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Resistance Required: Update on Globalization Preface A young child was playing in the driveway with his trusty old red wagon. A thought passed his mind and his brow furrowed and his lips puckered and he began to cry. His Mom came running to the porch and shouted out to him, "What is the matter." They boy calmed at her voice and looked to her saying, "I have noticed that no adults play with red wagons. I am afraid that I will not be allowed to play with my wagon when I grow up." His Mom assured him that he would be able to play with his red wagon when he grew up.  The boy turned back to his play but after a moment began to cry again. His Mom asked, "What is wrong, honey? What has happened?" They boy sniffed and wiped his nose and said, "I am afraind that when I grow up I will not want to play with my red wagon." Each of us mortgages our future against fears of what might be. Think on how this happens for you. Consider what you might do about it. SERMON Perhaps it will be your grandchildren or your great grandchildren or even further removed, but the story may well be told in fifty years . . . The people of the Desert Kingdom used their considerable powers to wear down the resistance of the Tree People and the River People and the Animal People of the north. The people of the Desert Kingdom built big thirsty water suckers and placed them at the mouths of all the rivers flowing through the land of the Animal People and the Tree People and the River People. They then constructed big ugly pipes to carry water from the mouth of every river found in the north to their Desert Kingdom in the south. The pipes divided the land just as the battle over building them had. The pipes prevented the free flow of caribou, gave logging access to previously prohibited and inaccessible old forests, and it caused the bays and estuaries at the mouths of the north people’s rivers to become so salty that they ceased to be the nursery of the oceans. No fresh water ever reached the oceans from the north again. The people of the North were sad. The people of the Desert Kingdom lived well because of the water they took and they did not care if the Tree People and The River People and the Animal People were sad. Sounds so far fetched that we can dismiss it, right? Think again, folks. Under the worst parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the suits have already been laid against the Canadian Government. On December 4, 1998, Sun Belt Water Inc. of Santa Barbara, CA, launched a lawsuit against Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) suing Canada for $220 million (U.S.) because of an earlier British Columbia decision preventing the company from exporting billions of litres of fresh water from B.C. to California. The case is important, not only because it demonstrates the power of foreign businesses to sue our government under NAFTA, but because it highlights mounting efforts by business to privatize and export Canadian fresh water - efforts the federal government appears unwilling (or unable) to stop. Since the 50's and 60's there have been many schemes to export our water to the US. Most of our water flows north to the Arctic Ocean and Hudson's Bay. The North American Water and Power Alliance was a plan to divert the north flowing rivers of British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon south to the United States. The water was to be routed through a canal running through the center of the Rockies, flooding one fifth of British Columbia. There was also The Great Recycling and Northern Diversion scheme which would close the mouth of James Bay, diverting the water south at a cost of $100 billion. Toronto area MP Dennis Mills tried to revive interest in this scheme. Last year, on February 10, 2000, Federal Environment Minister Christine Stewart and Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy met with journalists on Parliament Hill to announce a federal plan to prevent the bulk export of Canadian fresh water abroad. The ministers called on the provinces to join with the federal government in a moratorium on bulk water exports until a detailed national accord could be reached. Axworthy tried to allay fears that Canada might lose control of its fresh water. He referred to a 1993 exchange of letters between Canada and the United States which purports to exempt fresh water from the free trade deals. Well . . . that sounds promising . . .right? Think again . . . Following the ministers' press conference, Maude Barlow(Thank goodness for people like her.) of the Council of Canadians took to the podium to respond, saying that the Council is pleased the government knows it has to do something. The bad part is that they're trying to do with water what they tried to do with magazines. They gave away all the rights under the North American Free Trade Agreement and are now trying to fudge it and find a compromise. It's not going to work. For several reasons. First, the moratorium is not binding on the provinces. If even one province decides to not adhere to it, the whole plan will be placed in jeopardy. [Quebec has, in fact, declared that it will not take part.] Secondly, if any one province allows the export of water for commercial purposes, all of the provincial bans across the country will be put at risk because only federal legislation exempting us from NAFTA can pertain in this issue. That has been very clearly spelled out by trade lawyers and by Mr. Axworthy himself when he was in Opposition. Mr. Axworthy talked about an exchange of letters that took place in 1993. In 1988, on the eve of the federal election, Mr. Axworthy declared that no exchange of letters between governments could protect water - that only opening up the deal, all of NAFTA, would suffice. Unfortunately he can not have it both ways and he certainly can not treat us as stupid, thinking we never remember what he has said in the past, that we can not figure "it" out!!!. The benign notion that water can lie in the ground protected in one province while it's being traded commercially in another is wrong. We have not yet understood the implications of the terrible parts of NAFTA. Listen . . . A Canadian company - Global Water Corp. of British Columbia - has already signed a contract to export 18 billion gallons of Alaskan water every year to China. Global Water Corp. plans to begin exporting within a year. This means that one of the three NAFTA countries has already opened up commercial export and trade of water; therefore NAFTA has been triggered in terms of the water resources of all three countries. Locally, the whole issue of water being taken from Canada and sent to the United States is being opened up by a decision made by the Director of the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario to allow OMTA (Canada) to take large amounts of water from the Tay River to make a mineral slurry to be shipped by rail tank car to the United States. Should a Minister at the Provincial level be allowed to trigger NAFTA action that affects all Canadians? Hearings have been set for early March in Perth. The results of that hearing could mean that the Desert Kingdom will indeed suck water from the mouths of the rivers of the Tree People, the Animal People and the River People of the North. Folks, how far fetched it is that such a children’s story as I started with may be read at a bedside in fifty years? We can argue that we have the right to say what happens to our own resources. We can argue that we are a sovereign country. We can argue that we have a Parliament which speaks for the people and it will protect us. Right? Think again. We had laws prohibiting the use of MMT, a gasoline additive. It wrecks catalytic converters, effectively making them useless in fighting pollution. It is therefore a hazard to human health. Right? Think again. The Government of Canada was forced to pay US based Ethyl Corporation $20 million in compensation for lost profits and repeal a law banning MMT because a three person tribunal issued a binding ruling under NAFTA that Canada had caused harm to Ethyl Corporation. MMT was not directly harmful to people and therefore did not fall under the health protections of NAFTA. The result was that Canadian law was overturned without a Canadian court or Parliament or a Province doing anything but offering as much resistance as they could. Friends, this is insane. It used to be a good business motto - make a good product and reap the benefits, make a bad product and get punished (by the market). Such thinking is right out of the theological thinking which undergirds capitalism - the vindictive side of Calvinism. The righteous are rewarded. Others are punished. But when we look at the Ethyl Corporation decision, capitalism no longer wants to punish bad products to keep its own reputation clean. All that anyone wants today is money, and more money, regardless of the cost. Capitalism has gone awry in this instance. This is not competition, it is highway robbery and a throwback to the American Revolution. Surely, since that money was paid to Ethyl Corporation from our taxes, and I can not imagine any decent Canadian believing that our politicians should have voted to allow such things, we are facing taxation without representation of our views! Is the telling of that bedtime story really so far fetched? Folks, these events are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to global trade. If you want to keep up on what is going on, you have some web site sources listed at the end of this sermon. Where are we now? We know that international trade agreements to which Canada has been a party under the leadership of Brian Mulroney and Jean Cretien have some sections which business says is good for them, but which organizations which value rights, social services and national identity believe are a disaster. Mind you, I am not against NAFTA in a wholesale manner. However, it has some perfectly horrid provisions. What is happening today. After the victory over the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment several years ago, the discussions moved to the World Trade Organization. The WTO opened up the discussions and found that is was a strategic mistake to ask the developing nations what they thought about trade agreements currently under negotiation by the largest nations of the world. Developing nations were sceptical of laws binding them to ecological standards they could not afford as well as workers benefits and rights they could not afford. Either would make their products uncompetitive in the world market. The WTO meetings in Seattle during the fall of 1999 were opened up to scrutiny and minor participation by NGO’s. We all know that the Seattle meetings were a disaster. It was not only the discussions inside the hotel but the protesters outside that sealed the fate of those discussions. While there were many well meaning and well trained protesters seeking to avoid violence, there were also anarchists, well trained in how to incite violence. The presence of anarchists at many of the protests against world trade agreements has forced local governments to load the streets with a massive police presence to limit the damage to physical property. There is no question that police and protesters fed on each other and the situation was explosive and repugnant to most of us. The scenes were repeated in April in Washington, D.C., last year during meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank where it took 10,000 police to hold 30,000 protesters at bay for four days. Ah, but we can easily say that this was in the States. Well, folks, it went well past the shores of the States. In Chaing Mai in the highlands of Thailand, in May of 2000, farmers gathered to protest the gathering of the Asian Development Bank to the dismay of bankers. This last September, in events little covered by the Ottawa Citizen, protesters took to the streets and disrupted the meetings of the Asia Pacific Summit of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne. Mounted police ran protesters down in attempting to quell riots. In Prague, this past fall, at a meeting of the Breton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and others, was shut down a day early by the activity of over 10,000 protesters. A debate at Prague castle, sponsored by Czech President Vaclav Havel, exposed the real nature of the IMF and the World Bank when World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, and IMF Managing Director, Horst Koehler, were not prepared to go beyond platitudes and generalities. Many world economic leaders have since remarked that these two performed poorly and blew their most important encounter with civil society. Certainly things like that do not happen in Canada. Guess again, folks! We have only to look at the police presence at meetings of APEC, the Asian Pacific Economic Conference, at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre near the end of November in 1997. It was there that 18 world leaders including then Indonesian President Suharto and Chinese President Jiang Zemin of Tiananmen fame met amidst protesters who were pepper sprayed for holding up signs in sight of some of the world leaders. This was when Mr. Cretien made his famous pepper on eggs statement. It was most embarrassing to have him duck such a serious issue in such a frivolous manner. Things like that do happen in Canada and they will happen again in Canada. From April 20-2, 2001, Quebec City will host the Summit of the Americas, with 34 leaders of nations from Canada to Chile and the Caribbean. They will talk about issues like hemispheric integration and migration, security and terrorism, democracy and human rights, as well the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, the FTAA. Working groups have been meeting in Miami for the past year to hammer out agreements and next steps for spreading NAFTA to all of the Americas. Two weeks before the Quebec City meetings, trade ministers will meet in Buenos Aires to sign off on the texts of the agreement for slashing tariffs and other trade barriers. Is this bad? Not really. I agree that a lowering of tariffs will eventually lead to a levelling of the playing field and deeper integration of all economies. I believe that free trade eventually helps the cause of peace in the world. Getting there is painful and the process allows the rich to make huge cash grabs along the way, deepening the rift between the wealthy and the poor and thinning the middle class at the same time. However, everything a capitalist does is not bad! But enough is enough! There are pork barrel riders on all of these agreements which allow for the unbridled attack on culture, resources, and local standards for worker safety, human rights, environmental protection, and democracy. To get the gradual removal of trade barriers mixed up with these other areas is a grave mistake. The problem, of course, is that an anti-capitalist will purposely blur the lines and get our hearts involved in the debate by mixing issues which do not really belong together. And the capitalists will blend their story with the anarchists’ violence to bring out our disgust with some of the tactics. It is no wonder we get confused. Folks. I hate spin. Spin is so transparent today, no one really gets away with it. But they all do it and it takes time and information to work around it. If you hope to succeed in not falling prey to these tactics, you must be up on the issues and thirsty for the latest information, or you will not be able to keep ahead of and understand all the claims that are made. It is nearly impossible for most of us to sort out the conflicting claims. It is made the more impossible when local media abrogate their ethical responsibility to allow civil discussion rather than polemic and brainwashing in their pages. Will there be demonstrations in Quebec? Of course! With the record of Quebec Police and the Federal Government when it comes to allowing real dissent . . . We know the record. When it comes to any of the trade organizations actually being willing to dialogue with the protesters . . . We know the record. When it comes to anarchists at protests . . . We know the record. When it comes to ardent anti-globalists and zealous anti-capitalists . . . we know the record. Will there be violence at Quebec City? It would be a miracle if there is no violence. I fear we will hear about it in the reports of commissions a year from now. And it is too bad, because it could all be averted if the leaders would just listen. They have no clear record showing that they will. Will there be violence in Quebec? From what I have read about the ten foot high chain link fence to be erected around the old city by the Surete de Quebec and the RCMP, violence is expected. Only people with passes will be allowed through the gates. How wrong the government is in its tactics. Will there be violence? You can rest assured that the methods being used to defend the leaders will assure that there is violence. This will be the largest police action in Canada that the government has ever taken against its own citizens. What a sham, what a shame, what a disgrace! One Canadian group, CLAC, La Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitaliste, met in Montreal over a year ago to begin its planning. They are currently on a road show training people all across the country for what is billed the Carnival Against Capitalism. They are holding a national meeting in Quebec City at the end of this month to finalize planning. But they are only one of many groups and NGO’s planning a presence at the Quebec conference. There is also another Canadian event taking place in Montreal, January 26 - 28, at Concordia University. Dubbed, Colour of Resistance, it is part of the teaching about issues that needs to be done in preparation for the Quebec meetings. Colour of Resistance will look critically at issues of representation, race and identity within the anti-globalization movement and within capitalist globalization. The leaders of Colours of Resistance reject imperialism and the paternalism they see in multicultural approaches. Their workshops include The Third world in Montreal: Immigration and Refugees; Globalization: Racism and Representation, the prison industrial complex; police brutality; Food Security, reproductive Technology and Communities of colour; and Imperialism and Globalization. Sounds like a primmer right out of the sixties! Can the violence happen in Canada? You bet it can! If we go back to the old MAI and the disagr eements with it, we find that the global business interests have not changed their ideas at all. They still find democracy to be the enemy of capitalism. They still find human rights, worker safety, and ecology to be too costly and anti-competitive in nature. They still believe they have the right to be compensated for producing a failed product that poisons people. It is these people who are still driving the movement to rewrite investment and trade rules. And while there has been some improvement at the World Bank and the IMF, these organizations are still seen as enemies to human rights and sustainable development by the protestors. While there was some hope engendered a year ago by the harmonization movement, whereby many of the global rules relating to worker safety and the environment might be placed on a level playing field, perhaps without too much degradation of higher standards in the world, it has become clear that both the developing nations and business want little involvement with any of these concerns. Business really runs the roost here. The tendrils of business run deep around the world. Nations are often seen as a throwback. People are a disposable resource. Governments have less and less control over business, especially as governments have bought into the business led agenda for down sizing. Smaller government is less powerful on the world stage and will have even less to do with trade decisions in so far as they represent the interests of people. I must admit that what I am saying this morning would have been straight out of a communist cell in the forties and fifties. Out of the far left in the sixties. But today, this thinking is just to the left of centre, and becoming more and more mainstream with every union that joins the anti-globalization movement - even if it is for the wrong reasons that most unions join the movement. That could be another sermon, but I am not going to go there in worship. These issues have become so fractured and complicated that we need to focus a bit. I would suggest that if any of you are intrigued and want more, attend the sessions at Concordia at the end of the month. If you want to attend the protests in Quebec City in April, book a room now. Find a moderate group with plans in the work and work through them. People on their own are likely to be so out of the information loop that they can get into trouble - unwittingly! There are three things you can do now and for the entire year to come which will help give you a feeling that you have been able to do something in the fight to lessen specific harmful impacts of globalization. First, and foremost, educate yourself well enough to pick one or at the most two issues to stay on top of. Find out where to get your information and keep it coming. Keep reading. Become somewhat of an expert. If you do nothing, you support globalization. Then write your letters to heads of corporations, TV and Radio stations, to the editors of Newspapers. Write to our Prime Minister, to people in his trade delegations, to members of Parliament. If you do nothing else, do these things. Then you will not be accused of standing by while we were taken over by undemocratic interests. Second, come out . . . .YES . . . .come out of the closet and let friends know which specific aspects of agreements you would change and why. If you do not talk with friends you fail to take your lessons and share them. Lessons unshared are not lessons learned with any conviction. There are many times each day when you will have an opportunity to say something. Do it. Third, and this is not for the faint of heart - go to demonstrations. Do not be afraid to get arrested. I do not mean for violence or serious crimes, but for simply standing your ground when you know in your heart that you have a right to speak out right where you are standing. I was once told that no UU minister was worth his or her salt if they had never been arrested. I agree. I have been arrested. Twice . . . . . .Well . . . .once was for speeding! The other wads for the right reasons. I might also say that any Canadian Unitarian who is an ardent social activist can look at an arrest for the right reasons with pride, not shame. Most arrests do not lead to jail - they are simply a tool of the police to get you out of the way. And for the most part, you can see the pepper spray and tear gas situations arising and can move out of the way before they happen. I know some of you would lose your jobs if you got arrested - fair enough. But there are other ways you can be involved. And if you get to jail, make friends. The jails will be filled with like minded people, all there to resist the worst of the globalization movement. And when your friends come to visit, remember what happened when two Unitarians met in a jail over a hundred years ago. When Ralph Waldo Emerson came to a jail to visit Henry David Thoreau who was in for some act of social disobedience, Emerson said, "Henry, what are you doing in there?" and Thoreau replied, "Waldo, what are you doing out there?" And finally, and I will end on this, we need to have some coherent national direction based on principle. When we complain that the use of MMT in gasoline is not good and ban it, it is a good move. We resisted the sale of MMT in Canada by Ethyl Corporation. It is unfortunate that we lost the battle at arbitration (rather stilted arbitration!!!!). We can not then turn around and argue for our own right to sell something we know is not good for people. Canada went to court to try to remove a French ban on the importation of asbestos and asbestos products. We lost. On one hand we do not want the bad stuff and on the other we want to sell it. These are complicated cases, but the result shows that our own nation is not of one mind on the environment. It should be. Friends, we started with a portion of a simple children’s story where the Tree People, the River People, and the Water People lost to the people of the Desert Kingdom. In losing, their countryside was riddled with ugly pipe that divided the land. The Tree, River and Water People also lost control over their land. They were not effective in resistance. We have seen that portions of free trade agreements can have disastrous provisions attached from the point of view of people who value the inherent worth and dignity of individuals and the use of a democratic process. On the other hand, these agreements are leading to the fulfilment of the capitalistic system, whose advocates say will herald in a new age of peace a prosperity for all. The truth likely is in the middle somewhere. We have seen that the old MAI, which had a clear focus, has broken into many parts, divided its concerns amongst the agendas of many groups. It is harder and harder to find out what is going on where. We have also seen that protesters are not all sharing the same concerns or tactics. Everyone will get tarred with the image of violence if they are not careful, and such images will be exploited by the globalists. Globalist spin doctors have already hijacked the concern of protesters for the poor of the world by claiming that free enterprise will solve the problem of poverty and raise standards of living worldwide. It is complicated, because free enterprise likely will help - but to be so fascist with people who think differently is wrong . . . on both sides!! And finally we have been given options for action with the clear first step of education. What you do is up to you. Here is what I am doing. I read alternative sources of news each day to stay on top of the issues. I write letters to the local papers - that do not get published! The issues I have chosen to stick with are those related to attacks on environmental laws and Third World and developing nations concerns about worker safety. To that end I have developed several friendships in developing nations with business people and we send email talking bout ways to increase safety standards and benefits without driving the business under because the costs are so great. It is not easy work, and I am not very effective, but we keep talking and I keep reading. What will you do? Do you think you are too old? Never. And what of your children and your grandchildren? So you don’t do politics? You’d best change that attitude because politics is the art of allocating resources in this world. If you are concerned at all, politics is the name of the game. You are too busy. So were people in Germany in the 1930's. You believe in capitalism. I do to, but I also know that it has shown itself to be in need of regulation, and you know that too. Help determine what that regulation should be. The forces are too overwhelming and you are so small? True. So either give upand hand the world over to the business elite or accept the challenge. The choices are yours. What are you going to do? You remember the story about the child with the red wagon at the start of the service. He mortgaged his moments against the fear of the future. Don’t do it. You will end up with nothing, not even the red wagon now. Be part of building that future. What are you going to do?	What to expect on Sundays Religious Sources "Views From These Pews"