>Brothers: Here is a copy of the most recent manifesto. If you want to make
further changes please advise within two months. Hope you are well, Dave.

>DRAFT
>
>The Call of Peoples?Global Action against "Free" Trade and the WTO
>People from all over the world have met in Geneva 23-25 of February with the
>four following points of departure and agreed to the Peoples' Global Action
>Manifesto:
>
>POINTS OF DEPARTURE
>a clear rejection of the WTO and other liberalization fora; 
>a confrontational attitude; 
>a call to non-violent civil disobedience and to the construction of local
>alternatives by local populations; 
>decentralization and autonomy as organizational principles
>
>PEOPLES?GLOBAL ACTION MANIFESTO
>I
>We live in a time in which international agencies such as the World Trade
>Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank
>(WB) and other institutions are deploying new strategies to globalize
>capital, affecting political, economic and cultural life.
>Capital however has always been global. Its boundless drive for profit
>making and expansion does not recognize any limit. The only limit it
>recognizes is the one people compel it to.
>From the slave trade of earlier centuries to the imperial colonization of
>peoples lands and cultures across the globe, capitalist accumulation has
>always fed on the blood and tears of the peoples of the world.
>Today, a new strategy is deployed. Its name is globalization. It spreads
>through the fabric of societies and communities of the world seeking to
>integrate their peoples into a gigantic system whose sole purpose is the
>extraction of profit and the accumulation of capital. In this sense
>therefore, globalization implies the further dismantling of barriers to the
>free movement of capital
>The consequences of globalization are disastrous for the peoples of all
>countries: falling wages, unemployment and landlessness, cuts in social
>services, lack of job security, peasants driven off their land, the maximum
>exploitation of laborers all over the world, the destruction of
>underprivileged communities and nation-states, illiteracy, health
>deterioration, the pollution of the environment, etc. This process attacks
>the most elementary human rights. International capital’s domination of the
>markets of the world is foreclosing the development of self-reliant
economies.
>
>The newest and perhaps the most important phenomenon in this globalization
>process is the emergence of trade agreements as key instruments of economic
>liberalization. The WTO is by far the most important institution for
>evolving and implementing these trade agreements. As the organization of the
>multilateral trading system, the WTO has in fact become transnational
>capital’s vehicle of choice for organizing and enforcing global economic
>governance. The Uruguay Round vastly expanded the scope of the multilateral
>trading system so that it no longer constitutes only trade in manufactured
>goods. It now also includes trade in agriculture, trade in investment and
>services, privatization, intellectual property rights, and investment
>measures. The WTO agreements also have the most significant implications for
>non-economic matters. For example, the services agreement and the specific
>agreements on communications and information technology would have
>far-reaching effects on the cultures around the world. All this has
>tremendous impact on the shaping of national and economic social policies,
>the scope and nature of development options, equity, the marginalization of
>persons, and local and national sovereignty. 
>The TRIPs (Trade Related Intellectual Property) agreement and bilateral
>pressures especially on bio-rich countries as also on industrialized
>countries are forcing them to adopt global intellectual property rights over
>life and biological resources. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are
>threatening biodiversity and food security. We oppose corporate monopolies'
>control of seed, medicines and traditional knowledge systems and patenting
>of all life forms.
>The WTO is linked to other international financial institutions promoting
>globalization which have serious social, economic and political impacts.
>"The economic programs of the IMF and the World Bank are immoral; they
>deserve our condemnation for they do not care about the suffering of the
>people," says Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. As Eduardo Galeano of
>Uruguay says, "We cannot take communion from the altars of a dominant
>culture which confuses price with value and converts people and countries
>into merchandise."
>At the regional level, trade agreements are also proliferating. NAFTA is a
>prototype of a regional legally-binding agreement involving privileged and
>underprivileged countries, and its model may be extended to South America.
>APEC is another model with both kinds of countries involved. The Maastricht
>Treaty is of course the main example of a legally-binding agreement among
>privileged countries. Regional trade agreements among underprivileged
>countries, such as ASEAN, SADC, SAFTA and MERCOSUR, have also emerged. 
>As though this was not enough, a new treaty is being promoted by the
>privileged countries, the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, MAI, to
>widen the rights of foreign investors far beyond their current positions in
>most countries and to severely curtail the rights and powers of governments
>to regulate the entry, establishment and operations of foreign companies and
>investors. This is currently also the most important attempt to extend
>globalization and "economic liberalization." MAI would abolish the power and
>the legitimate sovereign right of states and peoples to determine their own
>economic, social, and cultural policies, without which underprivileged
>countries cannot protect their local firms, their local farms, and their
>public sectors. 
>The dominant state-corporate powers, determined to further impair the
>productive capacity of underprivileged countries, are demanding the
>reduction or elimination of the powers of states to restrict imports while
>they are restricting exports to "privileged" countries.
>All these trade arrangements are marginalizing traditional and small
>producers in both unprivileged and privileged countries, creating markets
>catering to their elites, and resulting in widespread poverty, hunger, and
>all the possible consequences like further discrimination and oppression of
>women, child labor, bonded labor, and other social debasements, ending most
>probably in the extermination of millions of people around the developing
world.
>The effects of trade liberalization are not restricted to the countries on
>the peripheries of the privileged nations?spheres. The dominant powers,
>driven by the lure of cheap labor, the appeal to them of weak or
>non-existent labor and environmental regulations, aversion to taxes, and
>lust for profit, are increasing the mobility of capital, goods and services
>thus permitting transnational corporations to pit working peoples of all
>countries one against the other. Capital does not only move from
>"privileged" to "underprivileged" countries. Sometimes the opposite movement
>occurs and often capital flows within each group of countries, although the
>share of capital transfer within rich countries is by far the greatest. The
>effects of this process in the wealthy countries are multiple and deeply
>interlinked: the destruction of social services, the disappearance of the
>bargaining power of workers, the corruption of democratic elections with
>corporate money, and the complete subordination of policy-makers to the will
>of industrialists and financiers. The globalization of misery is also
>happening within the richer countries. This constant blackmail promoted by
>capital mobility that goes under the name of "competitiveness" and
>"flexibility" is imposing a downwards race in social and labor conditions.
>In addition, in all countries jobs are destroyed by the introduction of new
>technologies.
>II
>After talking and listening to each other assembled in Geneva for the first
>conference of Peoples?Global Action, we tick off together, area by area,
>the further calamities of WTO and other institutions?strategies of
>globalization for people and the earth.
>Gender and the attack on women 
>Globalization and neoliberal trade arrangements build on and increase
>existing inequalities including gender inequality. The gendered system of
>power in most traditional systems as well as in the globalized economy
>encourages the exploitation of women as workers, as maintainers of the
>family and as sexual beings. The worldwide trade in women’s bodies has
>become a major element of world commerce and includes children as young as
>10. Forced out of their homelands by the poverty caused by globalization,
>women seek employment in foreign countries, often as illegal immigrants,
>subjected to terrifying working conditions and insecurity. 
>Women are expected to be actors only in their own households. Although this
>has never been the case, this expectation has been used to deny women a role
>in public affairs. Economic systems make use of these gender roles to
>sometimes identify women as the cause of environmental destruction . Women
>having too many babies rather than the people of the north consuming too
>many resources is seen as the cause: Since women are not supposed to work
>outside the home, they can be paid less, and this cheap labor drives down
>all wages. Women are responsible for creating, educating, feeding, clothing
>and disciplining young people to prepare them to become part of the labor
>force. Women’s knowledge, which has often meant the survival of their
>communities, is not valued and is ignored. Western science and academics
>have rejected women’s knowledge, creating economic and social programs that
>effectively destroy it. 
>Patriarchy and the gender system rest firmly on the idea of the naturalness
>and exclusivity of heterosexuality. Social systems and structures reject any
>other form of sexual expression or activity. Violence against women and
>against gays, lesbians and bisexual must be stopped. The elimination of
>patriarchy and the end of gender discrimination requires an open commitment
>to the protection of sexual diversity as a human right. It is vital that
>those resisting WTO and other international financial institutions and
>agreements understand and confront the exploitation and marginalization of
>women. We need to develop new economic and political models that represent
>real alternatives to these old and new forms of oppression.
>The indigenous people fight for survival
>Indigenous peoples and nationalities oppose and fight the neoliberal
>globalization project as an instrument of transnational and financial
>capital for neo-colonization and extermination. These new actors of the
>globalization process are violently invading the last refuges of indigenous
>peoples, violating their territories, habitats and resources, destroying
>their ways of life, and in many cases perpetrating their genocide.
>Corporations are stealing ancient knowledge and patenting this knowledge for
>their own gain and profit. This will mean that indigenous people and the
>rest of humanity will have to pay for the access to this knowledge that has
>been commodified. The fights of indigenous peoples to defend their lands and
>their forms of living, are leading to a growing repression against them,
>causing them to sacrifice their lives or their liberty. 
>Onslaught on nature and agriculture
>Land, water, forest, wildlife, aquatic life, mineral resources are not
>commodities, but our life support. For decades the powers that have emerged
>from money and market have swelled their profits and tightened their control
>of politics and economics by usurping these resources at the cost of the
>lives and livelihoods of vast majorities within nations around the world.
>For decades the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, acting through corporate
>powers, in alliance with nation-state governments, have facilitated
>maneuverings to appropriate the environment. The result is environmental
>devastation, tragic and unmanageable social displacement, and the wiping out
>of cultural and bio-diversity, much of that lost beyond regeneration or
>replenishment or compensation to those reliant on it.
>The complicated words invented by the corporate and financial
>powers?globalization," "liberalization," "privatization"—just disguise the
>growing disparities in living conditions between elites and masses in both
>"modernized" and "peripheral" countries. Within and between countries these
>disparities have widened and deepened as the rich spirit away the natural
>resources from communities and farmers, farm laborers, fishworkers, tribal
>and indigenous populations, women, the socially disadvantaged—beating down
>into the earth the already downtrodden.
>The centralized and non-sustainable management of natural resources imposed
>by environmental trade clauses violates the laws of underprivileged
>countries. The self-righteous international agreements and conventions
>ratified by the same powers also facilitate their own agenda: to accumulate
>wealth and power. Not just contemporary, but even intergenerational
>sustainability is seriously threatened.
>Waging struggles against the global capitalist paradigm, the underprivileged
>work towards the regeneration of their natural heritage and the rebuilding
>of integrated egalitarian communities. Our vision is of a decentralized
>economy and polity based on communities?rights to natural resources and to
>plan their own development, with equality and self-reliance as the basic
>values. In place of the distorted priorities imposed through global designs
>in sectors such as transport, infrastructure, energy,. and energy-intensive
>technology, they assert their right to life in the fulfillment of the basic
>needs of everyone, excluding the greed of the consumerist minority. We are
>determined to disrespect and disobey the imposed laws and agreements of
>globalization, including MAI, and the inhuman systems of the corporate
>world. Respecting traditional knowledge and cultures consonant with the
>values of equality, justice, and sustainability, we are committed to
>evolving creative ways to harness, use, and fairly distribute our natural
>resources. 
>Culture and education.
>Another important aspect of globalization, as orchestrated by WTO and other
>international agencies is the promotion of commercialization and
>commodification of culture, the appropriation of diversity in order to
>co-opt it and integrate it into the process of capitalist accumulation. This
>process of homogenization by the media not only contributes to the breakdown
>of the cultural and social networks in local communities, but also destroys
>the essence and meaning of original culture.
>Education as a tool for social change requires confrontational academics and
>critical educators for all educational systems. Community-based education
>can help link social movements to the learning and to the love of knowledge.
>The right to information is necessary to the work of social movements.
>Limited and unequal access to language skills, especially for women, hinders
>participation in social-change work with other peoples. Building these tools
>is a way to reinforce and rebuild human values. Yet formal education is
>increasingly being commercialized as a vehicle for the market place. This is
>done by corporate investment in research and by the promotion of knowledge
>geared toward skills needed for the market. The domination of mass media
>should be dissolved and the right to reproduce our own knowledges and
>cultures must be supported.
>The content of the present education system is more and more conditioned by
>the demands of production from corporations. The interests and requirements
>of economic globalization are leading to a growing commodification of
>education. The diminishing public budgets in education are promoting private
>schools and universities, and the labor conditions of people working in the
>public education sector are being eroded because of the Structural
>Adjustment Programs. Increasingly, learning is becoming a process that
>intensifies inequalities in societies. Even the public education system, and
>most of all the university, is becoming inaccessible for wide sectors of
>societies. The learning of humanities (history, philosophy, ...) and the
>developing of critical thinking is being dismantled in favor of an education
>subservient to the interests of the globalization process, where competitive
>values are predominant Students increasingly spend more time in learning how
>to compete with each other, rather than enhancing personal growth and
>building critical skills and the potential to transform society.
>Militarization
>The rising globalization process is leading to a complex growing crisis that
>gives rise to widespread tensions and conflicts. The need to deal with this
>increasing disorder is intensifying militarization and repression (more
>police, arrests, jails, prisoners) in our societies. Military institutions
>such as U.S.-dominated NATO, organizing the other main countries in the
>North, are among the main instruments upholding this unequal world order.
>There is also, behind facades of democratic structures, an increasing
>militarization of the states of the less-privileged countries. At the same
>time, the economic interests behind the military-industrial complex, one of
>the main pillars of the global economic system, are increasingly being
>controlled by huge private corporations. The WTO formally leaves defense
>matters to states, but the military sector is also affected by the drive for
>private profit. Mandatory conscription in many countries indoctrinates young
>people into the current structures which legitimate militarism.
>The PGA calls for the dismantling of nuclear and all other weapons of mass
>destruction. The World Court of The Hague has recently declared that nuclear
>weapons violate international law and has called all the nuclear-weapons
>countries to agree to dismantle them. This means that the strategy of NATO,
>based on the possible use of nuclear weapons, amounts to a crime against
>humanity.
>III
>The WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and other institutions that promote
>globalization and liberalization want us to believe in the beneficial
>effects of global competition. To the wide range of demands expressed by our
>different struggles they invariably reply in the same way: continue to
>subordinate your human needs to the needs of the global market. However,
>competition among countries, industries, regions and cities only pits people
>against each other. We have seen enough of this inhuman philosophy. We say
>"Enough!"—we have been forced to pay the consequences. We reject the
>principles of competition and competitiveness as solutions for people's
>problems. Instead we support the principles of mutual co-operation and
>solidarity within a framework of dignity, equality, justice and freedom.
>States are destroying parliamentary democracy by systematically promoting
>corporate power. We want the opposite: full development of democracy. So
>corporations must be systematically disadvantaged until they disappear, and
>state structures transformed to arrive at the full potential of direct
>democracy.
>Nowadays, there are many diverse ways of resistance against the
>globalization process and its consequences. We need to build bridges to
>connect the different social sectors, peoples and organizations that are
>already fighting globalization across the world. In addition, we need to
>transform our daily lives, freeing ourselves from market laws and the
>pursuit of private profit. At the same time, we need to take up activities
>outside waged labor that are essential for human values and solidarity among
>generations, such as caring for children and elderly people.
>We need to develop new structures that will protect the interests of the
>workers and peoples, such as new types of unions, or comparable organized
>structures, that will help excluded people and combat growing job
>insecurity, informal sector economies, and unemployment. We need new types
>of organizations that emphasize that there is no way of solving the problems
>we are facing without questioning the logic of capitalist globalization.
>Such organizations have to be independent of governmental structures,
>autonomous from economic powers, and democratic, promoting the people’s
>participation. These new structures should also be connected to the
>interests of local communities, take into account the defense of the
>environment, and develop international solidarity against globalization. 
>The MAI and WTO agreements give unprecedented rights to transnational
>corporations over people and the environment. These agreements constitute
>direct and indirect violations of basic human rights (including civil,
>political, economic, social, labor and cultural rights) which are codified
>in international law and many national constitutions and ingrained in
>people's understandings of human dignity. Yet nowadays even elected
>governments fail to fulfill their human rights obligations and surrender
>their responsibilities to the transnationals. Deteriorating human rights
>conditions in underprivileged countries are worsened by the policies of
>globalization and liberalization. The US and other industrialized countries
>are fully responsible for this, and hence it is hypocritical of them to use
>human rights and drug issues as non-tariff barriers to trade.
>In every democracy or alleged democracy the consequences of corporate
>domination of the political system are profound. Large corporations are
>top-down, hierarchical, and anti-democratic, dedicated to sucking up wealth
>from people, communities, and nations into the international corporate
>aristocracy. In due course these gigantic companies and the shadowy
>billionaires behind many of them will crush free enterprise and small shops
>and farms. They are the real enemies of economic freedom and that means they
>are the real enemies of political freedom and the people’s rights.
>In spite of increasing protests by affected populations and enlightened
>citizens?groups, corporate and state powers are not relenting. Even
>"democratically" elected governments have been implementing these policies
>without debate among their own peoples or their elected representatives. The
>people are left with no choice but to destroy these trade agreements. 
>The need has become urgent for a coordination of protest and resistance to
>produce concerted action that will dismantle this illegitimate new world
>governing system of giant corporations, nation-states, and transnational
>financial institutions and trade agreements. Only a Global Alliance of
>Peoples?Movements of peasants, workers, indigenous people, women, jobless,
>landless, youth and other unprivileged groups which can facilitate
>action-oriented resistance can defeat this emerging globalized monster.
>Impoverishment of populations is the result of this neo-liberalism,
>empowerment of the peoples and civil society through this Global Alliance of
>Peoples is our only way to justice
>Empowerment also passes through people's control over both consumption and
>production of technology. Technology is not neutral. It is designed,
>promoted, commercialized and imposed to serve the process of capitalist
>globalization. Since the use of technologies has a very important influence
>on the social and individual life, peoples should have free choice over the
>technologies they want to use, free access to and control of these
>technologies. Criteria for these choices is the strengthening of the
>cultural and social integrity of local communities, richer links between
>peoples so that everyone can regain more power over his or her life. Only
>those technologies which can be managed, operated and controlled by local
>people(s) should be considered valid for the areas concerned.
>Also, control of the way technology is designed and produced, its scopes and
>finalities, should be inspired by human principles of solidarity mutual
>cooperation and common sense. Instead, the principles underlying today
>production of technology are exactly the opposite: profit, competition, and
>continuous unnecessary production of obsolescence.
>In the context of governments all over the world collaborating with
>corporate power, the only alternative left for the people is to restore for
>themselves a life free from coercion, domination and exploitation. Direct
>democratic action is hence the only possible way to stop the mischief of
>corporate state power. However we do not judge the use of other forms of
>actions under certain circumstances. 
>We call for people to cooperate against undemocratic development. We call
>for direct confrontation with transnational corporations harnessed to state
>power for short term profit. We commit ourselves to actions in countries all
>over the world simultaneously pressuring and forcing parliaments and
>governments to put social and environmental demands before international
>competition. The struggle for national independence, sovereignty and
>self-determination is a very important part of the fight against
>globalization. People's movements must increasingly fight for national laws
>and regulations which protect the country and its peoples from the
>disastrous effects of globalization. The effect globalization has on states
>making them more repressive against peoples' protests must be met by
>wide-spread mobilization among the majority for human rights and solidarity
>with those directly oppressed. The effect globalization has on states making
>them more liberal towards commercialization of public and private life and
>promoters of a culture of consumerism and corporate interests also in
>education must be reversed .
>Most important is the need to build strength in the work against
>globalization and take direct action. Such democratic action carries with it
>the essence of non-violent civil disobedience to the unjust system. It also
>has the essential element of immediacy. Such necessary actions of protest
>and defense of existing rights and local communities must be combined with
>the constructive building of alternatives and sustainable lifestyles. We
>need a joint search for completely different concepts and alternatives to
>the existing system.
>The need has become urgent for a coordination of protest and resistance to
>produce concerted action that will dismantle this illegitimate new world
>governing system of giant corporations, nation-states, and transnational
>financial institutions and trade agreements. Only a Global Alliance of
>Peoples?Movements which can facilitate action-oriented resistance can
>defeat this emerging globalized monster. Impoverishment of populations is
>the result of this neo-liberalism. Empowerment of the peoples and civil
>society through this Global Alliance of Peoples is our only way to justice
> 
>We declare the need and intention to organize, through coordination
>respecting decentralized autonomy, a new global peoples?movement of
>independent allies in education and action. Constructive direct action and
>civil disobedience should become the hallmarks of the peoples?alliance. We
>also need to find new ways to link up world peoples on the basis of needs
>rather than profit.
>We assert our will to struggle as peoples against any form of oppression. We
>do not only fight the human wrongs imposed on us. We also are committed to
>building a new world. We are together as human beings and communities, our
>unity deeply rooted in diversity. Together we shape a vision of a just world
>and begin to build that true prosperity which comes from natural bounty,
>human empowerment, dignity and freedom. 
>WORKING DRAFT Peoples?Global Action Manifesto DATE 03/03/98