People Before Profit blog

Youth camp sets tone at Brazil forum

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 06:40:00 +0000

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — Anyone attending the fifth World Social Forum here couldn’t miss it. Situated right in the middle of the “World Social Territory,” a vast swath of land alongside Guaiba Lake that was home to this year’s events, was the sprawling Youth Encampment.

The scene on Jan. 26 was stunning. Engulfing a semi-wooded area of a beautiful park and extending far beyond it, small tents were crowded up against each other for as far as the eye could see. Music was emanating from almost every direction. There were banners and signs, many of them handmade, about ending war, discrimination and exploitation.

The tents were red, yellow, green, khaki, and many other hues, partially shielded from the sun’s harsh rays by black netting suspended above them. And they were home to 35,000 youth and students from 39 countries. That’s right — 35,000.

Manuel Somoza, 26, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, was staying at the camp with two of his friends, Hillary Witte and Michael Seliga, both from the United States.

Somoza, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry in environmental studies, said, “I’m here to participate in a workshop on conservation. The particular angle that we’re looking at is how the current environmental policies of the North are affecting the indigenous communities of the South, and seeing whether academics can help bridge the gap.”

Witte, 20, from Los Angeles, is a student at the University of Washington in Seattle. She said, “I wanted to come here because it is important to be part of something like this. I particularly wanted to learn more about women’s movements around the world.”

Her friend Michael, 23, also from Los Angeles, recently graduated from college. He simply said, “This is a great open space for dialogue, with lots of information about things going on all over.”

Some came to the forum and the encampment almost by chance. Hernan Doño, 27, of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a musician. He said, “I was traveling with my parents on vacation and I heard about the forum and decided to participate.”

Doño said music has “the power to transmit information in a unique way, and even to heal,” adding that his first CD focused on environmental themes, such as stopping global warming.

Of the 35,000 campers, the vast majority — about 25,000 — were from Brazil. Trailing far behind were campers from Argentina and Canada, with about 700 and 600 respectively.

For many Brazilian youth, the forum was a window to their country at large and to the world.

Vanderlei Silva, 20, is from Brasilia, the nation’s capital. He was walking into the camp with three of his friends and co-workers when he stopped to talk.

“We work at a young adult education program in Brasilia,” Silva said. “We have come to the forum because we are presenting a project concerned about educational issues in rural areas. Education is key to so many other things. If you have education, it can help solve problems like peace and war.”

While he and his friends were very upbeat about the encampment (“It gives us a chance to have contact with people from all over the world,” Silva said), they added in unison: “It’s good, except there could be more showers!”

Ana Paula, a 24-year-old university student from Brazil, was first and foremost concerned about developing political strategy. “The forum is a place for people to get together who think it’s important to fight the capitalist system and find another way to organize their economic life. It’s also a place to develop ways of more effectively fighting to combat this system.”

Fernanda Alves, 20, from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, studies filmmaking at Fluminense

Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. “Education makes people who they are, and we should work for a better world,” she said. “I fully agree with the forum’s slogan, ‘A better world is possible.’ It’s also important to not just listen to ideas, but to find solutions to problems. We need to talk less and do more.”

malmberg@pww.org

Chiles privatized pensions spell worker hardship

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 06:06:00 +0000

NewsAnalysis

As the Bush administration pushes to privatize Social Security, many people are looking at countries where state-funded pensions have been privatized. One of them is Chile. President Bush lauded Chile’s privatized social security system as a “good example” for the U.S. when he visited Santiago last November to participate in the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

Chile’s privatized pension plan, however, has not lived up to its promises. The Chilean experience shows that Social Security privatization is only part of a wider scheme of neoliberal economic policies that seek to shore up corporate profits while reversing gains won by the working class.

Chile’s state-sponsored pension plans were created in 1924 and 1925, making Chile the first country in the Americas with a social security program, 10 years before the United States. The leftist Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s expanded the program to encompass about 75 percent of the workforce.

After the 1973 fascist coup headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, trade unions were outlawed, the minimum wage abolished, state-owned enterprises were privatized, and social programs were abolished. Only later, in the face of an acute economic crisis, was Pinochet forced to ease these policies.

Pinochet adhered to the monetarist policies of the “Chicago Boys” — Milton Friedman and other economists at the University of Chicago — who believed in “trickle-down” economics. The Chicago Boys said that giving tax breaks and other economic incentives to the rich would prompt them to turn around and invest that money in the Chilean economy, thus creating more jobs.

It didn’t work out that way, just as Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theories didn’t work here. And reducing taxes on the rich has meant less funding for social welfare programs.

The first generation of Chileans is retiring under the system put in place by Pinochet 25 years ago. The plan gets no funding from employers. All of it comes from the workers, who are required to “invest” 10 percent of their earnings in the plan, which is administered by one of 15 Pension Fund Administrators (two of which are owned by U.S. corporations), investment firms that charge fees for “managing” the individual accounts.

Any financial company can set itself up as an AFP, as the companies are known by their Spanish acronym. While proponents of this system say that this promotes competition to get better returns, in reality all AFPs make more-or-less the same investments.

Because of poverty, unemployment, and the crapshoot of the stock market, together with the cut the AFPs take, Chileans are discovering that the promises made to them have not panned out. Retirees are also suffering because they haven’t received cost-of-living raises.

Today even the government itself and the AFPs have admitted that at least half of the Chilean people will never accumulate enough to be able to get the minimum pension equivalent to $100 (US) monthly. The Chilean Center for Alternative National Development (CENDA) has said that “two-thirds of the population will never qualify for a minimum pension.” Manuel Riesco, CENDA’s director, added that “the Chilean private pension system will provide pensions on its own only to the upper-income minority.”

If there is one sector in Chilean society that has benefited from the privatized system, however, it is the AFPs. Many have former Pinochet cabinet officials on their boards of directors and they are among the most profitable companies in all of Chile.

Just like in the U.S., the people’s movement in Chile is fighting not just against the privatization schemes, but to expand programs for people’s needs. Its trade union federation, CUT, has set as one of its six priority “points of struggle” for 2005 “to change the current pension system” so that there is greater coverage and that it pays at least 70 percent of wages after retirement. CUT is also calling for an end to “the abuse of excessive fees by the management of the pension funds,” as well as stopping the fund monies from becoming profits for the AFP owners.

The key architect of the Chilean plan under the fascist dictator Pinochet was José Piñera. Where is Piñera today? He’s a senior fellow at the Washington-based, libertarian Cato Institute, one of the main proponents of Social Security privatization in the U.S.

If George W. Bush’s uses the “good example” of Chile to revamp and privatize the Social Security System here in the U.S., it’s a good bet that workers, women, African Americans, Latinos and other lower-income sectors of the population will be worse off.

José A. Cruz (j.a.cruz@comcast.net) is editor of Nuestro Mundo.click here for Spanish text

Global call to action: End poverty!

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 05:10:00 +0000

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — From its opening march of 200,000 people — chanting slogans, singing, and carrying banners for an end to war, poverty and inequality — to the nightly rhythms of Brazilian samba, the fifth World Social Forum was an explosive mix of politics and culture that defies adequate description.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez got a hero’s welcome at an overflow rally at Gigantinho, the city’s main sports stadium, Jan. 30. The audience of over 20,000 cheered as Chavez denounced President Bush for conducting foreign policy with bombs and condemned U.S. efforts to dominate the global economy.

Over five days, some 120,000 participants from over 100 countries, of all ages and hues, streamed into hundreds of panels held in large tents on the banks of the Guaiba River, often in sweltering temperatures, to hear debates on the impact of global trade, ending Third World debt, defending the rights of women, eradicating poverty, opposing racism and stopping the U.S. war in Iraq.

Each night, well into the early hours of the morning, tens of thousands gathered around specially designed and sometimes improvised stages to enjoy pulsing music, theater, and dance from all corners of the planet.

The opening march Jan. 26 was a gigantic, four-hour spectacle of political enthusiasm, with a sea of people flooding the city’s main avenue carrying colorful flags and banners with slogans like “U.S. out of Iraq,” “Our nation is not for sale,” “Stop privatization,” “Say no to the World Bank and the IMF,” and “Another world is possible,” the signature theme of the forum. Chants and songs echoed off the surrounding buildings.

A particularly spirited and large contingent from the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) and its allied youth and student groups hoisted scores of red flags and marched alongside a flag-draped sound truck with fiery orators on top and rhythmic music throbbing from huge speakers below.

The PCdoB orators hit hard against imperialism and Bush’s war on Iraq. They called for stepped-up solidarity with the people of Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela and Cuba, and with neighboring countries like Argentina and Uruguay that have recently moved to the left.

During the march, Mizue Taoka of Tokyo, a leader of the Japan Confederation of Railway Workers’ Unions, was distributing fliers for a panel titled “Strategy of trade unions against globalization.”

She said, “In Japan today one of the biggest problems is job insecurity. There has been a privatization drive, and now there are many contract workers who have no benefits. Unemployment in Tokyo and nationally is around 5 percent, a high figure for us. Last year, 30,000 people committed suicide, many because they couldn’t find work.”

Taoka was upbeat about the forum. “I’ve already met railway workers from many other countries in the world, and I hope to build up solidarity through our panel promoting a new International Center for Labor Solidarity, involving workers from Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand.”

Victor Santana, 53, a local economics teacher, expressed skepticism about “free trade” agreements pushed by the Bush administration. He said, “While neoliberalism may benefit some people, it hasn’t benefited cities like Porto Alegre.”

“Unemployment is up, and informal employment is very widespread,” Santana said. “The general conditions facing the people are not good.”

Valerio Lopez, 42, a worker from Porto Alegre who is a member of the agricultural workers union CONAM, said, “Our union grapples with problems like severe unemployment, underemployment and hunger, and we have a a big housing problem.”

Brazil’s 175 million people have inherited the burden of centuries of colonial domination by the Portuguese and more recently the neocolonial domination of the U.S.

Today, under the left-center government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank continue to squeeze Brazil with onerous interest payments on its debts.

Lula spoke about this legacy of exploitation and poverty at a rally of 12,000 people packed into the Gigantinho stadium for the launch of a Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP).

“We need to build another force so we can change the world’s economic and social geography,” he said.

The GCAP, initiated by ActionAid International, urges countries of the industrialized North to dismantle farm subsidies, stop privatization, provide greater food and medical aid to poorer nations, comply with earlier pledges to set aside 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product for development aid, and otherwise increase their efforts to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

At the huge opening march, Paulo, 22, a student from Brasilia, said the forum “brings the people of Central and Latin America together in their struggle against North American imperialism. It builds unity.”

malmberg@pww.org