Lords of the rings

Murray Worthy reveals some of the dirty secrets of the 2012 Olympics corporate sponsors
Adidas is the official sportswear partner of London 2012, with sole rights to produce clothing featuring the prestigious Olympic logo. In return for its investment, the company aims to overtake Nike to become the UK’s sportswear market leader. Away from the Olympic spotlight, the workers making goods for Adidas experience poverty pay, abuse and exploitation. In factories supplying Adidas in Bangladesh, workers earn as little as 9p an hour and are required to work more than 60 hours a week – with overtime that is often unpaid. This abuse of basic labour rights is wholly contrary to the Olympic ideals of social responsibility and human dignity. Race to the Bottom
ATOS is the French IT firm responsible for carrying out the British government’s ‘work capability assessment’. Tens of thousands of sick and disabled people have been forced into poverty after being stripped of essential benefits. Despite the process being dubbed unfit for purpose, and an increasing number of suicides due to the vicious health testing regime, this form of assessment is to be extended to everyone on some form of disability benefit. When not bullying disabled people, ATOS is the official IT partner of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games – championing its support for disabled athletes with one hand while destroying the lives of disabled and sick benefit claimants with the other. Disabled People Against Cuts
Incredibly, BP is the official sustainability partner, oil and gas partner and carbon offset partner of London 2012. This allows the company to promote discredited biofuels and carbon offsets as solutions to climate change, sidelining genuine long-term sustainable solutions such as moving off fossil fuels or reducing consumption. And despite high profile claims about its use of biofuels for the 5,000 Olympic vehicles, 99 per cent of the fleet will rely on conventional fuel. This is not forgetting that BP is the company behind the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, tar sands extraction in Alberta and a £7.5 billion deal to exploit oil in the Russian Arctic. It was previously very good friends with the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the Gaddafi regime in Libya. UK Tar Sands Network
BT, the official communications partner of London 2012, stands accused of complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. BT has welcomed Israeli telecoms company Bezeq into its exclusive BT Alliance programme, despite the fact that Bezeq provides the telecoms infrastructure for Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. BT’s own business principles include specific commitments to uphold human rights, yet it has refused to acknowledge that there is a problem in its relationship with Bezeq. Human rights campaigners are calling on BT to hang up on the occupation and disconnect from Bezeq. Hang Up on the Occupation
Coca-Cola has sponsored the Olympics since 1928, making it the longest continuous supporter of the Games. The company says that it shares the Olympic Movement’s vision and is committed to promoting ‘active, healthy lifestyles’ for all. Yet Coca-Cola has become the target of a mass campaign in India for destroying livelihoods and communities by exhausting water resources and contaminating local ecosystems with effluent. Coca-Cola has been implicated in human rights abuses in Colombia, where trade unions allege that the company’s bottlers used illegal paramilitaries to attack and kill worker activists, and has a long history of union-busting in a wide range of other countries. India Resource Centre
On 2 December 1984, a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, leaked 27 tons of deadly gas. Half a million people were exposed to it and an estimated 25,000 have died as a result. A further 150,000 victims are believed to be chronically ill and around 50,000 unable to work. Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001 but has since refused to accept liability for supporting victims or for cleaning up the toxic contamination at the Bhopal site. Union Carbide’s former CEO has even been declared a fugitive from justice by the Indian courts. Despite this, London 2012 selected Dow to provide a giant plastic wrap around the Olympic stadium. This led to threats of a boycott of the Games by the Indian government and prompted the resignation of a member of the Olympics sustainability commission, who said she believed that the organisers had become apologists for Dow. Bhopal Medical Appeal
G4S is the world’s largest private security company and official security services provider to London 2012. While it claims to provide ‘security solutions’ for ‘complex environments’, the company in fact contributes to increasing human insecurity around the world. G4S is the parent company of the British private military company, ArmorGroup. It has been criticised by the US senate for hiring Afghan warlords to provide security, one of whom was alleged to have close ties with the Taliban. Closer to home, G4S security operates four UK prisons and three immigration detention centres and has been implicated in various human rights abuses. Perhaps the most infamous case is the death of Jimmy Mubenga. In a deportation flight to Angola in October 2010, he was heavily restrained and handcuffed by three G4S guards. After collapsing in custody, he was later pronounced dead in hospital. National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns
Rio Tinto won the contract to provide the metal for the near 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals at London 2012, claiming a passionate commitment to sustainable development. The reality falls far from the rhetoric. In Utah, USA, where most of the metals will be mined, Rio Tinto is accused of being responsible for more than 30 per cent of particulate air pollution, mainly made up of heavy metals, leading to 150 premature deaths each year. Meanwhile, in Mongolia, where the remainder of the metals will be mined, Rio Tinto refuses to recognise nomadic herders as indigenous to the area, and has depleted water resources in the already water-scarce Gobi desert. London Mining Network
These two articles are also available as a printed leaflet. For free copies for your union branch, campaign group or just to hand out yourself, email your address to office@redpepper.org.uk

The WTO had come into being just four years earlier, as the final act of the Uruguay Round of world trade negotiations. Its ambitions were clear from the outset. Former WTO director-general Renato Ruggiero spoke of the organisation’s mission as ‘writing the constitution of a single global economy’. Protesters knew that the Seattle demonstrations were more than just a coming together of individual struggles for environmental justice or workers’ rights. Seattle was an act of mass resistance to corporate globalisation itself.

Yet Seattle was more than just a spectacle of resistance. It was also a famous victory. The demonstrations succeeded in derailing the launch of a new round of trade negotiations designed to force open world markets for the benefit of transnational capital. Under pressure from demonstrators outside, and from furious African and Caribbean delegates within, the WTO talks collapsed in failure. The global justice movement had come of age.

Victories

Ten years on from Seattle, the movement can boast further victories. The WTO was eventually able to launch its new Doha Round of trade talks in 2001, amidst explicit threats to developing countries following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Yet those talks collapsed again just two years later at the WTO’s Cancún ministerial conference, as a result of intensive collaboration between global justice activists of North and South.

Better still, the WTO was forced to completely abandon its planned expansion into new issue areas such as foreign investment and government procurement, which would have subordinated even more sectors of our economies to the organisation’s global constitution.

The WTO has lurched from crisis to crisis ever since, with further collapses leading to long-term stagnation. Current attempts to revive the trade talks smack of desperation, while the alternative of abandoning them altogether would be a grave admission of failure. Yet many countries have already voted with their feet by turning to bilateral or regional trade negotiations in place of the multilateral WTO. The EU’s aggressive Global Europe strategy, launched in 2006, seeks to force through on a bilateral basis many of the same measures that were already rejected by developing countries in the multilateral talks.

The US has adopted a similar strategy, and its regional free trade initiatives have met with strong resistance. Coordinated opposition put an end to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, which topped the Bush administration’s agenda at the start of the decade but was dead in the water by 2005.In its place, new economic initiatives in Latin America are now openly challenging the supremacy of the neoliberal Washington consensus. These include the Banco del Sur as a genuine development bank for the region, and the Bolivarian Alternative (ALBA) to replace the free trade agenda promoted by the US.

Global and diverse

So where is the global justice movement, now that capitalism’s latest crisis is upon us? While struggles still continue in all corners of the globe, the movement seems to have been marginalised in the debate over the future of the world economy. Does this mean it has served its purpose? Is the global justice movement dead?

The movement has certainly not disappeared. It has, however, lost the high profile it enjoyed ten years ago as the mainstream media has turned its attention to the ‘war on terror’ as its primary focus in international affairs. Demonstrations against the World Bank and IMF in Prague (2000) and against the G8 in Genoa (2001) were widely covered, but since 9/11 anti-globalisation protests have become yesterday’s news. Ongoing resistance in Latin America, Africa and Asia has received even less attention: how much coverage was given to this September’s demonstrations in New Delhi, when 50,000 farmers were arrested en masse as Indian social movements mobilised against the WTO?

Partly, too, the global justice movement has developed more targeted, less spectacular campaigns against the neoliberal agenda. Trade union federations from 11 major developing countries have joined forces to fight off WTO proposals on industrial trade that would wipe out their manufacturing sectors with massive loss of jobs. The international peasant movement La Via Campesina has sustained an intense campaign to remove agriculture from the WTO altogether, in view of the organisation’s devastating impact on farmers across the world. These and many other initiatives at the national level are further coordinated through the Our World is Not for Sale network, and have continued to frustrate the WTO’s ambitions long after the more spectacular protests have ended.

Far from disappearing, the global justice movement has broadened into a truly diverse movement. Trade unionists from North and South have joined with environmentalists, farmers’ groups, fishing communities, indigenous peoples, youth and other social movements against the common threat of corporate globalisation.

The thousands who took over the streets of Hong Kong in protest against the WTO’s 2005 conference were led by migrant workers and women’s rights groups from across Asia, protesting against the commodification of their labour under world trade rules. Such mobilisations are a tribute to the ceaseless organising and political education undertaken in favelas, villages, colleges and workplaces the world over. These actions form the basis of the global justice movement, and they remain as strong as ever.

This broadening and deepening of the movement has been facilitated by the development of social forums over the past decade. Since 2001, the World Social Forum and its regional offshoots have provided crucial spaces for many hundreds of thousands of activists to build networks for coordinated resistance. At the regional level, too, spaces such as the European Social Forum have facilitated the construction of networks linking up movements across countries and across themes. This painstaking activity takes place away from the gaze of the mainstream media, but is crucial for the movement’s long-term sustainability and growth.

Political power

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that we can rest on our laurels, as the global justice movement clearly faces new challenges today. While individual struggles have seen huge victories, the movement has failed to set the terms of the debate on the sort of new economic order we wish to come out of the current crisis. Despite the evident bankruptcy of global capitalism, world leaders have done their best to ignore calls for more radical change. Turning our individual struggles into political power at the global level remains elusive.

While the WTO has been unable to conclude the Doha Round of international trade negotiations, we have not been able to kill them off altogether. G20 leaders have now called for a conclusion to the talks in 2010, despite the acknowledged damage that this will cause poorer countries. This was precisely the result of the previous Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which led to huge losses for the world’s least developed countries, and especially those of sub-Saharan Africa. It is also why the Doha Round was originally billed as a ‘development round’, with the supposed aim of undoing some of the harm caused by earlier agreements.

A genuine development round of trade talks would have removed the threats to public services and industrial policy that came in as a result of the Uruguay Round. It would also have ended the vast subsidies handed out to European and US agribusiness, which lead to the dumping of cheap produce on overseas markets and the destruction of millions of livelihoods in farming communities around the world. Yet the WTO quickly dismissed any hopes that it might deliver such a positive agenda. Instead, the organisation reverted to type with a new wave of trade liberalisation designed to force open agricultural, industrial and services markets for the benefit of multinational corporations alone.

The past ten years have confirmed that the WTO will never deliver a positive agenda for change. Suggestions that it can be reformed to meet the needs of a new world order fail to appreciate the deep-seated ideology and vested interests that drive the organisation. The Doha Round was its opportunity to prove that it could act in the interests of development and social justice, and it has failed dismally. Ultimately, as the Seattle protestors recognised, there can be no progressive future with the WTO.

This radical vision of a world without the WTO is the agenda that must inspire today’s global justice movement. We have spent enough time on individual campaigns around the specific parts of the globalisation agenda, neglecting the broader political analysis and imperative for change. Seattle offered a glimpse of the power that the movement can wield if it joins its disparate parts in a broad front against the common enemy. Ten years on, the movement is stronger and better connected than ever. It is time to take it to the next level.

John Hilary is executive director of War on Want

Globeleq was set up in 2002 by the Department for International Development (DFID) as part of the government’s strategy of ‘promoting the private sector in the developing world’. The company remains wholly owned by DFID through its private sector promotion arm CDC, formerly known as the Commonwealth Development Corporation.

Globeleq now has operations in the energy sectors of 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and is actively pursuing further acquisitions in its bid to be ‘the fastest growing power company in the emerging markets’.

Globeleq has indeed grown fast. The company’s rapid expansion has been made possible because other multinational power companies have been keen to exit developing country markets as a result of the problems associated with energy privatisation.

However, this means that vast amounts of aid money supposedly earmarked for development purposes have been given instead to US power companies wishing to pull out of the developing world. Two such companies – AES and El Paso – have benefited to the tune of over US$1 billion between them in this way.

In this way Globeleq is keeping alive a private sector presence in situations where other companies have abandoned the market. This is in line with DFID’s broader aim to sustain the private sector in cases of market failure, but it raises serious questions in light of DFID’s overall mandate of poverty reduction. The involvement of multinational power companies in the energy sectors of developing countries has been deeply problematic, as the poor have often found themselves excluded from access to privatised electricity. Far from solving the problems of poverty, electricity privatisation has often exacerbated them.

There are currently 1.6 billion people around the world without access to electricity, roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Two thirds of these are in Asia, with most of the rest in sub-Saharan Africa. The International Energy Agency estimates that it will be necessary to roll out electricity services to a further 600 million people by 2015 if the world is to meet the top line UN millennium development goal of halving the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day.

Yet privatisation of the electricity sector has not been successful in expanding coverage to poor communities. In fact, privatisation has led to sharp increases in the tariffs charged to consumers, and these increases have often raised prices beyond the reach of the poor. The arrival of multinational companies such as AES, Enron and EDF in developing countries during the 1990s saw dramatic price increases in electricity. When the Indian state of Maharashtra opened its power sector to Enron, for example, the state electricity board soon found itself forced to raise tariffs to farmers by a crippling 400 per cent to meet the added costs.

Electricity privatisation has proved hugely unpopular in many of the countries in which Globeleq operates. In Arequipa, southern Peru, mass protests erupted when the government attempted to privatise two electricity companies in 2002, with two people killed and 150 injured. Months of demonstrations against electricity privatisation in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh left three people dead and thousands arrested.

Yet DFID continues to promote the privatisation of public services through Globeleq and other such initiatives. This not only conflicts with DFID’s own poverty reduction mandate, but it also undermines the ongoing work to build alternative models of energy provision, such as public sector and community- based services that are affordable and accessible to all.

The government has acknowledged the problems caused when developing countries are required to hand over public services to multinational companies.

Why, then, does it own a private power company that aims to take over energy services in the developing world?John Hilary is director of campaigns at War on Want. A full report on Globeleq is available at www.waronwant.org/globeleq