Something is Happening, Mr. Bush

By Tom Barry
August 2001

0108backlash.pdf

"You know something is happening here. But you don't know what it is. " Do you, Mr. Bush?

Something is happening. It took Seattle for the global elite to notice, and this rumbling doesn't sound like it's going away. Whenever the lords of capital or the sovereigns of the wealthiest nations meet, they face the same signs of frustration, alienation, and outrage. Smashed ATM machines, purple hair, anarchist street fighters, police barricades, and increasing numbers of peaceful protestors laying siege to the meetings of those involved in global economic governance are the signs of this backlash against globalization.

Like Bob Dylan's bewildered Mr. Jones wandering helplessly through the sixties, Bush doesn't have a clue about what's really going on.

Bush lives in a timeless world where wealth and power dictate policy--and where the poor will always be with us and what's good for Enron, Exxon, or Company X (as long as it's a major campaign contributor) is good for America and the world. He was born into this bubble of privilege, and has floated above the movements and issues of our times unaffected. During the sixties, the young Mr. Bush kept to his bubble--a witless aristocrat unmoved intellectually or emotionally by the cultural, social, and political upheaval that seized America. During the siege of Genoa, Bush caught a glimpse of a new wave of social tumult. But he mistakenly dismissed the upheaval as the protestors' failure to appreciate the many benefits of the new global capitalist free-for-all.

Unlike his predecessor, also an America-First free trader, President Bush doesn't understand that new times need new rules. Apparently, he fails to see that the rising backlash against the dogma of corporate globalization has deep roots--not only in the industrialized world but also in the less developed world. It's a backlash fed by consumer alienation, but also one egged on by increasing job insecurity and vanishing social-welfare nets. Although self-interest is at play, the Northern globalization backlash is also swept forward by a new internationalist wave of empathy and solidarity. In the South, there are no Black Block bands smashing ATM machines and tossing firebombs, as there were in Genoa. But Bush's handlers would do well to point the president's attention to the rising social unrest in Latin America and remind him of the black-masked zapatistas' rejection of NAFTA.

Seeing the future, Clinton knew that the time had come for some integration of social issues--mainly labor standards and environmental protection--into the trade arena. Bush, on the other hand, sets an unwavering course: free trade fast-tracked and straight forward, without any social modifications. It's what big business wants; it's what he expects.

As president, Clinton had a clue of the havoc unmitigated free trade could wreak. But the "something that is happening" won't go away even with social clauses in trade accords or with labor and environmental side agreements, as in NAFTA. The protestors who besiege the institutions of global economic governance--as they will again this fall in Washington at the World Bank/IMF annual meetings--represent the activist manifestation of a rumbling of discontent spreading around the globe. What's happening is a rejection of a new world order shaped by corporate priorities--combined with a faith in the global community's ability to chart a better way toward protecting our common environment and securing our common good.

What's really annoying is not that Mr. Bush doesn't know what's happening. It's that he doesn't seem to care, or even want to know. It's challenging enough for him to remember his script.

(Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org> is codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus and a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center.)