STWR - Share The World's Resources

In anticipation of April's G20 meetings in London, tens of thousands of protestors are expected to march from Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park on Saturday 28th March 2009 as part of a nationwide 'Put People First!' campaign - asking Ministers to prioritise jobs, justice and the climate.

24th March 2009 - Put People First! ~ STWR

'Put People First!' is a coalition of development charities, trade unions, faith groups, environmentalists and other organisations, formed in response to calls for a fair and sustainable route out of economic recession.

On 28th March tens of thousands of protesters will march through London as part of a global campaign to challenge the G20, ahead of their 2nd April summit on the global financial crisis.

Even before the banking collapse, the world suffered from widespread poverty, widening inequality and the threat of climate chaos.

For too long, governments have followed a financial model that has created an economy fuelled by ever-increasing debt, both financial and environmental.

Our future depends on creating a world economy based on a fair distribution of wealth, decent jobs for all and a low carbon future. There can be no going back to business as usual.

STWR is a platform partner for the event and will have a stall in Hyde Park all day, as well as a strong presence on the march - look out for our big blue banner which reads 'One Planet - Share The World's Resources'. You can send your own message to the G20 by clicking on the image below.

Nick Dearden Appeals: It's Time to Put People First

An Essential Heresy: From Neoliberal Theocracy to Economic Democracy

Put People First! Website 

Alternative G20 Summit 2009 - London

Climate Camp G20

It's Time To Put People First

16th March 09 - Nick Dearden, Compass

Car magnate Henry Ford once said "it is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Today, as people begin to understand just how our global economy is structured and who benefits from that structure, it's little wonder that anger is welling across the world. In the UK, unemployment is already approaching two million, and forecasters expect this figure to rise to over three million by 2010.

Across the world figures are even more frightening - the International Labour Organisation fears 40 million less jobs by the end of the year. Falling demand and remittances from many developed countries, together with a global credit squeeze and spiralling debts, could well lead to a crisis as serious as the ‘Third World Debt Crisis' in the 1980s and 90s, where very poor countries which were essentially bankrupt spent whatever money they had to feed the banks of the North.

None of this is accidental or surprising in a world run by finance, which has thrived on instability and has created crisis after crisis. Today more than ever the livelihoods and welfare of billions of people are dependent on the rise and fall of the market.

Financial globalisation allows massive transfers of money from developing to developed countries, with unprecedented ease. What in times past would have required guns boats and armies can now be achieved with a few clicks of a mouse.

To give a few examples, $160 billion is lost to the developing world every year through tax evasion, based on the fact that most trade takes place within global corporations and those corporations now have the ability to move that money around the world with few restrictions or questions asked. $250 billion is lost because $11.5 trillion of global assets are currently held in tax havens, like the UK.

The global money markets turn over a mind-blowing $3.2 trillion every day - much of which is speculative capital which moves very rapidly in and out of countries and currencies, causing immense damage. Another $1.6 billion a day is transferred from poor to rich countries in debt ‘repayments', based largely on loans recklessly thrust on newly independent countries in the 1960s and 70s by financial institutions who promptly raised interest rates to extortionate levels. Needless to say these gigantic sums dwarf aid budgets.

In the West, the consumption boom, based on cheap but unsustainable credit, which has kept the boat afloat till now, would consume the resources of three to five planets if everyone in the world were to live in the same way. Now developing countries are being offered new loans so that they can deal with the consequences of an environmental catastrophe which they have not created, but from which they will suffer first.

These problems - of poverty, inequality, environmental destruction - were foreseen 30 years ago but crushed by the unstoppable advent of ‘neo-liberalism'. The result? Governments divorced from the people they supposedly represent, levels of wealth unknown in human history alongside millions who toil in conditions that would have been familiar to Frederick Engels.

But this moment is an opportunity which we haven't seen for 30 years. Finally the king that was finance is unstable on his throne. Suddenly no one has the sort of blind faith in unregulated markets which has defined economics for a generation. World leaders who made their reputation instituting free market policies are scrambling to evade the blame for what has happened.

Gordon Brown is one of many leaders looking to show statesmanship in creating a new world order. But attempts to resuscitate a trade round at the World Trade Organisation which will further force open developing world markets, and resurrect the IMF which has led the charge of financial liberalisation, are certainly not the answer.

In reality, few people appear to have much faith that politicians can deliver the sort of change that's needed. That's why an unprecedented platform - spanning trade unions to development organisations, environmental networks to faith groups - have come together to mobilise ordinary people across the UK. Put People First, like Compass, is calling for ‘no turning back'. We need urgent and radical change in the way the global economy works.

Put People First's demands include democratising the global economy - no longer can our lives be run by unaccountable institutions and an almighty and secretive financial sector. We are calling for decent and ‘green jobs' and public services, radical action to prevent climate change and an end to an international trade and investment regime which continues to suck wealth out of the developing world for the enrichment of the few.

People from very different backgrounds, faiths and political persuasions now agree that we urgently need to make the economy serve people, rather than dominate them. But this change will only happen if ordinary people get engaged and push for the sort of world they want to see.

An essential starting point is a mass demonstration on 28 March in Central London. It will take much more than one demonstration to create the better world we want to see - but we have more chance of changing the world than at any time in a generation. Get involved.

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An Essential Heresy: From Neoliberal Theocracy to Economic Democracy 

16th March 09 - Benedict Southworth, OpenDemocracy

The word ‘recession’ has an essentially negative quality, defined as ‘the act of withdrawing or going back’. As an idea it goes against our western sensibilities of linear progress.

In its purely economic meaning, recession is described as ‘an extended decline in general business activity’. The current decline seems set to last for the foreseeable future. Despite earlier optimistic predictions, the Bank of England has stopped taking bets on an upswing in the economy until at least mid-2010.

As the recession unfolds, I find myself less and less interested in the blame game that has gripped the media. What interests me more is the economics equivalent of the ‘science vs religion’ debate: we may know how the current situation arose and have our opinions on who is to blame, but do we really understand why?

Before the banking implosion, a number of other crises were exposing the tremendous pressure the global economy was putting on the planet.  The food crises, rising energy prices and a rapidly approaching climate tipping point sounded an alarm warning for some time before the collapse of Bear Stearns hit the panic button on Wall Street.

The common thread across the crises is, I would argue, the dogma of economic neo-liberalism and its central tenets of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation. This ideology and its expression through economic policymaking in both advanced and developing economies around the world has sewn the seeds for the current set of overlapping crises in five key ways.

Firstly, it has exacerbated inequality. Even the most ardent supporters in laissez-faire economics will usually acknowledge that, for all its successes in delivering high global growth, free markets do not make any judgement about the distribution of wealth. The concentration of capital in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and corporations has been a key feature of modern turbo-capitalism.

In defence of this, champions of unfettered markets argue that global growth is good for all, and that a rising tide lifts all boats: the so-called trickle-down effect. Yet the evidence suggests otherwise. Since 1980, global GDP has more than doubled. And yet very little of this has been captured by the world’s least affluent people. Just two per cent of the world’s population own over half of global assets, while the world’s poorest 50 per cent control just one per cent of global assets between them.

The second major reason for the system shocks caused by neoliberal economic policymaking relates to the dismantling of state systems of social protection and the provision of public services. The presumed desirability of ‘light-touch’ government intervention in markets has translated into a global fire-sale of public assets and services upon which the poor often depend heavily; including municipal water supplies, transport systems, forests, mineral resources, financial institutions, food marketing boards and even health care and educational systems.

The public interest functions of these have been stripped back and in some cases wholly lost in the interests of market efficiencies – a case of the cart coming squarely before the horse. World Development Movement research into the impacts of water privatisation in Tanzania, Zambia, Afghanistan and the Philippines; and of liberalised and deregulated banking in Mexico and India has shown how these policies have curtailed access to these vital services to the poor.

The third systemic risk resulting from the dominance of neoliberal ideology has been the misplaced faith in the ability of laissez-faire approaches to deliver market efficiency and transparency through corporate self-regulation. It was this faith that lay behind the evisceration of financial regulators powers’ to monitor and enforce good practice in the banking sector. Yet the clear inability of the banks to sacrifice unprecedented short-term growth at the expense long term prudence and stability has ended up costing the world dearly. As noted by the billionaire investor, George Soros, unregulated financial markets have proven to be inefficient.

Meanwhile, the dismantling of cross-border capital controls has made it increasingly possible for banks and other institutions to obfuscate their balance sheets through the shadow banking system and off-shoring their assets. Approximately US $10 trillion is currently held by wealthy individuals, banks and other corporations in off-shore tax havens. This money not only represents potentially vital lost public tax revenue, but also makes a mockery of notions of trickle down wealth dispersal. Current estimates suggest that the uncaptured tax attributable to this runs to $255 billion, more than double the current total amount of official aid going to poor countries.

The fourth flaw within free market ideologies is its assumption that the private good equates to the public good, and that as a result market principles apply equally and universally to any sector of the economy. Hence, speculative activities on essential goods such as energy and food have been treated by governments and regulators as on a par with those on IT companies and car manufacturers. This has contributed to massive volatility in food and energy prices, with serious consequences for those living on the margins of economic survival. As President Bill Clinton noted in October, world leaders ‘blew it’ by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world’s poor.

The fifth and potentially most fatal flaw of neoliberal economic policymaking has been its inability to fairly and adequately consider the wider social costs and consequences into the market price mechanism. Thus, the credit-driven, fossil-fuelled and consumption-led growth treadmill has led to a highly unsustainable pattern of resource use in terms of impacts on the planet’s ecosystems and climate.

By the same token, the social costs of things such as child labour within retailer supply chains, human rights abuses associated with mineral extraction have generally failed to register within the pricing system. Indeed the opposite, with products that reflect the real costs of production, such as fair trade goods, usually costing more than the world market price, while the majority of globally traded goods continue to disguise the hidden social and environmental costs of production.

Despite these multiple flaws, challenging the doctrinal hegemony of neoliberal ideology was, until recently, to cast oneself as the modern version of a heretic.  But as the current financial crisis continues to expose the multiple system risks built up over the past three decades, a wave of public debate has been unleashed that openly questions the philosophy that has underpinned our broken economy.

That’s why the World Development Movement, along with over 80 other organisations are calling on G20 leaders to disavow the fallen ideology of neo-liberalism and adopt policies which “Put People First” when they meet in London next month.

The Put People First policy manifesto – which presents an economic recovery plan that would help create jobs, redress imbalances in global economic power and inequality, and tackle climate change – doesn’t seek to replace neo-liberalism with another economic monotheism. Indeed, heterodoxy is an essential feature of our beliefs: the ability for countries, and especially poor nations, to choose their own economic policies that meet its short and long-term development objectives.

Nor does Put People First reject globalisation. One of the mistakes commonly made by leaders and opinion formers alike, including Gordon Brown, is that rejecting the economic orthodoxy of liberalised markets is equivalent to a rejection of globalisation. Not so. The globalisation of technology through, for example, open source patenting, the globalisation of ideas, of cultural learning, of political cooperation to tackle truly global challenges such as climate change and HIV/AIDS, of dealing with corporate tax evasion and stronger human rights frameworks, can all thrive in the absence of a neo-liberal economic doctrine.  Indeed, some of these things would flourish more readily in the absence of an economic system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.

The millions of people represented by the Put People First alliance believe that pursuing alternatives to neo-liberalism is not just politically desirable in this time of crisis, but a question of economic and ecological survival. That’s why we want people to join us in London on March 28. We must tell the G20 leaders that now is the time for reformation: the time to move from neoliberal theology to economic democracy.

Benedict Southworth is the Director of the World Development Movement

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