Around the world, Occupiers sit in their small circles, exercising and evangelizing “direct democracy”, praising localism, and demanding access to power, on the stage of global finance, up where the vultures soar, the horizons of globalism have never been wider.
The tentacles of the Goldman Sachs squid have never been longer; the pockets of JP Morgan have never been deeper. And as the IMF goes on its Austerity Measures world tour, the banks and corporations follow in its deathly wake, hoovering up assets and resources at pennies on the pound. The global fire sale is in full swing.
Meanwhile, transnational capital sits happily offshore, and a good trillion dollars a year is thrown at the Big 4 accountancy firms to keep the taxman baffled.
Angry tents have sprung up in cities round the world, and yet, with all this going on, the global goalposts have been quietly shifted. Think back a decade or so. Remember the phrase “anti-globalization”. Ring any bells? Like the word “deforestation”, it’s been pretty much stripped from the vocabulary of protest.
All the anger at the brutal misuse of lopsided free trade agreements, all the outrage at the violence of transnational financing, has melted away. The placards have been wiped clean. Where they once railed against “globalization”, now they demand “global solutions”. A global movement with global aims, fighting global battles for a global future.
Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen a seismic shift in the ideas of ‘globalism’ and ‘globalization’ from the negative into the positive. At some point between the late 90s and now, Globalization stopped being a dirty word. You can see the shift taking place in the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (2004), which declared: “Many recognize the opportunities for a better life that globalization presents… Our driving spirit has been to make globalization a positive force for all people and countries.”
In March 2010, Gordon Brown said that one of the benefits of a Financial Transactions Tax would be that “the levy should support globalisation.” The idea is a veritable boon. What a difference a decade makes. And it’s not just the politicians who are globalists: activist website Avaaz.org promotes “a vision of globalization with a human face”.
The protesters in Seattle, in 1999, saw globalization very differently. Steve Schifferes of the BBC, in his end of the millennium article ‘Free trade did not have a good year in 1999’, talks of the “mass demonstrations in Seattle” at which: “the consensus that free trade was vital to world economic growth was seriously questioned for the first time in a generation. Demonstrators in Seattle claimed that the World Trade Organisation, the body that regulates world trade, was unrepresentative and undemocratic, and did not take enough account of environmental interests and those of the world’s poor.”
But where are the tents outside the WTO? Where are the tents outside the IMF? Occupy is keen to declare itself a “global movement”, so let it be aware of the global dangers.
The mantra is seductive. Global problems, global solutions, global taxes. Oxfam’s “Robin Hood Tax” campaign sees itself as “turning a global crisis into a global opportunity”. It’s a position shared by Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, and attendee of this year’s Bilderberg Group meeting in San Moritz, who said in late 2009: “In our political response to this crisis, new forms of fiscal burden-sharing will be needed. One of these is a global financial-transaction tax.”
It’s worth remembering that James Tobin of “Tobin Tax” fame, was a staunchly pro-globalization. William H. Buiter (Chief Economist, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) remarks on Tobin’s pro-globalization stance: “Tobin forcefully repudiated the anti-globalization mantra of the Seattle crowd and distanced himself quite emphatically from the enemies of trade liberalisation, globalization and the open society.”
Certainly, the society that transnational capital wants is open: open for business. But is this the “open society” that Occupy wants? Occupy wants transparency, it wants accountability. It wants respect. The openness it demands is human and direct. It could do worse than look back at Seattle and remember why people marched and chanted against globalization. And remember: globalization is not an engine of respect. Liberalisation is not always the friend of liberty. And tax is a shackle that only the richest can slip.