti-globalisation movement, drawing on interviews from inside campaign 
groups across Europe and the US. By spending time with protest organisers, 
counter-capitalist intellectuals, tree-sitters and labour leaders from 
across the movement, the FT set out to answer the questions: Who are they? 
What do they want? How are they funded? Where is it all going?
It turns out to be a formidable movement. Or, to be precise, a movement of 
movements. Anti-globalisation activism is diverse and inchoate, without a 
unified agenda or a traditional leadership.
increasingly well-funded
It is, however, well co-ordinated. It is well-informed. It is increasingly 
well-funded. And, perhaps most alarming for elected politicians and 
corporate leaders, a growing number of people think it has mainstream 
values and a mass appeal.
It is not, as Mr Blair has described the protesters, a "travelling circus 
of anarchists", although, to be sure, there are clowns, arsonists and 
Molotov-cocktail throwing thugs within the movement. Nor is it just 
society's green fringe of unwashed hippies and Luddite reactionaries, 
although there are plenty of vegan spiritualists, unreconstructed 
communists, regressive utopians and smoked-out dreamers. And, while there 
is plenty of fuzzy thinking and fast-and-loose abuse of economic 
statistics, there is also a critique backed by respected economists, 
businesspeople and politicians.
Nor is it strictly speaking "anti-globalisation". The vast majority of 
activists are pro-globalisation, indeed products of it. The movement was 
welded together by the internet. Mass mobilisations, in Europe in 
particular, have been made possible by mobile phones. The unprecedented 
pitch of public feeling in the North for people in the South has coincided 
with cheap air fares between the two.
Instead, this is counter-capitalism. The new wave of political activism has 
coalesced around the simple idea that capitalism has gone too far. It is as 
much a mood as a movement, something counter-cultural. It is driven by the 
suspicion that companies, forced by the stock markets to strive for ever 
greater profits, are pillaging the environment, destroying lives and 
failing to enrich the poor as they promised. And it is fuelled by the fear 
that democracy has become powerless to stop them, as politicians are 
thought to be in the pockets of companies and international political 
institutions are slaves to a corporate agenda.
A survey this summer in Le Monde, the French newspaper, showed 56 per cent 
of people in France thought multinational corporations had been the 
beneficiaries of globalisation. Just 1 per cent thought consumers and 
citizens had benefited.
Such surveys have given the movement the sense that it is astride a mass 
mood. Elsewhere, there has been evidence that it has sympathisers within 
the corridors of power.
It goes further than just the politicians who back the Tobin tax. Joseph 
Stiglitz, former chief economist of the IMF published a comprehensive 
critique of the Bretton Woods institutions, and Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard 
professor who has also been a fierce critic of the Fund, have reinforced 
the activists' sense of their own credibility.
As one Bank official puts it: "There is a feeling that the shouts on the 
streets are echoed by murmurs inside the institutions."
Activism has been drawing people from the ranks of business, too. Craig 
Cohon, who today counts himself as part of the movement alongside No Logo 
author Naomi Klein, was one of the top marketing executives for Coca-Cola 
in Europe until last year. He went to Davos, the annual gathering of CEOs 
in Switzerland, and decided to quit his job. He has started working on 
Global Legacy, an effort to raise $100m to fight urban poverty around the 
world.
Some in the developing countries of the South say that what is happening in 
the industrial North is misguided. Anti-globalisation activists claim to 
speak for the poor in developing countries, but do not understand the 
issues. Worse still, a few even suggest anti-globalisation activism is the 
means by which the First World can pursue a protectionist agenda, denying 
the Third World the benefits of economic growth.
Jerry Mander, an advertising executive-turned-anti-globalisation activist, 
however, argues that thanks to the "struggles in the South" the 
shortcomings of corporate-led globalisation are now evident to everyone.
He reads out a quote: "'The rising tide of the global economy will create 
many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats. [It will] span 
conflicts at home and abroad...[Its] evolution will be rocky, marked by 
chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide. [Those] left 
behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability and 
cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological and 
religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.' 
And," he says, "that's not me talking, that is the CIA."
This queasiness about capitalism, activists say, has been fed from many 
directions. There is a sense of growing inequality, stoked by mass 
redundancies, widespread job insecurity and the disgust at soaring 
executive pay. There is discomfort over the commercialisation of public 
space, reinforced by the idea that Starbucks, McDonald's and The Gap have 
overrun every high street in the industrialised world.
It is, perhaps, no surprise that the gradual but seismic upheaval in the 
world economy of the last 20 years has generated mass anxiety. Foreign 
direct investment flows averaged $115.4bn a year between in the late 1980s. 
By 1999 they had reached $865.5bn. The European single market, the North 
American Free Trade Association and the Uruguay Round have created 
supranational authorities that override national and local governments.
To some extent, the response is emotional, even spiritual. Bruce Rich, a 
senior attorney at Environmental Defense in the US, suggests there is an 
ennui of affluence: "The kids who grow up with everything say 'There must 
be more to life than this.' In the 50s, you had the silent generation and 
then in the 60s you had great activism. In the 80s you had the me 
generation and then in the 90s the start of this movement."
The campaigners have what they call many "asks". Most of them are negative. 
A cutback in carbon dioxide emissions. The abolition of Third World debt. 
The end of World Bank support to fossil fuel and mining projects. The 
withdrawal of Unocal from Burma. No more exploitation of Florida tomato 
farmers by fast-food chain Taco Bell. A stop to Occidental's oil projects 
in the U'wa region of Colombia. The list goes on.
So far, the efforts to put together a positive programme for change have 
been fraught and unconvincing. In their efforts to come up with a 
bumper-sticker ideology, the activists have rallied around the slogan: 
"Another world is possible". As yet, though, they have struggled to come up 
with a vision of what that other world would look like.
Instead, they have been brought together most singularly by the WTO. To 
many, the WTO has promoted trade, spread prosperity, extended consumer 
choice. As a result, trade liberalisation has been a stalking horse for 
democracy in countries where closed markets were the counterparts to closed 
governments.
But the activists see the WTO as the corporate world's tool to turn more 
high streets into homogenous shopping malls, to engineer the privatisation 
of more public services, to annul environmental protection laws in the name 
of free trade and to open more countries to the whimsical forces of Wall 
Street.
"With the WTO, they have handed us a huge target. They were seen to be 
meddling everywhere. They were trying to create a world for corporations. 
It has helped us unify. We were individual mosquitoes, which have become a 
swarm," says Kevin Danaher, a slimmer version of Jesse "The Body" Ventura, 
who runs Global Exchange.
Outside Danaher's office on the corner of 16th Street and Mission, where 
San Francisco's crack addicts and homeless folks mill around, a truck 
delivers beer to the local grocery store. A panhandler begs for change 
outside McDonald's. The world does not look as though it is quite ready to 
rise up in revolution.
Like the coursing rivers the movement itself so loves, the 
counter-capitalist current cannot easily be pinned down. It does not have 
one voice, or one message. It keeps changing, morphing from one campaign to 
the next. It is wide in its tactics and ambitions, violent and 
revolutionary on the edges, peaceful and reformist in the main. It rushes 
in often contradictory directions, anti-corporate and entrepreneurial, 
anarchist and nostalgic, technophobic and futuristic, revolutionary and 
conservative all at the same time.
And it does not have one source. Many tributaries have swollen 
counter-capitalism: the anti-apartheid movement, the campaigns against US 
intervention in central America, environmentalism, the emergence of protest 
movements in the Third World, famine relief in Africa, the Asian financial 
crisis, human rights protection, Acid House raves in Europe, road rallies 
organised by Reclaim the Streets and hip-hop music in the US.
For Soren Ambrose, his journey began in the Niger Delta with Ken Saro-Wiwa. 
In the early 1990s, Saro-Wiwa said the operations of Shell in Ogoniland had 
left people dead and huge stretches of land destroyed. His concerns were to 
define a new kind of activism in Europe and the US: a protest which is 
about "them, not us", which is focused on corporations and economic 
principles, not war and civil rights. And he touched lives which have since 
carried his concerns into campaigns against companies and institutions that 
were unscathed by protest five years ago.
It was a meeting with Saro-Wiwa in the early 1990s that inspired Steve 
Kretzman to set up Project Underground, the Berkeley-based group which has 
become a permanent irritant to mining companies. John Sellers' meeting with 
Saro-Wiwa when he visited Greenpeace at the same time has helped impassion 
his leadership of the Ruckus Society, the group which next week hosts a 
training camp at Middleburg, Virginia, to prepare for mass civil 
disobedience in Washington this month.
The message of Saro-Wiwa remains the inspiration behind Platform, which 
works from a tiny office on the Thames and seeks to turn public attitudes 
against BP and Shell. And it was Saro-Wiwa who prompted Soren Ambrose to 
quit a life of academia for activism.
When the Nigerian authorities hanged Saro-Wiwa in Port Harcourt on November 
10 1995, they created the first martyr of the counter-capitalist movement.

Part 2
Feeding the hands that bite
By James Harding
Published: October 15 2001 18:31GMT | Last Updated: October 15 2001 19:35GMT
Part two: Bankrolling the movement
John Sellers is wearing a woolly lime-green sweater. He has a big shaved 
head, neat little ears and electric blue-painted toenails popping out of 
his sandals. On a late summer's day in Berkeley, California, he bears more 
than a passing resemblance to Shrek.
Like the cartoon ogre, the thick-set director of The Ruckus Society, the 
civil disobedience group which trains activists for tree-sits, banner-hangs 
and barricades, also has a giant laugh.
Particularly, when he mentions the origins of $100,000 worth of Ruckus 
funding this year: "It is great that it is Unilever money. There is no 
better way to launder corporate multinational largesse than giving it to 
the movement that is confronting it."
The Ruckus Society trained activists who helped shut down the World Trade 
Organisation meeting in Seattle in November 1999. It is also one of a 
handful of radical activist groups which this year have enjoyed a big lift 
thanks to Unilever, the consumer goods multinational.
The company, which sells a range of goods from Lipton tea to Dove soap in 
150 countries around the world, has made $5m available to 
anti-globalisation initiatives via Ben & Jerry's, the ice-cream company 
with a social conscience.
When Unilever was courting Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield last year, the 
company was pressed to offer a little more to the inventors of the Cherry 
Garcia and Phish Food ice cream brands.
In order to get Ben & Jerry's agreement to sell their ice cream business to 
Unilever for $326m, the Anglo-Dutch group offered a further inducement: a 
$5m contribution to Ben & Jerry's Foundation, another $5m for a venture 
capital fund for ethical start-ups called 'Hot Fudge' to be run by Ben 
Cohen and a minimum $1.1m a year commitment to annual grants for social 
change groups.
The Unilever money has been a boon to several activist groups.
Ben and Jerry's foundation, through a special fund overseen by three senior 
company staff including Jerry Greenfield, gave $1m over three years to 
Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based group which campaigns to abolish 
the World Bank and the WTO as well as name and shame irresponsible big 
companies. Unilever has been a leading corporate advocate of trade 
liberalisation.
United for a Fair Economy, which campaigns among other things against what 
it sees as excessive chief executive pay, also got a grant. Niall 
FitzGerald, the Unilever co-chairman, had total compensation last year of 
£1.3m.
When Unilever bought Ben & Jerry's, the management of both companies had a 
discussion about their differing views of the world. "We explained to 
Unilever that the values of Ben & Jerry's would be anti-globalisation and 
they said they were very much supporters of globalisation," says Cohen.
Today, he does not oversee the disbursement of the $5m, which is being 
distributed to groups "like Ruckus, which support progressive social change 
as it relates to the global economy," according to another person at the 
company. Instead, Greenfield is one of three people who decides where the 
money goes.
Unilever, Ben & Jerry's executives say, is well aware of where the money is 
going. Allowing Ben & Jerry's to support anti-globalisation, they suggest, 
was a price worth paying to own the Ben & Jerry's brand.
As counter-capitalism has grown, it has begun to bump up against 
corporations, the complex business of financial planning and the rough 
world of stock market investments.
Organisation has helped campaigners channel popular disaffection with 
global capitalism into protest. A new network of fundraisers and office 
managers for activist groups have sought to make the new protest movement a 
permanent feature of life by rooting it in sound finances.
September 11 threatens to provide an ugly illustration of how tightly the 
movement has become tied to the mainstream economy.
For just as the Unilever-backed donations to the likes of The Ruckus 
Society were a mark of how activism prospered on the back of America's 
boom, the movement now promises to suffer financially as the West teeters 
towards recession.
For anti-globalisation activism faces a financial squeeze after the attacks 
on America. Charitable foundations fear the value of their endowments will 
shrink further with the stock markets and the boads of philanthropic 
organisations look set to shy away from the critics of capitalism.
The funding stream to anti-globalisation groups was anyway just a trickle. 
Some sympathetic foundations have their wealth tied into the stock market 
and, in particular, into technology stocks. Even before September 11, 
therefore, foundations were cutting back on donations to some environmental 
and human rights groups. Several San Francisco-based activist networks have 
had to cut their full-time staff, because the squeeze on resources has made 
it impossible to pay their salaries.
Now, those endowments could shrivel further as economists forecasts a 
gloomy spell for the Europe and the US. More importantly for the protest 
movement, the boards of charitable foundations which have been some of the 
big givers to critics of international financial institutions, for example, 
are now wary of being aligned with the critics of capitalism.
The result is that you will find anti-globalisation activists in San 
Francisco sounding rather like depressed dotcommers. They talk about the 
need to be "entrepreneurial". Rather than depending on charitable giving, 
they look to running fair trade shops or "reality tours" for holidaymakers 
with a global conscience. They do not have the managerial talent, they say, 
to match the group's ambitions with its resources. Charitable foundations 
will often fund projects, but not infrastructure or back office operations. 
They fret about the strings attached to donations, particularly when they 
come from suspect corporations.
The movement, critical though it was of burgeoning global companies, was 
buoyed by the wealth which filtered through from an expanding international 
economy. In fact, a large number of businesspeople have - wittingly or 
unwittingly - become big donors to counter-capitalism.
FitzGerald from Unilever and Cohen and Greenfield from Ben & Jerry's are 
just one case.
George Soros, the hedge fund operator, Anita Roddick, the founder of the 
Bodyshop chain of stores, and Doug Tompkins, the founder of the Esprit and 
North Face clothing lines, are among a new breed of philanthropist born of 
the corporate world who are giving to protesters against corporate-led 
globalisation.
Governments, too, have been significant financiers of protest groups. The 
European Commission, for example, funded two groups who mobilised large 
numbers of people to protest at EU summits at Gothenburg and Nice. 
Britain's national lottery, which is overseen by the government, helped 
fund a group at the heart of the British contingent at both protests.
Counter-capitalist budgets are still tiny. While the latest figures show 
Nike spending $545m on a year's advertising in the US, United Students 
against Sweatshops, which campaigns against the company, has an annual 
budget of roughly $250,000.
While 50 Years is Enough is trying to marshall forces against the World 
Bank and International Monetary Fund with a $233,000 annual budget, the 
World Bank's public relations budget is $21m.
Even before September 11, some campaigners were fretting that in the wake 
of chaos in Seattle and Genoa, conservative donors and corporate-backed 
foundations are pulling back donations to political activism. Ted Turner, 
the ebullient founder of CNN and voluble philanthropist, was an early giver 
to radical environmental groups. But in the last year, he has pulled back 
from funding groups like The Ruckus Society and mining campaigners Project 
Underground.
For the last four years, Mark Rand was part of the hand-to-mouth movement 
of activists.
Running one of America's more radical youth groups at the same time as 
having caring for a young baby, he slept with a radio beneath his pillow. 
When his daughter woke him up in the middle of the night, he would switch 
it on and let the ramblings of US talk radio guide him back to sleep. The 
alternative, he had discovered, was to lie awake for the rest of the night 
fretting over whether he would make payroll for the nine members of staff 
at Just ACT, the politically active youth group run out of San Francisco.
This year, Rand took to a different remedy for his insomnia. He has taken 
the reins of a quiet new effort to build a sympathetic web to finance the 
movement: the Funder's Network on Trade and Globalisation.
Counter-capitalism has begun to organise its finances. The Funder's Network 
is not the first to try to co-ordinate "progressive donors". One group in 
the US, known informally as The Doughnuts - as in, plenty of "dough" - has 
been gathering in wealthy heirs and heiresses to work on putting money into 
social justice groups.
Pulling together funders, Rand hopes, will mean not quite so many groups 
are "operating on a shoestring".
Since Cohen and Greenfield sold Ben & Jerry's, the movement hopes others 
selling up will fund the movement.
Anita Roddick's Body Shop is currently being pursued by potential buyers. 
If the sale goes through, Roddick, who is on the board of the Ruckus 
Society, is looking forward to increasing support for anti-sweatshop 
activists, independent media organisations, dissent groups, local 
environmental start-ups, socially responsible ventures and a range of others.
"I will not be funding large organisations, but poverty, human rights 
abuses, civil rights, economic rights is where my heart lies," she says.
Depending on the terms of the sale, Roddick would have the kind of funds at 
her disposal to be talked about as a radical funding figure in the same 
league as one of the leading businessman-turned-philanthropists: Doug Tompkins.
Tompkins gave the money to set up the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which is 
based in California. Today, it has a roughly $90m endowment, according to a 
Deep Ecology director. The money comes thanks to Tompkins' business acumen. 
He started and built Esprit, the retail chain, and North Face, the 
mountainwear business. Since he sold it, he has been using the money to buy 
land for environmental conservation and funding anti-globalisation projects.
To activists, Tompkins, who now lives out of telephone contact on a vast 
environmental retreat in Chile bigger than Massachussetts, is the model of 
the new philanthropy.
There are others. George Soros has diverted some of his fortune into the 
Open Society Institute. In turn, it has been an important donor for the 
Ella Baker Center, which campaigns against what it calls the "prison 
industrial complex" and the creeping privatisation of public services which 
it sees as a function of corporate-led globalisation.
Bob Young and Marc Ewing, co-founders of Red Hat, the designers of the 
Linux software and Open Source systems, have established the Center for the 
Public Domain, a group which has already made over $5m of contributions to 
civic society initiatives. In the UK, some of the fortune left by Sir Jimmy 
Goldsmith has gone into the JMG Foundation, which is overseen by Jon 
Cracknell, one of the founder members of the Funders Network on Trade and 
Globalisation. Mr Cracknell did not return phone calls. (Sir Jimmy's 
brother, Teddy, is editor of The Ecologist and a leading light in the 
movement.)
Much of the money which funnels into the movement is given by anonymous 
donors. 50 Years is Enough, the campaign group at the heart of the protests 
planned against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund later 
this month, has been sustained primarily by one woman who has given the 
activists roughly $250,000 over the last few years. She did not want to be 
identified.
Almost all the money which comes into the movement, whether from 
foundations or inviduals, has some link to a corporate past.
The CS Mott Foundation, one of the bigger givers to groups campaigning 
against the World Bank and the IMF, owes its wealth to General Motors. The 
Ford Foundation, which has given widely to environmental groups, got its 
money from the Ford Motor fortune. Richard Goldman, an insurance executive 
and the descendant of Levi Strauss, has long had a fund established with 
his wife, Rhoda, which, thanks to the jeans fortune, has been a big donor 
to environmental and social groups. Likewise, the Rockefeller Brothers 
Foundation and the Samuel Rubin Foundation have turned old business 
fortunes into funding for a new breed of activists who are suspicious, if 
not hostile, towards business.
The bulk of US foundation money is tied up in the stock markets. 
Ironically, this means that the collapse in stock prices on Wall Street is 
pinching activists working across the US. Foundations have seen the value 
of their portfolios shrink. Donations are being reined in.
As a bunch of people danced in a circle to the beat of a Native American 
drum at a party on a Berkely roof-top this summer, a few environmentalists 
and human rights activists sounded like they were having the kind of 
conversation you might expect in Silicon Valley, on the other side of San 
Francisco. They faced a cashflow crisis, said one. "We'll be all right 
later in the year, but there is a cash problem right now."
On the other side of the Atlantic, where smoke from stubby French cigars 
wafts through the offices of Attac and Le Monde Diplomatique, the 
intellectuals who run Europe's largest counter-capitalist group do not need 
to worry about the vagaries of the stock market. The finances of Attac - 
the Association pour la taxation des transactions financieres pour l'aide 
aux citoyens - are provided mainly by its 30,000 members across the 
continent and the organs of the European state.
Bernard Cassen, director of Attac and one of the top editors of Le Monde 
Diplomatique, the French journal which has been an ardent critic of 
corporate-led globalisation for nearly two decades, says donations of FFr50 
to FFr200 ($7-$28) per year from its members make up the bulk of the E6m 
($5.5m) annual budget.
Across counter-capitalist movements, much of the giving comes from the 
membership, whether through labour union dues or student group levies or 
membership fees for environmental groups.
The Jubilee campaigners for the cancellation of Third World debt relied 
most heavily on donations from church members in the late 1990s. A mailshot 
to church supporters in the late 1990s could deliver as much as a 40 per 
cent response, according to Jamie Drummond, who works with Bono and Bob 
Geldof on debt relief. In a commercial setting, a mailshot which yields 
replies from 1-3 per cent of addressees is a success.
But the biggest single donor to Attac, which estimates it sent nearly 5,000 
people to protest in Genoa, was the European Commission. The EU gave 
FFr800,000 over two years.
"In the European Commission, we have very few friends," says Mr Cassen, who 
has used his columns in Le Monde Diplomatique as a platform for persistent 
criticism of what he sees as the EU's failure as a democratic insitution. 
"It was very difficult to obtain [the money], but we obtained it." The 
Commission's directorate general for development gave most of the money, 
while more is expected to come from a new unit for engaging with civil 
society, according to Attac.
The EU, through its commitment to community groups, education forums, new 
media platforms and academic research, has provided, activists estimate, 
millions of euros across the continent to groups whose work has fed into 
the new movement. Still, the EU has become a target.
"We regard the European Commission as the spearhead of neo-liberalism in 
Europe," says Mr Cassen, noting that Brussels is now beginning to feel the 
heat. "Nice and Gothenburg were a new thing. The European institutions used 
to be able to escape the opprobrium, but now they are in the front line."
Britain's World Development Movement, which over the years has taken on the 
UK government in court over the Pergau dam, campaigned against Rio Tinto 
and the governments of Europe and the US over Third World debt, is 
described by its director, Barry Coates, as the "shock troops" of the 
movement. It has also been a beneficiary of EU funding. In the last two 
years, it has received nearly £100,000 from the European Union, the WDM's 
biggest single donor.
The British National Lottery, which has provided just over £55,000 over the 
last two years, is the third largest financial contributor to the WDM, just 
behind the United Reformed Church.
There is also the beginnings of a funding network in Europe, which is based 
on the model of progressive foundations in the US. But the organisations 
are few and small.
The Network for Social Change is said to have enlisted about 60 wealthy 
individuals. To be a member, you have to have assets of over £250,000, 
either earned or inherited (excluding your main residence) and you must be 
willing to put £2,000 a year into socially or environmentally beneficial 
causes. Among others, the Network has helped finance Corporate Watch in the 
UK, the Oxford-based group. The Network for Social Change did not respond 
to requests for an interview.
Perhaps the best measure of how counter-capitalists are beginning to find 
their way to resources are the emerging signs that business is trying to 
squeeze the funding veins into the movement.
In recent months, companies and conservative foundations have been clubbing 
together behind the fronts of industry-wide lobby groups to try to staunch 
the flow of funds to counter-capitalist groups.
Frontiers of Freedom, which is backed by oil companies, defence groups and 
pharmaceuticals businesses, has been lobbying in Washington to see the 
Rainforest Action Network stripped of its tax exempt status.
RAN, which campaigns to protect old growth forests, has targeted companies 
such as Home Depot, the hardware chain, Staples, the stationery stores, 
Boise Cascade, the logging company, and Citigroup, the bank. Frontiers of 
Freedom has started research looking to target the Ruckus Society.
At the same time, the Guest Choice Network, which says it is backed by 
30,000 restaurateurs and tavern owners defending the freedom of Americans 
to eat and drink what they like without interference from meddling 
regulators, has been seeking to put together a full list of foundations, 
including their corporate board members, who are backing groups which they 
describe as being part of the "Nanny culture". In the food industry alone, 
including the genetically modified foods area, activists have access to 
$180m in funds, the Guest Choice Network says.
More worrying to some than the efforts to cut off funds is the corporate 
willingness to suffocate moderate critics with money.
Coates at the World Development Movement, which like others at the pure end 
of the grassroots movement will not take any corporate money, says his 
biggest concern is co-option: "I am not so worried about infiltration [of 
groups by intelligence officers for companies and the state], although that 
is an issue. The bigger worry is advances to NGOs to take a more 
conciliatory line. Many NGOs take money from corporations - from Rio Tinto, 
British American Tobacco and Monsanto. They are seen as being able to be 
bought."
After Seattle, Gardner Peckham, a former aide to the Republican and former 
US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, sought to put together a corporate 
coalition to take on the activists. By then a lobbyist with a political arm 
of Burson Marsteller, the public relations group, he wrote to dozens of 
companies suggesting a riposte. His idea was "The New Corporate 
Partnership", which would act as "both shield and sword".
"Corporations would like to respond, but don't want to draw individual 
attention to themselves," said the letter from Black, Kelly, Scruggs & 
Healey, the lobbyist firm on K Street, Washington's lobbyist row. "Our goal 
is to present a positive image of corporate responsibility, to reveal the 
true nature of the activists and consequently to reduce their impact."
A year on, Peckham is disillusioned. In his office on K Street, which is to 
lobbyists what Madison Avenue is to advertisers, Peckham said no one had 
yet committed to The New Corporate Partnership: "Corporations do not want 
to take these people on. They would rather pay them off."
Part 3
The by-product of globalisation
By James Harding
Published: October 12 2001 16:21GMT | Last Updated: October 15 2001 18:59GMT
After Bob Naiman and a bunch of fellow activists drew straws last year to 
throw a pie in the face of the managing director of the International 
Monetary Fund, they hit a snag.
Michel Camdessus, then the head of the IMF, had come to give a speech in 
Thailand. The local stores, however, did not stock the kinds of custard 
tarts or cream pies his critics were looking for. In the end, they had to 
make do with a sponge cake from a Bangkok outlet of Seven-11.
"I always worried that people would find out we bought the offending pie 
from a Seven-11," recalls Naiman in a shirt and tie at a Washington 
think-tank, styling himself these days as a campaigning economist. "Just 
think, anti-globalisation campaigners stocking up at a Seven-11."
Anti-globalisation has piggy-backed on globalisation. The resources, 
infrastructure and technology of a globalising world have enabled - or, in 
Mr Naiman's case, armed - the anti-globalisation movement.
On the streets of Gothenburg in June, the demonstrators orchestrated their 
protests by sending text messages over their mobile phones. When the 
organisers of the World Social Forum decided to host a summit to counter 
the annual Davos get-together of industry leaders, they met in Porto 
Allegre, Brazil. Cheap international airfares made it possible for 
activists to get there.
But the biggest single resource for the counter-capitalist movement has 
been the internet.
"Some of these issues and movements have been around for years. So what is 
new now? It is the technology." says Moises Naim, the editor of Foreign 
Policy, who says he has turned the magazine into what is effectively the 
journal of globalisation studies. "Just imagine how much the Christians 
could have achieved by the third century armed with the internet. . .If 
each activist has at least two feelings in common, it is probably these: We 
know more. And we can do something about it. The internet has been largely 
responsible for both."
It enables the Mobilisation for Global Justice to reach not just hundreds 
of thousands of people, not only to mobilise protesters but also find 
housing and arrange transport for those coming to demonstrate in Washington 
at the end of the month.
Not all the people aligned to activist groups are online. Not everybody who 
gets sent a campaigning e-mail reads it. But the pace of growth of 
counter-capitalism would not have been possible without the internet.
The web is also the source of the facts and figures and opinions which 
informs activist thinking. In a converted garage behind a row of terraced 
houses which serves as the headquarters for Corporate Watch UK, Rebecca is 
part of the online information movement. The Corporate Watch mission, she 
says, is 'to expose corporate power.' How does she do that? "Well, all you 
need is the internet and the Google search engine," she says. And, for 
other activists, news and analysis from the likes of Indymedia.org and Znet.
A couple of years ago, a steelworker was surfing the internet to see what 
he could find out about the Maxxam Corporation. He and his co-workers were 
campaigning against Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane, Washington. On the web, he 
found a bunch of environmentalists were fighting Pacific Lumber in northern 
California. Both businesses were owned by Maxxam Corporation, a company run 
by Charles Hurwitz. So, he suggested a get-together of the two groups - the 
workers in their overalls and boots and the environmentalists in their 
dungarees and Birkenstocks. The idle surfing gave birth to the Turtles and 
Teamsters combination, the blue-green coalition which was such a feature of 
the Seattle protests. More enduringly, it spawned the Alliance for 
Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, which today has 53 member 
organisations and lobbies members of US Congress not to give the US 
president unilateral authority to negotiate trade agreements and rewrite 
the rules on global trade.
To those very few activists who have both a sense of humour and a grip on 
technology, the internet has also been a means of subversion.
The Yes Men are arguably to online pranksterism what the Oz editors were to 
inky newsletter activism a generation ago. They are not a formal group, but 
a gang who make mischief impersonating people.
Having commandeered the gatt.org web address and established a hoax site, 
last year, The Yes Men fielded a request for Mike Moore, head of the World 
Trade Organisation, to come and speak at a Salzburg gathering of lawyers. 
In an e-mail exchange, 'Mike Moore' declined but sent an invented deputy, 
Andreas Birchlbauer. Dr Birchlbauer attended the conference and made a 
bewildering speech, noting that the Italians have less of a work ethic than 
the Dutch, the Americans would be better off selling their votes to the 
highest bidder and that the WTO's main aim was to create a one-world 
culture. The internet had got Dr Birchlbauer through the door. 
(Appropriately enough, a member of the Yes Men could not be met in person, 
but a friend confirmed the story.)
In the closing years of the 1990s, dotcom entrepreneurs and online 
investors trumpeted the fortunes they were set to make on the internet. The 
online world would revolutionise communication. It would build new 
communities. It would tear down the walls which restricted distribution and 
create an information free-for-all. And it has done all those things, 
except make those fortunes. Instead, some of the the biggest winners of the 
internet revolution have not been people fighting for profit, but against it.
Part 4
Counter-Capitalism
Inside the Black Bloc
By James Harding
Published: October 15 2001 18:31GMT | Last Updated: October 15 2001 19:31GMT
After a weekend which had seen one young man killed, cars and offices 
blackened by arson and a police crackdown which left blood and shattered 
teeth on the floor of a primary school, the airport lounge on the return 
home from the Genoa protests was full of the movement's hard core.
Not teenagers in black jeans and black balaclavas, these were a mid-50s 
crowd of middle Englanders, wearing sensible shoes, sporting their 
Christian Aid T-Shirts, rainbow scarves and jaunty Viva Jubilee banners.
In Genoa, site of the most bloody protests in the history of the 
counter-capitalist movement, the vast majority of the protesters were very 
nice.
While many of the debt relief campaigners could have stepped out of a 
church fete, the Globalise Resistance coach down from London to Genoa felt 
like a university debating team on tour, an earnest bunch of young people 
from the Brighton Collective were talking over the issues on a 28-hour bus 
ride.
So, which one is it: a movement of violent hooligans or compassionate worthies?
By any measure of the numbers, the rock-throwers are a tiny sideshow. The 
main constituencies of the movement are environmentalists, human rights 
activists, Third World policy wonks, peace-loving hippies and, in huge 
numbers, caring Christians. (Other religious groups play a role, but not in 
such large numbers.)
But, until September 11 at least, the rioters had cast long shadows. The 
events of that day promise to stigmatise violent demonstrators in a way the 
protestations of pacificists and earth-loving greens never have.
The attacks on America have been chastening for everyone, even the critics 
of globalisation. They now say that violence will not be tolerated. This is 
a change. Until the gruesome events of September 11, activists were fearful 
of being divided over the issue of tactics. The critics of the new protest 
movement, they believed, were seeking to split the fluffies - the peaceful 
protestsers - from the spikies - those who saw a merit in violent protest, 
particularly property damage.
Now, though, they say they will be happy to condemn violence in any form. 
But, to judge from the contentious role of sabotage and violent protest 
within the movement in the last couple of years, it may not prove so simple.
In Genoa, even before the non-violent direct action was supposed to begin, 
towers of black smoke had appeared dotted across the city, where Black Bloc 
activists had set cars on fire. During the day, the windows of banks were 
smashed in, ATM machines were doused with buckets of paint and the walls of 
building covered with graffiti: "Class War" and "Fuoco Alle Banche", it 
said. Genoa city officials estimate the property damage cost $45m.
The peaceful majority likes to say to it is the media's fault that the 
movement is seen as synonymous with street-fighting. Hooligans make for 
better television. The hooded men hurling rocks down the Corso di Torino 
get more airtime than the scenes a couple of blocks away in Genoa this 
summer, where couples in fairy costumes performed shadow dances, an arts 
troupe put on a street ballet and hundreds sat in silent vigil.
The people who sing songs and clap hands and parade with giant puppets like 
to say the violence is counter productive. Their argument is that the 
rioting has become the story, instead of the issues. The streets are no 
longer safe for peaceful protest. Campaigners are losing their credibility. 
World leaders can duck the problems, casting the protesters as a bunch of 
smelly, dreadlocked thugs out for a ruck.
However, the comforting rationale that violence benefits no-one is not 
shared by people on the front lines, a small fringe who remain determined 
to destroy property and fight the cops head-on. A larger swathe are 
determined practitioners of civil disobedience and non-violent direct 
action. In private, even peace-loving activists are loathe to condemn the 
violence. They do not want to be seen to split the movement. And, as much 
as they find it distasteful to admit it, the violence has given the 
movement extra momentum.
The death of Carlo Giuliani, the young man shot in the head in a Genoa 
backstreet in July, has given campaigners a new martyr. "I have wanted to 
say that Giuliani was a pointless death," says one woman who identified 
herself as a pacifist green, "but look at the impact."
While critics both inside and outside like to dismiss the "mindless 
violence" of anti-globalisation protests, there is nothing mindless about 
it. Those who count themselves in the Black Bloc, which, strictly speaking 
is a tactic rather than an organised group, argue that direct confrontation 
is necessary to fight a deaf system.
*****
In interviews with people who count themselves as part of the Black Bloc, 
the rock-throwing, car-burning and window-smashing protesters who were such 
a feature of the Genoa protests say that the violence acts as a megaphone 
for their message.
One Italian protester, who only gave his first name, Simone, came to the 
protests in Genoa with a motorcycle helmet, goggles to shield his eyes from 
teargas and a bandana to mask his face from the cameras. He identified 
himself as aligned to the Black Bloc.
For him, the non-violent approach of the Tute Bianche, the white overalls 
group which created a human wall to try and break through the police lines, 
was too timid. "This is a war. The politicians and corporations do not 
respect peaceful protest, they respect power," Simone said. "We will break 
through the fences. We will show them power."
But, coming from a poorer suburb of Genoa, he was also out to stick it to 
the rich who lived in the picturesque quarters of the mediterranean port 
city. He had been to an anti-globalisation seminar earlier in the week, but 
left: "Too much talking." On the busride into town, he said he was looking 
forward to a fight.
He and two others later smashed in the windows of a downtown estate agent.
The Black Bloc in the North America has been a much more civil bunch than 
in Europe. In general, it has styled itself as a menacing presence, dressed 
in black and adopting the Black Power salute.
In Quebec in April, the mass protests against the extension of the North 
American Free Trade Area escalated into a violent confrontation. One Black 
Bloc activist in Canada, contacted for this article, said she hoped this 
signalled that direct engagement was gathering supporters. "We are the 
megaphone of the movement," she said, "We have to get things louder."
James, a British protester who says he has sympathy with the Black Bloc, 
says: "Nobody should expect radical change to be a comfortable or easy 
process effective, not symbolic, confrontation is what shows we are 
serious, and attracts more people to the movement."
Most activists, even radical and confrontational ones, would disagree. 
Their approach is to send a message using non-violent means, disruptive but 
not destructive.
*****
Sophisticated organisation and the numbers of protesters was what surprised 
the police in Gothenburg in June.
While the Swedish security officers were facing their first mass protest, 
many of the activists were veterans of Nice, Prague and even Seattle. The 
police arrived on horseback, but the protesters had come with bags of 
marbles, which they scattered across the streets to make the roads 
dangerous for the police cavalry. Intelligence officials were frustrated 
because experienced protest organisers stopped talking on their mobile 
phones and, instead, sent each other text messages, which are not so easy 
for the police to intercept.
At Genoa, too, the police officers on hand were largely locals who had 
never seen anything like the numbers of protesters as they faced in July. 
Long before the first clash, it was clear the demonstrators had come prepared.
Hundreds had brought swimming goggles to protect their eyes from the 
teargas. Many carried with them lemons and limes, which they squeezed on 
their skin and sucked in their mouths to stop the stinging and wretching 
caused by teargas.
Some wore scarves and balaclavas across their faces to prevent 
identification by police cameras. Others had on motorbike helmets and 
strips of cardboard wrapped around their arms, legs and torsos to act as a 
shield against police batons.
The effect was that the police's crowd control weaponry was ineffectual. 
While teargas canisters exploded at their feet, protesters kept hurling 
rocks at police lines. As many officers had no other means of response, the 
scenes in many areas descended into farce: the police bent down and picked 
up the rocks and started throwing them back.
Madame Cholet, as one woman calls herself who is part of the Wombles, the 
White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggle, was one of 
the people who took part in the most ambitious action at Genoa. She was 
alongside the other White Overalls, the group known in Italy as the Tute 
Bianche, which built a wall of perspex and steel bars with which it walked 
headlong into the police lines. The Tute Bianche approach is to break 
through the police cordon by absorbing their baton charges. She says: "It 
was like being part of a Roman army. We moved in Roman army formation."
At so many of the demonstrations, the protesters have not only been 
prepared, but mocking. At Quebec, a group of activists catapulted 
teddy-bears at the police lines. In Genoa, another bunch tied their 
underpants to the high fences surrounding the centre of the city.
Since the teargas at Genoa has cleared, there have been reports of police 
brutality on the streets and intimidation bordering on torture inside 
Genoa's prison. Some Carabiniere officials have come forward to say they 
knew of infiltration of the Black Bloc, that fellow officers acted as agent 
provocateurs. Legal proceedings have begun against the Italian state on 
behalf of whose ribs were broken and skulls cracked when they were arrested 
by police swooping at midnight on the Genoa primary school which acted as 
the activists headquarters.
The officer who shot Giuliani, it has emerged, was just 20 years old. By 
contrast with many of the demonstrators, he had never seen a protest like it.
*****
In the airport lounge on the way back from Genoa the church-goers who came 
to campaign for full debt relief for impoverished countries made much less 
noise. Perhaps, this explains why their role in the movement has been so 
widely forgotten.
Both the movement - and its critics - like to think that anti-globalisation 
found its voice at the Battle for Seattle. From out of the teargas and the 
spray of water canons, a passionate movement for global justice came of age 
- or so the romantic history of the movement goes.
But back in 1998, the leaders of the worlds most powerful countries emerged 
from their G7 summit to find to their astonishment that the buildings had 
been surrounded by roughly 60,000 people holding hands and calling for debt 
relief to the world's poorest countries. The masses had poured out of 
English churches, inspired by the line in Leviticus which commands that 
every fifty years, in a Jubilee year, all debts should be forgiven.
The first mass demonstration on an issue of global economic justice did not 
occur in Seattle, but in Birmingham. The violence of the last 18 months has 
arguably obscured the real 'headbangers' at the root of this movement. 
Global economic activism was not hatched on the barricades in the Pacific 
Northwest, but first mobilised from the pews of England's churches.
What enabled protesters in California make the connection with church 
activists in England, however, was not the pulpit. The line which connects 
Birmingham to Seattle to Washington and beyond has been the internet.
Part 5
Burn, burn, burn: Eco-terrorism
By James Harding
Published: October 15 2001 18:38GMT | Last Updated: October 15 2001 19:22GMT
Craig Rosebraugh is the liaison for a more vicious brand of violence, the 
terrorism of the Earth Liberation Front.
Rosebraugh, a vegan baker from Portland, Oregon, fields information about 
arson attacks across the US done in the name of saving the planet. Although 
he says he has no idea who the eco-terrorists are and how they operate, he 
leaves his fax line open to receive anonymous communiques. The growing list 
of ELF vandalism, now estimated to have caused in excess of $30m in damage, 
is then logged on the Earth Liberation Front website, which also instructs 
activists to 'ignite the revolution' with a self-help guide to timer-set 
devices to start fires.
The ELF, styled on the Animal Liberation Front and claiming to be its 
sister organisation, is a breed apart even from the vandalism which has 
accompanied some protests. Even within radical green ranks who sympathise 
with the odd bit of "monkey-wrenching", the ad hoc attacks on bulldozers 
and construction sites in places of natural beauty, it is considered to be 
a step too far. (And, to be clear, the "monkeywrenchers" are a tiny 
minority of the hard-core environmentalists who subscribe the thinking of 
groups like Earth First!)
Eco-terrorists are generating a serious concern - and substantial spending 
- in official circles. Before September 11, the FBI had said that the ELF, 
which has attacked new homes being built in Long Island, logging depots in 
the Pacific Northwest and genetic research operations in Seattle, is the 
most dangerous domestic terrorist groups operating in the US today. A death 
as a result of an ELF attack is only a matter of time, Special Agent Steve 
Berry said.
Peter Chalk, a specialist in terrorism at the Rand Corporation, the 
think-tank which is an outgrowth of the Pentagon, was sceptical prior to 
the attacks on America about both about the FBI scare-mongering statements 
and the ELF's self-aggrandizing website. The anti-abortionist campaigners, 
such as God's Liberation Army, are more violent, having murdered 
individuals in an attempt to frighten off other doctors. In his Rand 
Corporation office, where he gave an interview in August, he had a picture 
of Osama bin Laden. This, even then, was America's most wanted man, he said.
"The one thing the law enforcement community, the government community and 
the intelligence community in this country does not want to hear is that 
terrorism is not a threat," said Chalk, noting that $10bn in federal funds 
are set aside each year for anti-terrorism work, of which at least $1.2bn 
is deployed to develop domestic defences against terrorism.
Eco-terrorism, however, fitted into the establishment's view of its 
vulnerabilities. In particular, eco-terrorists were seen as the type of 
extremists who might employ biological or chemical weapons.
According to Pentagon folklore, President Clinton read Cobra Event, a novel 
by Richard Preston about a group which terrorises the US by using 
biological weapons. Coming on the heels of the Timothy McVeigh bombing in 
Oklahoma and the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground, the White 
House worried this could be more than just fiction.
The president ordered funds to be set aside to increase the preparedness of 
US cities of biological, chemcial or radiological attack. The Homeland 
Defense Initiative, as it came to be known, poured fresh funds into a host 
of government agencies: FBI, Defense, Health and Human Services and the 
Department of Justice.
Chalk acknowledged that there were looming dangers within the violent 
environmental movement. The ELF is the sister organisation of the Animal 
Liberation Front, which has directly attacked individuals involved in 
animal testing.
"The environmental movement, the extremists are dangerous only in so far as 
they are a very unstructured movement. Some loner can tie his actions to 
the ideology and justify anything. There are no organizational 
constraints," says Chalk, suggesting another Timothy McVeigh could lurk 
within their ranks. "There is a real concern about biological terrorism and 
the environmental terrorists are seen as a real threat [on that front], 
because, to put it bluntly, they hate humans."
Eco-terrorism does not have broad backing, as the vast constitutency of 
environmentalists are non-violent. (Even the few who can stomach 
destruction of property shudder at the thought of any attack on life, human 
or animal.) It does not have organization or access to funds. It could 
provide the banner under which a solitary bomb thrower could mount a crazed 
crusade. Until September 11, the ELF was just a fringe freakshow. It was 
the extreme embodiment of the role of violence within the new protest 
movement: Contentious, overblown but unignorable.
Now, the world and, in particular, America is more frightened. The ELF and 
their kind are no longer just violent cranks. They will be branded as 
terrorists.
Even within the movement, the battle lines have been drawn. Either you are 
with the peaceful protesters or against them.
Part 6
Clamour against capitalism stilled
by James Harding
Published: October 10 2001 12:17GMT | Last Updated: October 15 2001 19:02GMT
Four weeks ago, Kevin Danaher was one of a group of activists preparing for 
a march on Wall Street.
Danaher and other anti-globalisation protesters across the US were emailing 
each other that Monday morning with ideas for a mass demonstration in New 
York's financial centre.
Using the now well-honed tactics of human blockades, banner hangs and 
street theatre, while also turning a blind eye to a spot of strategically 
placed vandalism, they were preparing for a global day of action aimed at 
the bastions of capitalism to coincide with the World Trade Organisation 
meeting in Doha, Qatar, on November 9.
The protests, they hoped, would be larger, more ambitious and more 
widespread than anything anti-globalisation activists had tried before. 
They would involve people across the world in what Danaher liked to call "a 
dress rehearsal for the world's first general strike". On the US east 
coast, the target was to be the New York stock exchange.
Less than a month later, such plans seem to hail from another, more 
innocent, age. After the deadly events of Tuesday September 11, the new 
protest movement has gone quiet. It has dropped the language of 
confrontation, replacing it with condemnation and condolence. Grand plans, 
such as the Wall Street march, have been abandoned.
Danaher, one of the founders of Global Exchange and a rapid-fire, deep 
baritone voice of American anti-globalisation, says: "The movement is 
shifting into educational mode. The activists in New York are going to 
change their entire tactical approach. There are not going to be militant 
street protests. There are going to be teach-ins and candlelit vigils."
On the morning the hijackers launched their attack on New York, 
anti-globalisation activism was riding high.
The demonstrations planned for the last weekend in September were set to 
attract well over 50,000 people and disrupt, if not derail, the annual 
meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Organisers were 
expecting so many people flocking to Washington they confidently predicted 
that they would encircle the White House, besieging the Bush administration 
with a ring of human protest.
Immediately after the attacks, such activism was silenced. The World 
Bank/IMF demonstrations planned for Washington were abandoned. True, a 
smaller, but still sizeable, number gathered for a global peace march. But 
Robert Weissman, a tall, gaunt disciple of Ralph Nader, was one of the team 
at the Mobilisation for Global Justice who had been co-ordinating the 
protests over the summer and then saw things come to a sudden halt. The 
frenzy of press briefings and logistics meetings in Washington church 
basements and suburban Virginia homes gave way to a quiet bewilderment. He 
explains: "We are all a footnote right now."
The movement has come to a stop. In public, activists say this is just a 
respectful pause. In private, however, some campaigners are asking whether 
the anti-globalisation movement itself will prove to be a victim of the 
attacks on America.
On the morning of the hijackings, the FT had just begun a four-part series, 
titled The Children of Globalisation Strike Back. The following three 
instalments were held over. Originally, the FT had concluded that the 
movement was a Fifth Estate. It was a movement of movements, an unruly, 
unregulated and unaccountable check on corporations, politicians and the 
institutions of democracy. It was powerful but, in its existing form, would 
never be in power.
The movement's momentum disguised a diversity of interests. It covered over 
cracks in the coalition. And it allowed for the absence of both leadership 
and a cogent philosophy to inspire followship. Hypothetically, the original 
series had suggested in a throwaway line that the movement could be 
derailed by a global recession or a war. But the one certainty, it said, 
was that anti-globalisation protest was not going away.
Today, nothing is quite so certain. Resuming contact with 
counter-capitalist protesters in the wake of the hijackings, the FT has 
sought to answer the simple question: What now for anti-globalisation? 
Already, parts of the counter-capitalist network are gathering around an 
anti-war message. Dissent in America and Europe has shown itself, even in 
these extraordinary times, to be remarkably robust. Counter-capitalism was 
anyway an international business. America's pain will not silence the 
critics of global capitalism in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. 
Activism will survive.
And yet, the movement, like so much else, will never be the same again.
 From his small terraced home in Oxford, England, George Monbiot has 
emerged over the past few years as one of the celebrities of the 
counter-capitalist circuit in Europe.
Having started out writing about the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea 
and the environmental degradation of the Amazon, he has developed a 
wish-list of global change. He would like to see, among other things, the 
government regain the right to shut down anti-social companies, the 
creation of a directly elected world parliament and a maximum size limit 
for corporations.
But, in the last few weeks, Monbiot knows he cannot do very much about it. 
"Toes are very sensitive right now. We should not be going about treading 
on them," he says.
"We were massively gaining in influence and now we are having to go into 
abeyance."
Activists, who used to relish the rhetoric of revolution and confrontation, 
are now holding their tongues. After the destruction of the Twin Towers, 
icons of American capitalism, something anti-capitalist can so easily smack 
of something anti-American. Talk of "mass mobilisations", "besieging the 
White House" and an "assault on Wall Street" is sooner forgotten now that a 
real battle has begun.
Campaigners have known over the last month that their critique of 
corporate-led globalisation - a world in which companies fuelled by the 
demands of hungry shareholders exploit people, pillage resources and 
capture democratic institutions - will find little sympathy at a time when 
reopening the New York Stock Exchange has been seen as an act of national 
defiance and buying shares an act of patriotism.
Danaher at Global Exchange, who describes himself as a man with "enough 
anger for 10 men", is one of the few sticking with the kind of analysis 
that was commonplace at the beginning of last month.
"Money values got us into this mess," he says. "It is the oil profits in 
the Middle East which meant the US and Russia were prepared to fund these 
people and train these people."
Many others interviewed in the weeks since the attacks on America, though, 
were uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed. Linking globalisation with 
fanatical Islamic terrorism could both cause offence and blur the issues.
Anti-globalisation has essentially been a movement of self-doubt in the 
globalising, capitalist west. With America on the offensive, the 
counter-capitalist movement is in retreat.
But the movement, by its nature, cannot tread water for long. It has 
neither the discipline nor the resources to do nothing and hold itself 
together.
Unlike a political party or a trade union, the anti-globalisation movement 
has no membership to fall back on. It does not have monthly meetings or 
constituency offices to keep its followers on board. It does not have a 
clear leadership to agree or impose a strategy. Nor does it have a 
political programme or politicians to follow.
The anti-globalisation network has been sustained by activism itself. Since 
Seattle in 1999, it has been defined by mass street protests. With each 
mobilisation, activists have had a greater sense of their own power. The 
lists of e-mail addresses of sympathisers have lengthened. The web of 
campaign organisers has spread, gaining more experience and support. The 
ambitions of the movement have increased. And the appetite within the 
media, policy-making circles and the public for their message has grown.
The critics of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had 
secured the right to debate with the leaders of the Bretton Woods 
institutions over the future of the world's financial architecture. 
European leaders were saying it was time to give a fair hearing to the 
Tobin tax, a proposed levy on foreign exchange transactions to help the poor.
Trade negotiators were fretting about the possibility that they would fail 
to launch a new round of liberalisation, as the World Trade Organisation 
was increasingly demonised by unions, environmentalists and human rights 
campaigners. Anti-globalisation activists felt they were winning - or, at 
least, beginning to win.
Those "wins", which were taken for granted at the beginning of last month, 
will have to be fought for all over again. With America and Europe looking 
set for engagement in what could be a lengthy conflict, the mainstream 
appetite and the state's tolerance for street protest is likely to shrink. 
Steve Kretzman, one of the so-called scholar activists of the Washington 
protest scene, says "The attacks will alter the landscape of organising in 
the foreseeable future."
And without mobilisations, counter-capitalists will struggle to keep their 
critique of companies, politicians and political institutions at the top of 
the public agenda.
These days, corporate-led globalisation is not even at the top of the 
activists' agenda. Anti-war is the priority.
The Mobilization for Global Justice, which had been planning the World Bank 
demos, morphed quietly into the Mobilization for Global Peace last month. 
Along the west coast of the US, the well-worn electronic network of 
anti-globalisation activists centred in Berkeley, Portland and Seattle is 
being revived for peace and justice rallies. Over the past few weeks, peace 
rallies in Portland, San Francisco and San Diego alone have drawn thousands 
of people.
In the UK, counter-capitalists such as Monbiot are in the frontline of a 
peace movement that is struggling, so far, to gain mass appeal. Globalise 
Resistance, the group backed by the Socialist Workers party that organised 
transport for hundreds of protesters travelling to Genoa in the summer, 
gathered about 1,500 people just over a fortnight ago to the first anti-war 
rally at Friends Meeting House in London. Since then, plans for peace 
demonstrations each Tuesday outside the UK prime minister's Downing Street 
residence in London have attracted small numbers.
Some who count themselves as Wombles - the White Overalls Movement Building 
Libertarian Effective Struggle - are planning a protest at Menwith Hill, 
the UK base for US surveillance equipment.
In many parts of the US and Europe, the anti-globalisation movement looks 
as though it is changing into an anti-war movement.
This is, perhaps, inevitable. Activists need to be active. Critics of the 
system do not like to be silent. And, for many, it is a matter of 
conscience: war is against their pacificist principles or their most 
pragmatic assessment of the situation - a wave of violence in response to 
the attacks on America can only create a new generation of martyrs and 
swell the ranks of willing suicide bombers, they say. Being anti-war, they 
tell you, is not an alternative to anti-globalisation, but a complement to 
it. It is born of the same compassion that prompted them to care about 
poverty, degradation and exploitation in the developing world in the first 
place.
But, as a strategy, anti-war activism is risky. It further distracts public 
attention from complicated counter-capitalist issues. And it threatens to 
expose as a weakness the diversity that until now has been the movement's 
greatest strength.
The rapidly gathering momentum of counter-capitalist protest over the last 
two years obscured the faultlines within the movement. The coalition of 
steelworkers and environmentalists, captured by the Teamsters and Turtles 
in Seattle, always looked odd. The World Bank and the IMF may not seem an 
obvious target for the AFL-CIO. But organised labour in America was 
determined to be astride the biggest wave of political activism in a 
generation and sponsored the planned demonstrations in Washington.
American labour, though, is not likely to sign up for an anti-war movement. 
As one Green activist puts it: "There will be some of the same people who 
were into anti-globalisation and are now involved in anti-war. But labour 
will be nowhere to be seen. Labour will be rallying around the flag."
The proponents of trade liberalisation, free markets and western liberalism 
have rallied in response to the assault on America. For them, capitalism no 
longer needs to be explained, it needs to be defended.
Robert Zoellick, the US trade negotiator, has argued that America should 
combat terror with trade. Those who feared anti-globalisation activism 
could act as a brake on the WTO's efforts to launch a new trade round now 
feel the activists can be ignored.
The coalition of counter-capitalists now faces a more energised and 
determined capitalist establishment than before. Keeping the coalition 
together while pursuing an anti-war agenda promises to be more difficult.
This is not only true between Greens and Blues, environmentalists and 
labour. In the past couple of years, some say much like 1968, activists in 
Europe and America have had a sense that they have been marching side by 
side. The sense now is that this moment has passed.
Across activist groups in Europe and the US, the message is the same: We 
are not sure exactly how things will go from here. But we are not going 
away. Over the months ahead, the calendar is full: the European Union 
summit in Belgium at the end of the year; the World Social Forum in Porto 
Allegre in January; the Rio-plus-10 environmental summit in Johannesburg in 
the middle of next year.
"The spirit is not flagging," says Susan George, intellectual grandmother 
of the movement in Europe. "It may be harder, but our message is even more 
necessary now. It is one of greater equality and solidarity between north 
and south."
Just as Ms George keeps burrowing away at the system, counter-capitalism 
remains doggedly what it was. It is still the Fifth Estate, a check on the 
excesses and inadequacies of global capitalism. Much like the media - the 
Fourth Estate - it is not always a force for good. It is riddled with 
egotism and petty politics. Its actions are sometimes misinformed, 
sometimes misjudged. It has an inflated sense of its own importance. Its 
targets keep changing and growing.
And it has been robbed of its momentum. Counter-capitalism was not just a 
movement, it was a mood. Its main platform - the street - is not as open as 
it was. Its message, always complicated, is now much more loaded. Its 
audience - politicians, the press and the public - are seriously 
distracted. And its funding base, already tiny, threatens to shrivel as 
charitable foundations and philanthropists see their fortunes shrink with 
the stock market.
As it has done before, it is going to have to reinvent itself. "The 
globalisation movement has been struck a blow, but not a mortal blow," says 
Danaher, the defiant activist who is still planning for a global day of 
action to protest against the WTO, even if it is not a march on Wall Street.
"We were damaged, but not irreparably. The movement is getting back on its 
feet. For a while, we were drowned out, but we are finding our voice."
Contact James Harding at james.harding@ft.com


Mario Pianta
Universita' di Urbino e
ISRDS-CNR, Via De Lollis 12, 00185 Roma, Italy
tel. (39) 06 44879207, fax 06 4463836, e-mail pianta@isrds.rm.cnr.it