Ian Walker: Hi, I'm Ian Walker, and you're listening to Background Briefing on Radio National.

Crowd Chanting

Ian Walker: It's been dubbed the Five Days that Shook the World, the Battle in Seattle. But it's more than a year since that historic moment and we're not in Seattle any more. Today we take a look at the 'where to from here?' for those at war against the forces of corporate globalisation.

Woman: I think in ten years from now -

Crowd: I think in ten years from now -

Woman: The thing that's going to be written about Seattle -

Crowd: The thing that's going to be written about Seattle -

Woman: Is not what teargas bomb went off on what street corner -

Crowd: Is not what teargas bomb went off on what street corner -

Woman: But that the WTO in 1999 -

Crowd: But that the WTO in 1999 -

Woman: Was the first -

Crowd: Was the first -

Woman: Of a global citizens' movement -

Crowd: Of a global citizen's movement -

Woman: For a democratic global economy.

Crowd: For a democratic global economy.

Cheering

Ian Walker: Flushed with their success at Seattle, anti-corporate activists rolled out a raft of mass protests during 2000: Davos, Washington, Windsor, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Prague, but the results were mixed. Much soul-searching, tactical strategising and ideological debates have been taking place within the activist community. Susan George is no stranger to the process.

Susan George: We can't build a movement on just a youth culture, of people who are available, or a jetset culture, whether it's progressive or not, of people who are available who can take off time and who have the means to get to some venue somewhere in the world, and who don't have families or jobs or whatever. I think we've got to build a movement on the basis of people from all walks of life who have normal lives, who have jobs, who have children, who have responsibilities. We want the young people, we want the people who are free also, but we can't build a big movement just on that basis.

Ian Walker: For 30 years, Susan George has been active in the struggle for third world debt justice. She was also a key player in the campaign in France to scotch the MAI, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Now she's leading the charge within Europe to democratise the world's most powerful economic institutions. Apart from winning new recruits, George thinks the new movement's other big headache is keeping a lid on violence. She says one of the movement's real strengths, it's almost completely non-hierarchical nature, could also be on of its failings.

Susan George: Many people n the movement are

The big truth about globalisation is that ten per cent of the population is profiting from it, and ninety per cent is losing.

basically libertarians, they don't want to constrain anybody to do anything. I think we've got to get rid of the violent elements, because it discourages 'normal' people from coming to demonstrate, because the big truth about globalisation is that 10% of the population is profiting from it, and 90% is losing, so we should have 90% of the people.

Ian Walker: Washington lobbyist, Gardner Peckham has few friends amongst anti-corporate activists, but as a corporate public relations consultant he's made it his job to know what they're up to and what they're on about.

Gardner Peckham: Basically both sides are managing a public relations war, if you will. You have the activist groups seeking sustenance from contributions from the rank and file, by basically establishing who the poster children are of bad conduct in the corporate world. And you have the corporations seeing little gain for themselves by sitting down and having a dialogue with the more extreme groups that simply want them to be out of business. For example, I believe that at some point the corporate community is going to have to come to grips with the activists. Their traditional response to activism is to either ignore it or try to isolate it and deal with it in a vacuum, and they can get away with that as long as the activists are separate, not united, as long as they are basically operating on the fringes and not in the mainstream. As soon as the activists get coalesced, develop messages that are simple and well understood among most people, and actually can agree on goals and objectives that they seek to achieve, then I think the corporate communities, and the government community are both going to have to start taking much more care and attention in dealing with them, and be more responsive to them.

Ian Walker: In the few months after Seattle, Gardner Peckham was involved in collating and distributing to his clients and friends on Capitol Hill, what he called a 'Guide to the Seattle Meltdown'. Using basic internet research, he asked his secretary to list the names, web addresses and basic agendas of the main activist groups behind the protest.
His list of 54 organisations ranged from teamster unions to the mainstream NGOs to obscure anarchist groups like the Black Clad Messengers.
Peckham added a covering letter telling his CEO colleagues the list was 'an alarming window on the future'.

Gardner Peckham: My thesis basically was that these groups are coming out of Seattle with a lot of momentum and they are coming out with potentially vastly better funding than they had before, and vastly better co-ordination and communication capability and many targets of opportunity on the horizon, not the least of which at the time appeared to be the IMF World Bank meeting in Washington, as well as the two political conventions this year, a lot of legislative activity on Capitol Hill, including the consideration of permanent, normal trade relations for China, as well as the Olympic Games in Australia, as well as the World Economic Forum meeting in Australia, and another World Economic Forum meeting in Prague in the Czech Republic. My sense at the time of Seattle was that these groups had the potential to achieve an awful lot with all of those targets of opportunity in the following six to 12 months. I am interested to note now that they really I think achieved very little and they seemed to be allergic to having much in the way of leadership.

Ian Walker: For all their failings though, Peckham admits the activists achieved

The activists achieved one thing: they managed to put their concerns squarely on the global political agenda.

one thing: they managed to put their concerns squarely on the global political agenda.

Gardner Peckham: I think that they have achieved a penetration of consciousness, if you will, in the corporate community, and in the political community, both in the EU as well as the United States, and probably vastly beyond that as well. There is, in everyone's calculation, for example, in trade issues, when you talk to people on Capitol Hill here in Washington or in the Administration, or in the think-tank community, there is invariably a calculation about what it is the activist community thinks about a particular issue, how they're going to respond to it. So in a way I think they have successfully penetrated; what they haven't been able to do thus far, is to achieve any specific goals as far as I can tell.

Ian Walker: Gardner Peckham, from the Washington PR firm, Black, Kelly, Scruggs and Healy.

Music: Haydn string quartet

Ian Walker: Russell Mokhiber also works in Washington but has few friends amongst corporate America. As the publisher of the magazine, Corporate Crime Reporter, he regularly gets up the noses of companies trying to bump up their bottom line by flaunting government rules and regulations on tax, working conditions or the environment. A few weeks ago, after a hard day's digging the dirt, Mokhiber took up a dinner and drinks freebee in the hallowed halls of Washington's Library of Congress. The evening was brought to you by the makers of Coca Cola, and Mokhiber soon learned it was rude for anyone to question the idea that even libraries go better with Coke.

Russell Mokhiber: We had learned from the morning papers that Coca Cola was donating all 20,000 of its television advertisements to the Library, and they were also setting up a fellowship to study culture or something, and Coca Cola was going to be funding this. When we got in, it was obvious that we recognised the names at the table, they were like Members of Congress, there was the ambassador from Burma, ambassadors from all over the world, there were reporters and dignitaries, and they were serving fancy food, trout and salmon and chicken and so forth, and they were serving Coke in old Coke bottles, the whole place was decked out like a corporate ad., it had Coca Cola and Library of Congress stitched in red, and the place was packed, upstairs, downstairs, and like a four-piece string quartet was playing. So very fancy, and Coca Cola paid for the whole thing. I was immediately offended by it because it's a serious question of pushing a junk food product using a public space to do it.

Singing: (old Coke ad)

Russell Mokhiber: The President of Coca Cola, his name is Douglas Daft, gets up and he introduces these ads. I don't know what Coke ads are running in Australia, but these ads are embedded in the American mind, and they ran like 20 minutes of it. 'We want to buy the world a Coke', and all this.

More old Coke ad

Russell Mokhiber: So they ran all these and sort of nostalgia sweeps the room and everybody applauds and then these young high school students, about 100 of them, all dressed in red Coca Cola T-shirts come after the TV, and they fill the staircases and they start singing this Coke song.

More old Coke ad

Russell Mokhiber: So I'm upstairs and looking down, and after this applause for this singing, the President of Coke comes back to the mike, and I yelled a question to him, the question was: 'Why are you using the public library to promote a junk food?' and the room went quiet, and everybody looked up, and it was just like from a TV commercial, because Doug Daft, the President of Coke, puts his hand to his ear, and he yells back up, 'What did you say? So it gave me the chance to yell the question again, and at this point I saw the Library of

"Why are you using the public library to promote a junk food?"

Congress police charge up the stairs, they're coming after me, and at this point some old guy in a three-piece suit, put his greasy napkin on my mouth to try and gag me, but I pushed his hand away and I yelled back in a louder voice, 'Why are you using this public library to push your junk food product?' and at that point I was tackled by three Library of Congress police, and sort of an applause went up in the house, and I was dragged out.
And we were turned over to the DC police and they were about to take us away in the paddy wagon, and a guy from Coca Cola came out and he says, 'Could I have a word with you?' and he's talking to the police, and the police said, 'No, you can't; who are you?' and he said, 'I'm from Coca Cola, we sponsored this event.' And he took them aside. Obviously he was concerned that they didn't want a trial. So this guy was very shrewd, and he understood what was going on and he urged the police not to arrest us and the police did not.
The point of the whole story to me is it reinforced my belief that we had come to a point in this country where you can't stand up and challenge this corporate takeover of the public space.

Ian Walker: There's a new school of American cultural critique that says we live in an era where the market's become deity. Thomas Frank is one who argues that at no other time in history have the values of business and the corporation been more nakedly and arrogantly on the rise.
We live, he says, in a world where the latest batch of management gurus churn out bestsellers with titles like 'God Wants you to be Rich', 'The Market's Will be Done', and even 'Jesus, CEO'. And on television, the computer company is telling us it's omnipresent, omnipotent even. IBM "I am" ad.
According to Thomas Frank, the images for this 1998 IBM ad help prove his point. Great throngs of humanity are shown going nobly about their business, a tiny caption asks 'Who is everywhere?' The answer is scrawled on a piece of cardboard and held aloft from the madding crowd. 'I am', it reads.
IBM is telling us it's everywhere and all-powerful.

'I am Superman' commercial: "...And I can do anything."

Ian Walker: Thomas Frank's new book 'One Market Under God' looks at exactly how we got to here, part of a new phenomenon he calls 'market populism'.

Thomas Frank: Markets are described as being not only mediums of exchange, but also mediums of consent. Markets are a kind of democratic process. By their very nature, markets militate against hierarchy and against snootiness and against discrimination of all kinds. And needless to say it's an idea that I find to be pretty ridiculous.
And a number of questions have come up while I was on a book tour, a number of people have asked me, you know, they see the title of the book and they think I'm just kidding: 'One Market Under God', I'm taking one of the lines from the pledge of allegiance here in America where we say 'One Nation Under God', and they think I'm exaggerating, and then they start reading it. And the first 20 or 30 pages are kind of a montage of corporate blasphemy, where the corporation or the entrepreneur or the manager or the leader is put in the place of God, and there is this kind of worship of the market as this divine thing that you can't resist, that's all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing and very well-meaning, and it's nutty. I mean democratisation is precisely 180-degrees the opposite of what's actually been happening.
What's been happening is that the rich have gotten so much richer in America in the last 10, 20 years, that it's basically off the historical scale. We all know about Bill Gates, but what people don't know as much is that American CEOs as a group, earn 475 times what their average blue-collar workers make.

Crowd at Parliament House, Canberra: 'Michael Moore kills the poor...'

Ian Walker: Michael Moore is a former New Zealand Prime Minister and the current President of the World Trade Organisation. And with welcome committees like this to greet you at almost every place you go, including Australia, it's little wonder Moore is feeling just a little defensive about what he calls 'the most demonised institution on earth'. At a recent speech to journalists at the National Press Club in Canberra, Moore had to battle the constant hum of protesters chanting outside. It's a low level buzz which could grow deafening for the WTO.

Michael Moore: I guess in the absence of 'isms', there are those out there who need to create an ism to hate, and to fear. And the anti-globalisation groups, like antiglobalisation.com, I think that's a rather ironic phrase, on your cell phones complaining about globalisation.

Chanting

Reporter: Mr Moore when you mentioned the obstacles you don't mention that, the anti-globalisation protests, and I'm wondering is it a factor at all in your mind, the role of public opinion, what happened in Seattle, whether that had anything to do with it, and what do you think is this obstacle at all?

Michael Moore: Seattle wasn't the first. If you were writing a book on it, you'd have the MAI was the first, where this was the first sort of electronic internet umbrella protest. Where governments and political personalities were ouflanked without knowing what was going on. Then we went to Seattle, World Bank, IMF, everywhere else, and there are contradictions out there. I know that, but some of those contradictions we can't handle. Even at the World Bank meeting vegetarians marching with beef farmers and protesting. I thought, 'What?' Even we can't reconcile the differences between those positions. For people who stand outside and say they're working in the interests of the poorest people in New Zealand, that makes me want to vomit because the poorest people on our planet they are the ones who I would argue who need us the most.

Ian Walker: However it's this very argument that irks critics of the WTO the most. They say it's the poorest countries who most want the organisation to change or to be abolished.
Lori Wallach is director of Global Trade Watch, part of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen group. On the phone from Washington, she says Moore and the WTO are either slow learners or perhaps a little deaf.

Lori Wallach: The WTO has not learned a single thing from Seattle. It's up to the same exact agenda that got shoved up its nose in Seattle, to expand into a whole set of new issues and areas, these intrusive WTO rules. So Moore is basically trying to deflect what is a unified, developing country call not to expand WTO, but to fix its existing inequities by trying to distract from that fact and say that people who protested are somehow against the poor. In fact it's the poor countries who are leading the fight.

Ian Walker: You described in a paper that you wrote on the first five years of the operation of the WTO that the process was more like a slow motion coup d'etat, or low intensity warfare.
What were you talking about there?

Lori Wallach: It's very subtle. It's not literally that someone rode in town in a tank and announces 'We are now the government, we will now get rid of your food safety laws'. Instead, through a process written in legalise and it's so complicated I've given it its own language name, I call it GATT-ese. You go to the agreement on 'sanitary' and find 'sanitary agreements' and you find out if there is a burden of proof acceptable for a PPM, if there is a cross-border market access conditionality? And then that's sewn up the DSU. I mean it's a whole bunch of gobbledegook that ends up being the WTO announcing to democratically elected governments, 'You cannot, for instance, keep out this particular food, because this pesticide we think is ok, even if you don't.'

Trucking music (Link Wray: Tijuana)

Ian Walker: A decrepit Mexican freight truck rattles and rolls down a US highway, the wheels fall off, and it skids into an American family sedan, killing five people. That's the kind of horror story Lori Wallach says will become more common after the most recent NAFTA tribunal ruling on an 'open highways' agreement between the two countries. Wallach says it's another example of how NAFTA trade rules ride roughshod over local concerns about public safety and health.

Lori Wallach: The consumer groups in Mexico point out that their highway fatality rates are three times what they are in the US.
Well under NAFTA, just like under WTO, a country can go to a trade tribunal which isn't a regular court, it doesn't have any democratic safeguards, and demand that these trade rights be implemented.
So Mexico went to a NAFTA trade tribunal saying, 'We don't care what the safety problem is, we have a right under NAFTA to have our truck on US roads, and we want the US to be forced to do what they promised to NAFTA, And the US government, which was very eager to open the border, if they could have found the safety excuse, fought back and said, 'Listen, we'll open the border when the trucks are safe; we'd like to open the border, we've sent you money to help clean up the trucks. Please, we can't open the border, it's not safe'. And it's a catastrophe waiting to happen.
There are already 4-million trucks coming from Mexico. They're allowed to drive just over the border, they're bringing in all the new NAFTA imports and they can come in 20 miles into the US.
Under this ruling they could drive from the Yucatan in southern Mexico, all the way up to the Yukon in Northern Canada, and these are trucks that have been failing at a 40% rate for really basic things like having brakes, lights, wheels that don't fall off.
So there will be inevitably a set of bloody crashes.

Ian Walker: Lori Wallach says there is a simple answer to making sure the Mexican trucks don't kill American road users. It lies in making sure the trade rules don't rule.

Truck braking sound

Ian Walker: The activist community is often criticised for saying only what it doesn't want, rather than putting new ideas on the table about how things should be. Global Trade Watch, however, has come up with a series of checks and balances on global capital, what it describes as the 'turnaround agenda'.

Lori Wallach: The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO would be pared back to an appropriate scale to cover their appropriate business and some of their more pernicious, inappropriate provisions and operations would be eliminated and, for instance, to the WTO would be added a savings clause, it's called in legal terms, which would clearly prioritise any country's implementation of its domestic labour rights, or environmental, or human rights, or indigenous rights treaties, over the provision, taking precedent over the provision to the WTO. And what this would do would empower countries once again, to say 'Hey, WTO, IMF, World Bank, this one-size-fits-all trade-comes-first-everytime that's not where our priority and value is? We're also a signatory to this international agreement on Labour Rights or on human rights, and hey, we're making NATFA second and the WTO's got to take a back seat!'

Music from Qatar

Ian Walker: The tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar is a long way from Seattle and that must be some consolation for the chiefs of the World Trade Organisation who've agreed to Qatar being the venue for its next big meeting in November. It may prove the perfect place for the WTO officials to kickstart new round of trade talks they were forced to abandon in Seattle. Qatar, with its population of half a million, is a monarchy with no real constitution. And for critics of the WTO, the choice shows up the gulf between what the WTO says it stands for, and what it does.

Susan George: It's a very repressive country because more than half the population is foreign, so they have a highly developed police state to keep tabs on all the immigrants that are there. It's a barren country, it's hard to get to, it's terribly expensive to get there.
London is the only place from Europe you can go directly to Qatar, so it's got absolutely everything you need for a nice, discreet, World Trade Organisation meeting, and unless people are willing to get there by camel, I don't see how they can protest. But what I would say is that yes, I mean let's do protest because human rights are not respected there. But let's also remember that in any number of WTO member countries, human rights come second and I think this choice of venue shows exactly what the WTO is.
It shows that this is an organisation which says 'Don't ask about how a product was produced or harvested.'
If you've got on one side a football that was produced by children in Pakistan in terrible social and environmental conditions, and on the other side a football that was produced by unionised labour, you're not allowed to ask what the difference is between those two footballs, those are 'like' products, and on the principle of production processes and methods, you can't ask any questions about the history of that product.
They are 'like' products and you can't use any of those criteria to judge between them.
So I'm saying the WTO is living up to its reputation and to its own principles by choosing Qatar, or allowing Qatar to be the venue for the next meeting. And what we really have to show is what the WTO is itself, because it embodies all those principles.

Ian Walker: There was some talk that because of the accommodation shortage in Qatar that some of those meetings might be held on a cruise ship. That's a pretty powerful metaphor I would have thought?

Susan George: It's a wonderful metaphor, because it does remind one of the offshore tax havens, the offshore paradises for all sorts of illicit dealings, and as the Chair of General Electric said, and I think that's a very telling statement, he said 'Ideally every plant you own would be on a barge.' Now isn't that wonderful? Exactly. You would take your barge with your plant on it to wherever the working conditions could be the cheapest and the most repressive and where you'd have the least interference from unions and no problems about social conventions or laws or anything like that. So I think putting the WTO on a symbolic barge is pretty apt.

Song: 'Who's side are you on?'

Ian Walker: Quebec City in Canada is shaping up as the next major fixture in the big league of global capitalism versus globalised activism. The event is the Summit of the Americas meeting in April, which seeks to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, by some 30 countries from Latin America. It'll create a trading zone taking in the entire Western Hemisphere. Critics of the new Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, says it promises to take NAFTA-type provisions a step further, with an investment rider that allows corporations to sue governments over laws that restrict trade.
Anna Dashtgard is Director of a coalition of Canadian groups called the Common Front Against the WTO. She says regional trade agreements like the FTAA are being used as a backdoor way to reintroducing some of the most troublesome aspects of the old MAI. The most worrying of these, according to Dashtgard, are provisions which could force local public services to be privatised in the interests of a freer investment regime.

Anna Dashtgard: Well the FTAA is one of the first agreements, regional agreements, to include services, putting services across the board from hospitals

"The World Trade Organisation is right now set up to be a form of global government."

and schools, to waste management garbage pick-up to water management. I mean anything you can think of possibly that comes under the rubric of services is included in the FTAA, which is very interesting. As I said, one of the first agreements to include that, and many people are seeing that as a move to pushing through services, privatisation of public services, through the World Trade Organisation. So the regional trade agreements are just at this point in time, are really steps towards setting up standards internationally, and the World Trade Organisation is right now set up to be a form of global government. It has institutional power.

Ian Walker: The protests planned for Quebec City in April against the FTAA look like being a watershed for Canadian anti-corporate activists. The Canadian government's responded with the country's biggest ever peacetime security operation. A second wall is being built around the old walled city, and a prison is being cleared out to house the troublemakers.
But for Anna Dashtgard, the unprecedented level of militarisation will only help to radicalise a whole new generation of Canadians, and make sure Quebec, April 2001 is remembered right up there alongside The Battle in Seattle.

Anna Dashtgard: It's going to be one of the most heavily militarised protests that have happened in this movement, certainly in North America. They're planning on sending between 5,000 to 10,000 police troops, not just from Quebec City where the meeting is taking place, not just from Montreal, which is nearby, but from across North America, riot police from across North America. It is going to be the most heavily militarised protest up until this point and they have a 4-kilometre radius perimeter all mapped out around the inner city core and they're planning to build a 3-foot high concrete foundation, an 8-foot high chainlink ffence on top and electrical barbed wire on top of that.
They're doing ID checks on the 30,000-plus people that live within the inner city core, they're not revealing where the entry points are, and I think when you see people that are locked down in an intersection blocking delegates to a meeting that you believe is undemocratic, blocking delegates into a meeting that you know is going to be making decisions that affect global society that are completely devastating, and you watch the way those people are treated by the police, and watch people being beaten up right in front of your face, and hear the stories of people being jailed and what's happened behind bars, it's a tremendous radicalisation of many people, and I think that's really key part of this movement.

ABC Radio 'AM' Theme

Peter Cave: It appears that anti-globalisation campaigners have struck again at the World Economic Forum. Computer hackers have obtained credit card numbers and other private information on the world's business and economic leaders, including Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Credit card companies have started freezing accounts amid fears that the hackers have information on the travel and security plans of some of the world's most powerful people. Raphael Epstein reports.

Raphael Epstein: So far unidentified -

Ian Walker: While Swiss police made sure protesters were kept well away from the latest World Economic Forum meeting in Davos with some well-aimed water cannons in the below freezing temperatures, the hackers who did find their way inside proved that cyberspace is a much more level playing field. The emergence of 'political hackers' or 'hacktivists' as they've become known, is a trend that intrigues military academic, John Arquila.
Arquila is one of the consultants often called in to investigate the kind of hacking that happened in Davos. He's also taken a keen interest in how activists used the Internet so successful to out-manoeuvre the authorities in the streets of Seattle.

John Arquila: I was absolutely amazed at the sophistication of the organisational design that preceded the Battle of Seattle. The Direct Action Network is the group of which I have the most direct knowledge, and they operate in a classic all-channel connectivity mode. This means that everybody has inputs into the strategic vision, everybody knows what's going on from one moment to the next, and all have input and new ideas immediately put out so others can hear them. And this is true not only of the Direct Action Network, but of the many, many other organisations and individuals who came from around the world to oppose the World Trade Organisation.
This was a remarkable result.
What I did observe, however, was that there are limitations to it in terms of the Direction Action Network's ability to sustain this kind of command and control, if you will, of such a disparate network of actors. And so the Battle of Seattle was not one that can be fought from week to week; they may be able to do this at great intervals, but not on a sustained basis as yet. The real questions are about the conditions under which organisations might be able to do this on a continuous basis. When that occurs, look out!

Ian Walker: In Australia, Guy Rundle, the editor of Arena magazine, is someone else who's kept a close watch on tactical and ideological trends within the anti-corporate activist movement. He was on the streets of Melbourne last September during S11 when the highly networked Seattle-style protest model was extended a step further. Guy Rundle argues S11 was the first global action to work effectively without a singular organising body behind it.

Guy Rundle: The affinity group model is the idea that rather than trying to get a party together with a common platform and submerging people's common differences in a unified hierarchically organised group, that you acknowledge that people have radically different orientations, styles of organising, political priorities, those sorts of things, and you don't try and overcome that, or you don't try and push the river, as it were.
What you try and do is co-ordinate those separate activities in a way that doesn't involve top-down hierarchical form of direction and control.
So with a variety of affinity groups, with 50 groups who may range from Animal Liberation to the Meatworkers' Union protesting against globalisation, global neo-liberalism in one form or another, all that you need to do is make sure that those groups are sharing information about what they're doing, involved in a continuous dialogue and that sort of thing. That can still generate chaos or it can still fail to come together if the will isn't there, but if the will is there for people to actually keep forms of honest communication going, then people can continually adjust their strategies and tactics to what other people are doing.

Ian Walker: But the Internet's not only changed the way activists organise themselves, it's changing the way corporations engage with the activists. Roy Lipski's part of a new breed of consultants keen to spruik the positive force of the web in forcing companies to change their way of dealing with problems and dissent. Suddenly, on the Internet, a company's voice is no louder than that of its leading critics. Lipski calls it 'the death of spin'. Not only that, he says, but notoriously bad corporate actors like the Shell Oil Company really have changed some of their ways.

Roy Lipski: The Internet has brought about the age of co-operation not the age of confrontation and parties that were traditionally regarded as enemies, or being on different side of an imaginary line, those lines are blurred now and people are working together, entities are working together to achieve common aims. One of the most striking examples of corporate change, in my opinion, has been the way Shell, the oil company, has really changed fundamentally in its approach to the environment, to NGOs and activists and to governments when it comes to its activities. Whereas I'd say a few years ago, Shell was acting very much like a traditional corporation, i.e. the command and control, denial of facts and this really backfired against them, first with the Brent Spar event, and then to do with Nigeria and other such events. And most recently the Evoli Sun incident off the French coast. There was a ship that was transporting some chemicals for Shell Chemicals, and some of the chemicals were leaked. Now by contract, Shell really had no obligations whatsoever, because it was simply using a third party entity to transport its chemicals, but Shell recognised that that was simply not enough and it did have a social and enormous moral obligation to get involved, and that's exactly what it did.

Ian Walker: Roy Lipski's London-based company, Infonic, is in the business of advising businesses about exactly who hates them and what kinds of nasty things they might be saying about them on the Internet. He makes the point that there are over a million web pages dedicated to the Nike Corporation, but more than 99% of those sites have names like 'Nike Sucks'. Lipski's solution to lessening the impact of these anti-corporate 'gripe sites' is to advise companies to engage their critics and invite them to have their say on the company's own site. It's an idea many corporations still find terrifying.

Roy Lipski: Shell was to my knowledge, the first company to adopt this kind of approach on its website. Shell put an area of various bulletin boards which contrary to what other companies were doing at the time, was totally uncensored, and it invited conversation and comment from general public and from various activists and pressure groups, onto its website, onto these bulletin boards and really encouraged open discussion of very difficult issues for the company at the time.
Things like the situation in Nigeria, and it did not attempt to control or spin these bulletin boards, in fact there's some material on there which I'm sure most people would think that normal corporations would like to remove, very critical, sometimes quite abusive but the company felt that the best approach was to engage its critics, to provide them with a forum and a space to air their views, and not to try and overwhelm or control the conversation because they realised that if they did try to do that, the conversation would simply go elsewhere, it would not stop it. And I think that's quite important when it comes to understanding this new relationship landscape on the Internet.
You can't shut up your critics, you can't stop them in the way that might have been possible in the past.

Ian Walker: Needless to say, despite Lipski's optimism for some kind of cyber détente, the idea of CEOs holding hands with their enemies and singing 'Kumbeyah' around the warm glow of their computer screens, is fanciful to most frontline activists.
Danny Kennedy is an Aussie expat and Director of the San Francisco based Project Underground, an activist organisation defending indigenous communities against exploitation by mining and oil companies. To Kennedy, the idea that big multinationals like Shell can be tamed simply by consistent Internet campaigns is naïve, to say the least. Danny Kennedy: Oh I'm all for believing in enlightened capitalists, I just haven't met one yet. You know, these players are rarely enlightened beasts, and so I don't yet believe we're in a position to be collaborating with them at the expense of not also controlling them and containing their excesses.

Ian Walker: One of the new ways activists are doing that is by following the money trail, then attempting what Danny Kennedy calls 'cutting off the blood supply to the head.' The best example is the current campaign against the financial giant Citigroup, by a coalition of activist groups headed by the Rainforest Action Network. Citigroup, with assets of around $US700-billion has set out to become the best-known consumer bank in the world, although the protest campaign sees to brand the company, 'the world's most destructive bank', alleging it underwrites many large and environmentally-damaging projects around the world.
Danny Kennedy says Citigroup's an appropriate target, not least because of its totally global reach.

Danny Kennedy: Citigroup in more ways than one, actually, runs the global economy if you really look into it, as to who it underwrites, what insurance bonds it provides for various investments that it backs, and finance that it provides, and pretty much every bad project you've ever heard of on Radio National, whether it's the Three Gorges Dam, or whether it's the Freeport Mine or whether it's whatever mega development catastrophe you can care to name, Citigroup's had a hand in that. And so in a sense, when we go after it, we're going upstream to the private sector finance that funds and drives this global economy and the more aggressive jagged edges of it.

Star Wars Theme (disco version)

Danny Kennedy: I like to think of it as the energy source on the death star of the empire in Star Wars that Luke and Han and everyone have to go in and knock out in order to blow up the Empire, you know, that's where we're going. Sometimes I think we're not there yet, the rebel forces haven't even got the X-wing fighters that can make it in and drop a laser bomb on it.
So I worry about our own ability to take on the Death Star, but still, we have to go there and we have to expose it to public insight and comment and pressure.

Ian Walker: Hardheads like Danny Kennedy have some sympathy for the younger recruits to the movement, like those who scrawled the slogan 'Kill Capitalism Before it Kills us' on the streets of Prague during the S26 protest last September.
But the debate over whether it's worth attempting to civilise global capital or turn it upside down has only just begun.

Susan George: I say now I'm a reformist, I don't know if I always was, but whyis that? It's just because conceptually speaking, I mean just in my head I can't figure out what it would mean today to destroy world capitalism. I literally don't know what that would mean.

"I can't figure out what it would mean today to destroy world capitalism."

I don't believe, I never did actually, in the great apotheosis where everything collapses in one night you know, as the French says, 'Le Grand Soir', the great evening. So since I don't know what that means I have to think about what it is I want, and what I want is to begin getting all of this system under control, under rules, under democratic rules, where people are protected, where families are protected, where nature is protected.

Song: 'I don't want to work for the corporation'

Ian Walker: Despite the obstacles, optimism seems to burn bright amongst the activists. Some are convinced it's the time of The New Reformation, others liken it to the anti-slavery movement of the late 19th century. There's little doubt a paradigm shift is under way.
Susan George says it's only the beginning, but the movement knows its right, knows its growing and can smell the fear amongst its enemies.

Susan George: Don't forget that what we're trying to do is something as ever done before in history, so I'd say it's been a very short time and that history is really accelerating, and the fact that there have been so many protests and so many people who are placing themselves massively on the side of the poor and downtrodden, not to coin a phrase, not just in their own countries but throughout the world. And this again is totally new in human history, and I find this tremendously exciting. Of course the road is long, but what is fantastic is that

"God did not come down to speak to Moses on Sinai and say Thou shalt be globalised."

people are not saying, 'Oh well, globalisation, I can't do anything about it because it's inevitable'. Today people are saying, 'No, I mean God did not come down to speak to Moses on Sinai and say Thou shalt be globalised' this is not divine law, this is not the force of gravity, this is rules put in place by identifiable human corporate actors and what some people have put in place, other people can indeed change. And also I see that people on the other side are scared stiff, frankly you know. I mean we have little power but we've managed to do fantastic things with the little we have, and they, with all their money and all their power, they're scared stiff.

Song: 'I don't want to work for the corporation' (Reprise)