Associated Press | February 2, 2002 | By Tony Smith
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil - Wars over energy, wars over water, wars over who's rich and who's poor. Participants at the second World Social Forum paint a grim picture of the future in a world dominated by global capitalism.
Just as in New York, where leading international politicians, business executives and thinkers are meeting at the World Economic Forum, the counter summit here is trying to come to grips with how the Sept. 11 terror attacks have changed the world. But there was no agreement here Friday that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan was right, or even justifiable.
"The world is marching toward terrorism on one side and war on the other," said Oded Grajew, one of the Social Forum's organizers.
"Terrorism spawns more terrorism. War spawns more war," he said. "Today we have already fought over oil; tomorrow it will be for water, then for food."
Grajew claimed that every day 30,000 children younger than 5 die of avoidable causes around the world.
"That's seven World Trade Centers a day and nobody puts it on the front page," he said. "The day they do, I'll know the world is saved."
The world will be far from safe unless economic globalization is reined in, more pessimistic participants said.
Keynote speaker Noam Chomsky opened a series of workshops called "a world without war is possible," which aim to present solutions for conflicts in the Middle East, Colombia and Spain's Basque region.
The radical MIT linguist outlined a bleak view of the future.
Arguing that unfettered global capitalism is concentrating the world's wealth in increasingly fewer hands, he predicted the governments of the rich, industrialized North, and particularly the United States, could one day use "weapons of instant mass destruction, targeting the growing masses of have-nots that globalization is expected to produce."
Chomsky said he was most concerned by U.S. plans to "militarize space" under President George W. Bush's missile defense system.
He called the initiative "a serious threat to survival."
"We can be confident there will be a world without war - or there won't be a world, or at least a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria or beetles," Chomsky said.
His doomsday prediction resonated with a crowd of about 5,000 activists who crammed into three auditoriums and a lobby at Porto Alegre's Catholic University to hear him speak.
"I think he's right," said Carmen Carady, a Brazilian in the crowd. "He should know best about what America wants to do; he's from there."
Chomsky and others contend Bush is using world outrage at the Sept. 11 attacks to push through economic policies that further the interests of global business.
"Sept. 11, independently of what we think of it, has been used as a pretext for a new ... offensive," said Hector de la Cueva of Mexico's Continental Social Alliance. "This offensive is to impose a new world order based, of course, on free trade."
Many activists worry that the U.S. and European governments and corporations are trying to expand the powers of the World Trade Organization and impose new free-trade agreements that will benefit rich nations to the detriment of poor countries.
"That means more harsh market discipline for the poor and a nanny state for the rich," said Chomsky. "Capital has priority and people are just incidental."Associated Press:
