Written by Laurence Brahm - Published by Review Asia on 11/01/2008

Economic theories from Adam Smith and his ilk have left compassion out of the equation. Given the latest financial meltdown, isn't it time to put it back in?

With the Wall Street crash still unraveling, global markets melted to the dismay of many. Erstwhile blue-chip investment hank Lehman Brothers went belly up, mega-insurer AIG was all but nationalized by the US government in order to keep it alive, while hosts of financial institutions under threat of collapse ceased inter-bank trading simply to survive. As pundits keep pointing out, this kind of market crash has not occurred since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Some say the US federal government's US$700-billion rescue plan will turn the USA into the USSA - the United Socialist States of America. This will end the neo-liberal economic dream and with it, probably, the neoconservative political era.

It shatters assumptions about the stability of our global financial system. In turn, the Bretton Woods monetary system - the remedy adopted after the Great Depression and World War II - is now under question. The very basis of our global financial system is not working, creating greater pockets of cyclical poverty - even in developed countries - and ever-wider gaps between rich and poor.

While brokers and punters are still reeling, many non-government organizations (NGOs) have been warning about this market collapse for some time. In fact, they have been screaming their concerns before television cameras at massive protests during meetings of the World Trade Organization, of the G8 group of industrialized nations, and of the World Bank International Monetary Fund in Seattle, Genoa, Prague, Quebec and Cancun.

They have repeatedly come together as a single voice expressing angrily in massive grassroots protests the point s cited below. The problem is that nobody has bothered to take these voices seriously. Given what has transpired over the past few months, maybe someone will listen now.

The collective voices of these NGOs have been mistakenly labeled as the "anti-globalization movement". It is probably high time to re-define the movement. For one thing, the terms "globalization" and "anti-globalization" are used out of context. Globalization has been around ever since the ancient trading routes first existed. So there is no anti-globalization or pro-globalization. These terms confuse the issues. It is a question of right or wrong globalization. More specifically, whether developing nations - and even underdeveloped regions within developed nations - are facing a new form of colonization in a modern abstract context, using financial levers and brand cult association disseminated through corporate culture and mass media.

Bretton Woods created the "Norch ", which was a social policy state, and the "South" - a social development state - but all within the structure of Washington manipulated puppetry, controlled through strings of highly conditional aid via the World Bank and the IMF. The alleged goal: liberalization of trade and finance.

However, from the 1980s onwards, this approach has promoted global capita l through shock therapy development programs at the expense of social development and human welfare. This form of globalization has favored an international deregulated system that serves corporate profitability only, but not the interests of the common man. As for protecting the environment, don't even think about it.

So what is the anti-globalization movement? Why is it called anti-globalization? Members of the movement use mobile phones, the internet and digitized messaging to organize street protests. These are the very tools of so-called globalization. So how can this movement be against the very tools with which its members organize themselves? And who' could be against such a wonderful thing as globalization?

It is probably time to stop using the terms globalization and anti-globalization. They are convenient political and media labels that mean nothing, are used incorrectly in order to create confusion and obscure a global, seamless, borderless, democratic and social justice force - the nemesis of multinational corporate culture, neo-liberal economics and neoconservative politics. The movement calls for a redefinition of global values - corporate, social, environmental, governance, the measure of success - that many hope would help in establishing new economic and political paradigms.

If the movement's warnings had been heeded, the global financial collapse might never have happened. When global trade and financial institutions meet, it is usually under massive security lockdowns, and meetings mostly have to be aborted as they often are disrupted – and discredited – by street protests. In light of the global financial crisis, it is obviously time to redefine globalization and anti-globalization. Perhaps we need to redefine what we mean by democratic participation as well.

From now on, these global grass roots participatory social action groups and NGOs should collectively be called the new "global just ice movement". It is not anti-globalization because it uses and promotes the very tools of globalization - the internet and mobile telecommunications - to organize protests among the globally discontented. Such protests are organized because the groups are denied access to the mainstream media, which prefer to dismiss these dissenting voices.

In fact, we have stopped having meaningful debates in our corporate-controlled media, which confine the framework of politically correct discuss ion within narrow terms it is comfortable with. We don't ask questions anymore and tend to accept reports in the mainstream Western media at face value. Whatever the New York Times reports, we believe as truth, and then parrot it. The emergence of Al Jazeera in both Arabic and English networks is, in a way, a response to this.

The global justice movement is united in one thing - its opposition to the expansion of a system that promoted corporate globalization at the expense of social goals such as fair trade, social justice, ethnic identity, community sustainability, national sovereignty, cultural diversity and ecological existence.

The movement has transnational vision and spirit. So far, it is organized to oppose hierarchies and keeps decision-making local and focused on specific issues. Its moral vision: transnational grassroots values will ultimately prove to be more powerful than the instruments of financial coercion used by the institutional corporate, financial and political forces with which it is in conflict.

Rather than globalization of brand association and a consumer-class driven by materialist values alone, the movement calls for the globalization of environmental protect ion, health care and pharmaceuticals, as well as access to food, clean water and education.

This means global economic and financial systems must be re-engineered so they no longer promote growing income gaps between the elite and the poor. Instead, they should be aimed at sustaining our very existence on this planet. We are quickly destroying our future through environmental desecration and disregard, driven by short-term materialist needs fostered through media-promoted consumer brand culture and melting-pot values, inculcating the idea that more is always better. It is time to re-engineer our global financial system; focusing on the values that form the assumptions behind the economic theories that sustain it. With all our economic theories, we forget the environment, and the world's peoples and cultures, even as we destroy everything to make money. This is the inherent fault of an economic theory that assumes human beings are driven only by greed - the need to make more money because maximizing profit is the sole basis of business.

Adam Smith came up with this notion and we are stuck with it because none of the big academic economists have bothered to challenge it. It befalls on us to defy this idea and advance a new one: responsible living is more than just about making money. A caring human being is somebody who takes responsibility for his society and environment and, ultimately, the next generation. Economic theories leave the compassionate side of human nature out of the equation. It is time put it back in.

Laurence Brahm is a global activist, international mediator, political columnist and author. He is the leading advocate of a fresh development paradigm - The Himalayan Consensus - an innovative approach to development.

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