This question was posed to me after I was detained for questioning at passport control in St. Petersburg, Russia airport. The Group of 20 Leaders’ meeting will take place here on September 5–6. I had arrived for the G-20 Counter Summit organized by the Post-Globalization Initiative, whose name was stamped on my visa as the inviting organization. Nevertheless, this was a question worth asking, if not for the apparent purpose of turning me away at the border.
After producing evidence of my hotel address, Russian contact person, return plane ticket etc., I was allowed to pass and now am free to ponder this question. More free than members of Russian civil society organizations and even Parliamentarians, who, according to the St. Petersburg Times, have been interrogated by the police about whether during the G-20, they would engage in “terrorist activities” in protest of the G-20. Shades of the aftermath of November 2001, when opposition to the World Trade Organization’s Doha agenda was affiliated with “terrorism” by proponents of that agenda. Although the technologies of official surveillance have become more sophisticated, the ideological purposes behind them have not changed so much.
The PGlobal organizers said that fundraising for the Counter Summit was not as difficult as they had anticipated. Finance-led globalization, to invoke the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development analysis, has not been good for most Russians. “Speculation” is a dirty word here, not the least because the government invested state pension funds in the derivatives market and lost heavily, according to Oskana Dmitrieva, an economist and member of Russia’s Parliament. Dr. Dmitrieva spoke on the panel “Confronting Speculation, Illicit Capital Flows and Tax Havens.” According to a Russian colleague, she spoke with unusual frankness for a Russian politician, given that some Russian politicians are the beneficiaries of banking secrecy laws that hide their tax evasion and offshore bank accounts. She said that the Russian government had sunk nearly three trillion rubles into the “virtual economy” of speculative instruments, even though the government had done little research into the risks of these instruments. Some of the money went into mortgage derivatives in Russia’s own subprime crisis
It was my role on the panel to explain the what and how of dark market (over-the-counter derivatives) speculation, and why the G-20 commitment in 2009 to make dark markets transparent had been resisted by governments who sought to restrict regulator access to trading data. While conceding that the global banks rescued by governments had seemingly unlimited budgets to lobby against financial reform, I concluded my presentation with a summary of institutional and civil society sources of support for financial reform. Not the least of these sources is a July 11 agreement between the European Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) that “the stricter rule applies” in cases of overlapping rules. The official Over the Counter Derivatives Regulators Group summarized the July 11 agreement in its August 30 report to the G-20 finance ministers meeting just prior to the arrival of their bosses.
The questions about my presentation were not entirely new to me, but the answers still unnerve me. For example, why aren’t Commodity Index Funds banned since they have caused price volatility and increases unjustified by market fundamentals, disrupted markets and harmed consumers? I said that in U.S. commercial law it is very difficult to ban any activity that cannot be shown to be inherently fraudulent, even if it is highly damaging. Nor did I have a good answer to the question “When will the global banks finally be regulated as global entities, and not with regulations designed to stop at national boundaries?” Is it anti-globalist to require global banks and corporations to submit to globally effective regulation?
Boris Kagarlitsky, a Counter Summit organizer, said that the meeting brought together the largest group of critics of the “free” but dark market economic order ever assembled in Russia. I was among the 30 international guests who spoke to and with a small but intensely engaged Russian public, thanks to a valiant and skilled group of interpreters. It is difficult to summarize so many speakers and topics but a few themes emerged.
First, there was a huge amount of capital flight from developing countries’ banks to U.S. and European banks, resulting in developing country currencies falling sharply against the dollar. For example, thus far in 2013, the value of the Brazilian real has fallen 14 percent; the value of the Indian rupee by more than 21 percent. Capital controls and performance requirements for investment could stem some of this currency depression but the former are punished by the International Monetary Fund, while the latter are banned in Bilateral Investment Treaties and/or Free Trade Agreements.
Uncontrolled Foreign Direct Investment can have very negative effects on food security, reported Riza Damanik of Indonesia for Global Justice. The Indonesia government evaluates economic health in terms of Gross Domestic Product and invests little to support domestic agricultural production. For example, 99 percent of investment in seed production is foreign. Investment in palm oil plantations has displaced domestic rice production and resulted in environmental damage to forests and forest people when land is cleared for palm oil production, and huge import dependence both for food and agricultural inputs.
Indonesia will host the next World Trade Organization ministerial meeting, December 3–6 in Bali. Riza said that under the WTO, only corporations have rights. At the meetings his coalition and others will organize in Bali, they plan to champion human rights, including the right to food.
However, human rights, financial regulation and trade policy are overshadowed in the mass media whenever the threat of war looms. Venezuelan Edgardo Lander, a fellow at the Transnational Institute, said that the Obama administration’s threat to bomb Syria in retaliation for the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians would trigger a wider conflict. He said that the Obama administration’s resort to violence revealed a crisis of “civilizational models” since G-20 governments would bail out banks and defend corporate assets with military force, but do nothing to reduce “the greatest levels of inequality in human history.”
Even though the debate about whether to bomb Syria was not on the Counter Summit agenda, it was added in a prefatory panel. The issue was less whether chemical weapons had been used but whether the U.S. should defy likely Russian and Chinese vetoes in the U.N. Security Council and bomb unilaterally. U.S. military power, and not its control over global finance, was characterized by several Counter Summiteers as the ultimate guarantor of economic imperialism. Professor Samir Amin said that the attack on Syria would be another episode in which the military is used strategically to preserve capitalism, as in his home country of Egypt.
Dorothy Guerrero, of Focus on the Global South, provided a great example of the interconnected analyses of many Counter Summit participants: the G-20 Summit would attempt to present the broken world economy and austerity policies to slash aid to the most vulnerable as “the new normal.” But in her native Philippines, “there is no new climate normal, just climate chaos and more climate change–related migration”. Indeed, she said, if the bombing of Syria triggered military conflict in the Middle East, millions of Philippines working in Middle Eastern countries would return to a country without jobs and services for them.
Most Counter Summit participants consider the G-20 to be an illegitimate venue for global and economic governance, because it circumvents the universal representation of the United Nations. Therefore, those participants would not be involved in the G-20 civil society (C-20) meeting of what Boris Kagarlitsky characterized as the “tame and civilized NGOs.” No doubt, the C-20 process provides less room for the radical thinking typical of the Counter Summit. And no doubt, the G-20 does not represent, nor even try to represent, the demands and needs of more than 170 other U.N. members. But still it is a pity that no G-20 government representative, save for a sole Brazilian finance ministry official, got to listen and respond to Counter Summit participant views on globalization in its varied forms.
