Area

Derail the WTO; linking anti-war and anti-corporate globalization movements; challenging corporate imperial power on both military and economic fronts.

Description

We are proposing a major uniting of the movements for peace and justice and the movements against corporate globalization. This campaign would be launched by a global day of action to Oppose War and Globalization while the World Trade Organization meets in Cancún, Mexico, on September 13th, 2003.

Goals

1) Build united mass social movement by bringing together the global anti-war and anti-corporate globalization movements through a massive day of action that would demonstrate the links between military and economic war and our global resistance to the WTO and imperialism.

2) Derail the WTO by influencing the last minute back-room deal-making - and backing up resistance of poor governments within the negotiating chambers!!

Activities

Massive Global Mobilizations on September 13th Against Globalization and War.

Massive public education about the links between economic and military war.

Messages

United, the vast majority of the peoples of this planet say: NO TO WAR, END THE TYRANNY OF FREE TRADE AND THE WTO, NO TO THE FTAA, ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Challenge

The WTO Ministerial will take place in the context of escalating US military aggression against the peoples and nations of the world. Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq is simply the latest and most outrageous case of the Bush administration's unrestrained unilateralist foreign policy. The WTO is war by other means. The WTO represents the most ambitious effort to resubjugate the economies of the countries of the South to serve the interests of transnational corporations. The neoliberal, free-trade paradigm incarnated in the WTO subverts the interests of people both in the South and the North. Its legacy is greater poverty, inequity, gender inequality, and indebtedness throughout the world. Gaining more rights for corporations and eroding the rights of people and the planet are major platforms of the Bush administration's agenda in the WTO, and they must be stopped.

Constituencies

This call is being put out by major world networks against globalization and imperialism, including, but not limited to: the Our World Is Not For Sale network (a grouping of hundreds of organizations across the globe working to derail the WTO for almost a decade); the Continental Campaign Against the FTAA/Hemispheric Social Alliance (the hemispheric grouping of anti-FTAA forces); the Mexican Organizing Space Towards Cancún (about 100 Mexican organizations working against the WTO meeting in Cancún) and the Comité Bienvenidos a Cancún, the local coalition in the Cancún area. These networks include the majority of peasant movements, worker's rights groups, churches, student organizations, and environmentalists working on these issues around the world - particularly in the global South.

Long Term

This action will grow our movement significantly, both in terms of number of people and in terms of connections and analysis. Many of us have been searching for months for a concrete strategy to link the two movements, and demonstrate how the agendas of global military domination and global economic domination are two sides of the same imperial coin. This is the first global call that definitively links the two, in the context of the meeting of the secret global government (the WTO.) In addition, doubtlessly, there are many who will say that the WTO, as a multilateral entity, is a solution to the unilateralism of the US imperial agenda. We need to frame the issue so that the media and public understand that they are but two sides of the same coin, and that the WTO is NOT the solution to Bush's imperial power grab.

Dates/Places

September 7-14: International Week of Action (networks in different countries organize actions as they see fit during the week, for example, Grito de los Excluidos on Sept 7th in 3,000 cities in Brazil.)

September 9-14: People's Forum for Alternatives to the WTO, in Cancún. (Official forum is Sept 10-14)

September 9: Global Day of Action against the WTO. These are intended to be non-violent actions/demos/activities/teach-ins, etc. aimed at pressuring national governments attending the WTO to truly represent the interests of their constituencies, as the delegates leave for Cancún. Also for social movements and NGO's to frame WTO issues from our perspective for the media and general public.

September 13: MAIN DAY- Global Day of Action Against Globalization and War. Massive marches and rallies in cities across the globe to demonstrate our opposition to corporate globalization and war. This date is key, because it will be the final day of arm-twisting and backroom 'consensus-building' before the declaration of the 'success's of the round is to be announced on the 14th. In Seattle, it was the day before the final closing that the developing countries pulled out of the declaration, citing a lack of democracy and participation in decision-making, and empowered by days of street protests in Seattle.

Comments

Global social movements and networks have been discussing these dates and plans around the WTO meetings, at least since Porto Alegre. In May, the groups making the call met in Mexico City and finally decided on the most strategic dates. In most countries, the organizations working against the war are the exact same ones organizing against the WTO (and FTAA.) In the US, while there is major overlap, many people and groups feel like we are not making the links enough between military and economic war. This Call to Action provides the perfect opportunity to bring our social movements for peace and justice together into a global network. We need the support of United for Peace and Justice to ensure that it is really a coalition effort among anti-war and anti-corporate globalization movements in the US, and ensure its success both, in Derailing the WTO and in building a movement for Another World Is Possible.

Submitted By

Name: Deborah James
Organization: Global Exchange (Call to action by Our World Is Not For Sale Network, the Continental Campaign Against the FTAA, the Mexican Organizing Space and the Comité Bienvenidos a Cancún.)
City, ST: San Francisco, CA
Email: deborah@globalexchange.org
Tel: 415.575.5537
Delegate(s) attending: Medea Benjamin and Andrea Buffa

Area

Peace Assemblies Campaign: long-term community building and organizing

Description

A campaign to involve a broad base of people in envisioning what real peace and security would look like in our towns and neighborhoods, to strengthen and create links between UFPJ and community based organizations, and begin to develop and demonstrate institutions of direct democracy that could impact both future crises and the upcoming elections.

Goals

1) Move the peace movement from reaction to a proactive stance.

2) Strengthen our local bases and involve a broad range of groups.

3) Develop a permanent base of grassroots people prepared to organize and take action quickly when crises develop.

4) Develop an alternative governance.

Activities

To organize public support for these demands and apply pressure on decision-makers to support this proposal.

The campaign would involve: networking with existing local groups to call for a series of town meetings or peace assemblies, somewhat on the model of the neighborhood assemblies that have sprung up in Argentina after the collapse of the government, transforming rallies and actions into forums in which people can gather and talk to each other, developing a structure to collect and share ideas and projects from various groups, developing alternative peace platforms and challenging candidates to adopt them, offering training and support in organizing, strategizing, action planning and decision-making processes for groups to build a broad-based capacity for democracy that could become an alternative power base in both electoral and non-electoral political processes. The campaign would build toward and national assembly, perhaps on July 4, 2004 a counter-convention that would pre-empt both the party conventions and set a peoples' agenda.

Messages

The recent war has demonstrated to millions of Americans that our democratic institutions are no longer functioning. (Just in case that wasn't clear before.) The peace movement is visionary and proactive, returning true democracy to its roots in popular assemblies. Democracy is not a spectator sport: it requires involvement and participation which can also be empowering and inspiring.

Challenge

The Bush forces are not doing "politics as usual", and neither should we. We will be stronger and more effective if we can move out of the reactive mode and expand beyond our usual repertoire of rallies and marches and blockades (although we should also do those when necessary!). And we need to be proactive in thinking about how to deal with the elections of 2004, or they will suck away energy and momentum from the movement. We also need to develop an ongoing power base that can interface with both electoral and non-electoral campaigns.

Constituencies

Community based organizations, which would broaden the racial diversity of the movement. Faith based organizations, labor, neighborhood associations, churches, family farmers. This campaign would also have appeal to the environmental and bioregional movements, and to the "cultural creatives" of the New Age movement who are often reluctant to get involved in protest. It could cut across political lines and involve many mainstream Americans.

Long Term

It would create an ongoing, permanent base of people ready to be mobilized around peace and justice issues. It would establish UFPJ as a creative, visionary coalition that can break new political ground, and potentially broaden the base of the movement.

Dates/Places

July 4, 2004.

Submitted By

Name: Starhawk and Lisa Fithian
Organization: RANT
City, ST:
Email: stella@mcn.org, fithianl@ogc.org
Tel: 415-640-5872, 213-840-1972
Delegate(s) attending: Starhawk, Lisa Fithian

Area

Globalization and Empire

Description

A campaign of resistance to corporate globalization, the economic front of the Bush Administration's empire-building war against the world.

Goals

1) To raise popular awareness of the links between the military and economic dimensions of Bush's empire-building agenda.

2) To stop the corporate globalization policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and prevent the adoption of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (FTAA).

3) To build unity between the global justice and anti-war movements in the United States.

4) To strengthen the relationship between progressive forces in the United States and grassroots resistance movements around the world, particularly in the Global South.

Activities

Summer and Fall Educational Campaigns: Over the summer, UFPJ would develop a series of accessible, readable outreach materials that draw the links between corporate globalization and the Bush doctrine of permanent war, and work to disseminate them as widely as possible through coordinated days of leafleting and tabling in communities around the country. UFPJ would intensify this popular education campaign in the fall, by organizing forums, teach-ins, and similar events to deepen understanding of the connections between military and economic empire.

September 13 Protests Against Globalization and War: UFPJ would organize a nationally coordinated day of local actions against globalization and war on September 13, anchored by a major UFPJ-organized protest in either New York or Washington, D.C. September 13 has already been designated as a "Day of Massive Demonstrations Against Globalization and War" by both the Hemispheric and Global Assembly against the FTAA and the WTO and the Jakarta Peace Conference. This date falls during the next ministerial meeting of the WTO, which will take place in Cancun, Mexico, from September 9-13.

November 17-23 Mobilization Against the FTAA and the School of the Americas: UFPJ would undertake a major grassroots campaign to mobilize support for the protests against the November 17-21 FTAA summit in Miami and the November 22-23 actions to close the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, GA. The Miami summit will launch the final round of negotiations for the FTAA, an agreement that would extend the disastrous free-trade policies of NAFTA to the entire hemisphere (minus Cuba); major protests are already being planned throughout the summit by groups ranging from the Citizens Trade Campaign to Jobs With Justice.

Messages

The Bush doctrine of permanent warfare and preemptive unilateralism uses military means to advance an empire-building agenda that is economic at its core, designed to promote the interests of global corporations at the expense of democracy, human rights, workers' rights, and the environment. "Free trade" is economic warfare on a global scale.

Challenge

The neoliberal "free-trade" agenda, which attacks democratic institutions and basic human rights in order to all protect the "right" of corporations to exploit the people and resources of the world, is the linchpin of the Bush Administration quest for empire. Challenging this economic agenda is challenging the very substance of this new vision of empire, a brutal and inhumane expansion of global capital backed by U.S. military force.

Constituencies

Within the United States, this campaign would enable us to build a strategic alliance with the global justice movement and to strengthen ties with labor and the environmental movement. It would also strengthen our bonds of solidarity with grassroots progressive movements around the world, particularly in the Global South, which already view economic and military empire as inextricably linked.

Long Term

Ultimately, we cannot successfully fight the Bush Administration's military agenda without also confronting its economic agenda, both domestically and abroad. This campaign moves us in the direction of a unified strategy for fighting the worldwide assault on democracy, and helps build the alliances we need to achieve our goals of ending the doctrine of permanent warfare and reversing the course of empire.

Comments

For more information, see
http://www.lasolidarity.org
http://www.flfairtrade.org/
http://www.focusweb.org/
http://espora.org/cancun03/ (Spanish language)
http://www.cancuncommittee.org (Spanish language)
http://www.citizenstrade.org
http://www.tradewatch.org
http://www.globalexchange.org
http://www.miamiftaa.org (under construction)

Submitted By

Name: L.A. Kauffman, Lisa Fithian
Organization: United for Peace & Justice, Root Activist Network of Trainers (RANT)
City, ST: New York, NY; Austin, TX
Email: lak@unitedforpeace.org, fithianl@igc.org
Tel: 212-603-3700, 512-443-7575
Delegate(s) attending: L.A. Kauffman, Lisa Fithian

Area

Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and related trade agreements

Description

This is a campaign to stop the FTAA. The FTAA is a proposed trade agreement which would extend NAFTA concepts to the entire Western Hemisphere except Cuba, force privatization of services and deregulation of labor and environmental laws. The strategy would be to participate in national and international movements as explained below.

Goals

1) Stop the FTAA and other free trade agreements (Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), General Agreement on Trade in Services) from being adopted in Congress.

2) Make the connection between militarism and corporate globalization and create an alliance between the anti-war and global justice movements.

Activities

1) Popular education on the connections between militarization and coporate globalization (tabling, teach-ins, literature).

2) Popular referendum on the FTAA through distribution of ballots (available from Jobs with Justice, AFL-CIO, Witness for Peace).

3) Mobilize for social forum and protest against the FTAA ministerial meeting in Miami, FL Nov. 20-21, and support local solidarity events.

Messages

1) Militarism and corporate globalization are two arms of US empire building.

2) The FTAA would strengthen corporate power by undermining democracy, human rights, labor rights, environmental protection and increase poverty and displacement of people, especially people of color.

3) Militarism and police repression will be necessary to enforce this reactionary agenda.

4) Militarization is currrently being used to repress the many peaceful social movements which oppose economic policies like the FTAA, particularly in Colombia.

Challenge

The next FTAA ministerial meeting is in Nov. 2003, CAFTA will be voted on in Congress perhaps in the beginning of 2004, and the FTAA may be decided on in 2005.

Constituencies

Global justice activists, young people, Latin American solidarity organizations, Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, Citizen Trade Campaign.

Long Term

Defeating FTAA will allow people throughout the hemisphere to retain their rights and their sovereignty, thereby eliminating conditions for injustice, which are also conditions for conflict and war.

Dates/Places

Miami, FL Nov. 20-21 is the eighth ministerial meeting of FTAA (protest in Miami and local solidarity protests throughout the US); CAFTA voted on early in 2004; FTAA voted on in 2005.

Comments

Submitted By

Name: Duncan McFarland
Organization: Boston Fair Trade Action; New England AFSC; Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace
City, ST: Boston, MA
Email: duncan.mcfarland@na.sappi.com
Tel: 617-628-0610
Delegate(s) attending: Duncan McFarland

Area

Global Justice/Anti-globalization

Description

We propose that United for Peace and Justice endorse, support and mobilize for major upcoming global justice summits, and make clear connections between the issues of war and global economic issues.

Goals

1) To undermine and delegitimize the institutions and trade agreements that enforce a neoliberal economic agenda on the world.

2) To envision and begin to build alternative economic institutions based on justice and sustainability.

Activities

Major mobilizations are already underway for key dates this year. They involve a full range of activities from teach-ins, forums, conferences, rallies, marches, and nonviolent direct action.

Messages

War is the enforcement of a larger, unjust economic system.

Challenge

Thomas Friedman wrote: "The hidden hand of the market requires the hidden fist." Bush's wars and US military power are the fist--but what they enforce is a larger, underlying system of economic exploitation that turns every global resource and area of human endeavor into a an arena of profit making. Unless we confront the underlying economic system, we will endlessly be challenging one war after another. The summits and institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are pressure points where the system becomes visible and can be challenged.

Constituencies

The vast global justice movement around the world, ranging from the NGOs to direct action groups. Thousands of groups in the Third World who have been organizing on these issues for decades: from Via Campesina to the Zapatistas. The labor movement. The unemployed. Immigrants1 movements. The disenfranchised poor and middle class in the US who see their own economic security slipping away.

Long Term

In the short run, it might seem more difficult to organize people around these more complex economic issues than around peace. But in the long run, we need to make these connections and contest the underlying disease, not just the symptoms. We need to challenge the underlying causes of war and the attendant systems of social control that limit our rights if we are to change these conditions. Exposing the underlying economic interests behind war can delegitimize most of the justifications for it.

Dates/Places

June 20-25, Sacramento: Mobilization against the Agricultural Mini-Ministerial pushing biotech and industrial agriculture as a lead-up to the WTO Cancun meeting.

September 10-15, Cancun: WTO ministerial meeting mobilization.

November 19-21, Miami: (Also linked to Fort Benning School of the Americas Protest November 22-23). FTAA summit mobilization.

Comments

We're not proposing UFPJ organize these actions--they are already being organized, but rather endorse and mobilize for them, and lend support in whatever forms are needed and that we can offer--funding, fundraising, organizing help, media help, etc.

Submitted By

Name: Starhawk and Lisa Fithian
Organization: RANT
City, ST:
Email: stella@mcn.org
Tel: 415-640-5872, 213-840-1972
Delegate(s) attending: Starhawk and Lisa Fithian

Area

Global Economic Justice as a Tool to Resist Global Militarism

Description

This campaign undermines the economic basis for US military intervention by compelling the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, through a strategy of combined financial and political pressure, to change their policies that force countries to restructure their economies to benefit Western, particularly US, multinational corporations.

Goals

The goals of this campaign are two-fold:

1) To assist a process of economic recovery in Iraq from a decade of war and sanctions that is democratically controlled by Iraqi people, and conducted in their own interests, free from the often disastrous intervention of unaccountable global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which would restructure Iraq's economy to benefit multinational corporations.

2) To extend the campaign against these global institutions beyond Iraq by endorsing the World Bank Bond Boycott (WBBB) campaign. The WBBB campaign is a worldwide campaign that makes use of a little-known fact about the Bank - that they raise a large share of their funds by selling bonds - to put financial and political pressure on the World Bank by getting institutional investors such as cities and towns, churches, and universities to pledge not to purchase World Bank bonds. The endorsement of the WBBB campaign by UFPJ will be symbolic (since UFPJ does not have an investment portfolio!), but the symbolism will be very powerful, since UFPJ carries a lot of moral weight nationwide. An endorsement from UFPJ will be immensely helpful to win future boycott resolutions in cities and religious institutions, particularly.

Activities

1) The first element of this campaign, i.e. resisting the entry of the World Bank and IMF into Iraq, will entail a legislative and media campaign highlighting the disastrous role of the IMF and Bank worldwide, and making the case that they are unfit to assist Iraq's recovery. Additionally, teach-ins, petitions, and other means of grassroots outreach may be utilized to spread awareness about the issue. Any further information and assistance that UFPJ will need in pursuing this campaign can be provided by nationwide organizations like Fifty Years is Enough (www.50years.org) and Jubilee USA (www.jubileeusa.org).

2) The second element of the campaign, i.e. endorsing the WBBB, does not necessarily require an ongoing effort on the part of UFPJ nationwide, but rather, entails the one-time effort of passing a resolution and circulating it to local coalitions nationwide who are affiliated with UFPJ. Then, it remains up to the local coalitions to assist local WBBB campaigns to the extent that they can.

Messages

1) The World Bank and IMF worsen global poverty by trapping countries in an unpayable cycle of debt, forcing them to cut back on workers' rights and wages in the name of "labor market flexibility," destroying the agricultural economies of countries by forcing them to open their markets to cheap (often subsidized) food imports from the US, and a host of other highly destructive policies.

2) The World Bank and IMF contribute to an undemocratic, corrupt political structure in poor countries, in which governments are more accountable to Western lenders and banks than they are to their own people.

3) The World Bank and IMF have a dismal track record of destroying the economies of countries - East Asia in the late 1990s, Argentina today, and Mozambique through the 1990s, to name just a few.

Challenge

1) The policies of the IMF and World Bank are an extension through economic means of US global domination, and often serve the same ends. It is clear that major goals of the invasion of Iraq are control of natural resources (oil), and access to markets in the form of contracts for reconstruction and continued operation of Iraqi infrastructure by US multinational corporations. The economic restructuring packages of the IMF and Bank serve these same goals, namely: a) Promoting access of multinational corporations to natural resources, by forcing countries to change laws protecting the environment and indigenous people, and opening up forests and indigenous lands to mining and logging operations. b) Promoting access of multinational corporations to markets, by forcing countries to accept imports of agricultural and consumer goods, which destroy local agriculture and small business.

2) These policies contribute to global militarization. In country after country, these policies have led to massive social unrest, which has been brutally repressed, often with aid from the United Sates: a) In Guatemala, indigenous people resisted the construction of the Chixoy dam in the early 1980s, which would have displaced them from their ancestral lands. The Guatemalan army resorted to massacres of communities resisting displacement. The World Bank had representatives on the ground in Guatemala, who ignored the emerging evidence of massacres and continued to release funds for the project. Till date, the World Bank has refused to accept responsibility and compensate survivors. Recall that Guatemala was ruled by a genocidal military government in the 1980s, and the US was providing them military aid - and the World Bank was freely lending to this same government! b) In Colombia, IMF loan conditions included relaxing the constitutional provisions setting aside land for indigenous people and Afro-Colombians, to provide more access to mining and oil companies. Communities and environmental activists who resisted the take-over of indigenous land for oil drilling and mining were targeted for murder and "disappearance" by right-wing paramilitary forces working closely with the Colombian armed forces. The US is supplying weapons and training to the Colombian armed forces as part of the "war on terror," ignoring evidence of the close links between the military and the paramilitaries, and evidence that the targets of paramilitary violence are not only the FARC guerrillas, but also labor, environmental, and indigenous rights activists. In other words, the Colombian armed forces and paramilitaries are enforcing the economic agenda of the IMF and World Bank, while the US provides the arms and training!

3) Specifically with respect to Iraq, the goal of the Bush administration is very clearly to control the Iraqi economy, and the World Bank and IMF will play a pivotal role in that process of control by trapping the new Iraqi government in debt, and using that debt as leverage to force Iraq to submit to multinational corporate control. A success in this campaign will reduce the levers of control that the Bush administration can have over Iraq.

Constituencies

1) Immigrant constituencies, many of which come from countries that have been devastated by IMF and World Bank "structural adjustment" programs.

2) The global justice movement that has grown in the US since the Seattle protests against the WTO.

3) Labor is a domestic constituency that is largely very supportive of global economic justice, but have historically not been involved in peace activism in a big way. Work on IMF/World Bank issues by UFPJ can be an opening to bring labor deeper into the peace movement.

Long Term

1) By building relationships with vital and diverse constituencies (see above), UFPJ can expand its base for future campaigns.

2) This campaign, if successful, will take a key weapon out of the US arsenal of world domination, which includes not only smart bombs and B-1 bombers, but the IMF, World Bank, and WTO!

Submitted By

Name: Basav Sen, Duncan McFarland
Organization: BankBusters, Somerville-Medford United for Justice with Peace
City, ST: Somerville, MA
Email: basav@igc.org, duncan.mcfarland@na.sappi.com
Tel: 617-645-3028, 617-628-0610
Delegate(s) attending: Duncan McFarland