www.cnn.com Thursday, January 30, 2003 Posted: 9:01 PM EST (0201 GMT)

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- With many opponents of President Hugo Chavez preparing to return to work, Venezuelans leading a 60-day-old strike shifted tactics, diving headlong into an initiative to shorten his six-year term with international help.

After two grueling months, strike organizers have agreed to let shopping malls, banks, franchises and schools reopen next week. Meanwhile, production continues to creep upward in the vital oil industry, where the walkout has been strongest.

As diplomats from six nations arrived in Caracas Thursday to push for early elections, opposition leaders were planning a petition drive to support several measures, including a proposed constitutional amendment that would:

•  Cut presidential terms from six years to four

•  Hold new presidential and congressional elections this year

•  Create a new elections council to organize any vote

•  Get the Supreme Court to determine when, exactly, a recall vote on Chavez's presidency can be held

•  Allow Chavez and legislators to seek re-election

Similar ideas were floated by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a recent visit to Caracas. The government said it was studying the opposition's proposal but won't allow it to shorten Chavez's term.

Diplomats from the United States, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal and Spain -- dubbed the "Group of Friends" of Venezuela -- planned a private dinner meeting late Thursday with Cesar Gaviria, secretary general of the Organization of American States. Gaviria has mediated talks here since November.

The envoys, including Curt Struble, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, planned meetings with Chavez and the opposition on Friday.

Gaviria said the diplomats can monitor compliance with any electoral pact and reduce tensions that have led to six deaths since the strike began December 2. "The country can't sustain more tension," he said.

Strike leader Manuel Cova of the Venezuelan Workers Confederation said Thursday a new presidential election could be held as early as March.

"To do this we need the guarantees of the international community," Cova said. "If we don't do it this year, we'll be in prison, or in exile, there won't be press freedom. ... We must do it this year."

Chavez had welcomed Carter's ideas about early elections. But he also has threatened to abandon the OAS-mediated talks, saying he won't negotiate with "terrorists."

Chavez failed to expand the "Friends" to include governments more sympathetic to his populist revolution. He has since warned the diplomats not to interfere in internal affairs.

The opposition called the strike to demand a nonbinding referendum on Chavez's rule in February, as petitioned by 2 million Venezuelan voters. It later upped the ante to demand Chavez's ouster.

But the Supreme Court, citing a technicality, indefinitely postponed the referendum. Chavez, elected in 2000 to a six-year term, shows no signs of leaving.

The deadlock has hobbled production in the world's No. 5 oil exporter. Analysts predict the economy will shrink 25 percent this year after an 8 percent contraction last year.

The government has cut its 46 trillion bolivar (US$25 billion) 2003 budget by 10 percent and announced Thursday it will cut the state-owned oil monopoly's 15 trillion bolivar ($8 billion) budget by 5 trillion bolivars ($2.7 billion) to offset oil losses.

Oil accounts for half of government income and 30 percent of Venezuela's 185 trillion bolivar ($100 billion) gross domestic product.

Chavez says oil production has reached 1.4 million barrels a day, and exports 1 million barrels a day -- a third of pre-strike export levels.

Dissident oil executives say production is about 1 million barrels and exports half that. Venezuela still must import gasoline.

PDVSA said a key oil loading terminal in Puerto La Cruz in eastern Venezuela resumed operating on an automated basis, making it likely that tanker loadings of 30,000 barrels per day will increase. The terminal loaded 800,000 barrels a day before the strike.

A refinery in the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix operated by PDVSA and the U.S. Hess Corp. received its first shipment of Venezuelan crude since December, Amerada Hess said Thursday.

After spending more than 130 billion bolivars ($70 million) a day to support the currency, the government suspended sales of U.S. dollars until it unveils currency controls next week.

www.dailytimes.com.pk Kaleem Omar

Japan’s GDP per capita, at $ 34,715, is 70 times higher than Pakistan's, at $ 492. The gap lessens when one adjusts per capita income statistics for purchasing power parity. But even adjusted for purchasing power parity, Japan’s GDP per capita, at $ 23,480, is still 15 times higher than Pakistan’s, at $ 1,570

There is a huge per capita income gap between rich and poor nations. Switzerland, the world’s richest nation in GDP per capita terms, has over 400 times the per capita income of Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries. Japan’s GDP per capita, at $ 34,715, is 70 times higher than Pakistan’s, at $ 492. The gap lessens when one adjusts per capita income statistics for purchasing power parity, or what a dollar will buy in the respective economies. But even adjusted for purchasing power parity, Japan’s GDP per capita, at $ 23,480, is still 15 times higher than Pakistan’s, at $ 1,570.

Moreover, the gap between rich and poor nations continues to widen. In 1939, the income of the average American worker was 16 times higher than the average Indian worker’s income. By 1969, it was 40 times higher. Today, it is 78 times higher.

The emergence of a large middle class in India has made little difference to the overall picture. Caught in the nutcracker of low-income growth on the one hand and a burgeoning population on the other, India remains a very poor country. It has the largest concentration of impoverished people in the world, with some 350 million people living on less than a dollar a day and another 350 million that are not much better off.

As co-authors Philip Kotler, Somkid Jatuspripitak and Suvit Maesincee note in their study “The Marketing of Nations”, there is also a large and often widening gap between the rich and poor within individual nations. This income gap is generally greater in less developed nations than in industrial nations.

If we compare the share of national income that accrues to the poorest 40 per cent of the country’s population with that of the richest 20 per cent, we find that countries South Korea, Canada, Japan and Sweden have relatively lesser inequalities. Others like Malaysia, Tanzania, Chile, Costa Rica and Libya have moderate inequalities. Yet others like Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Venezuela, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Guatemala have drastic income inequality in their overall income distribution.

Apart from struggling with poverty, many people in developing nations fight a constant battle against malnutrition, disease and poor health. In 1999, the average number of doctors per 100,000 people was only 5 in the least developed countries compared with 220 in the industrial countries. Every year, about 20 million people die from infectious and parasitic diseases. The infant mortality rate is 99 per 1,000 births in the least developed countries, compared with about 74 in developing countries and only 11 in industrial countries. Average life expectancy is about 52 years in the least developed countries compared with 61 years in developing nations and 75 years in industrial nations.

Malnutrition is another major problem in the poor countries. About one billion people in poor countries still do not get enough food. In terms of per capita daily protein consumption, it is 97 grams per day in the United States, compared with 63 grams per day in Brazil and 43 grams per day in Ghana.

Literacy levels in poor countries also remain low. Literacy rates in the less developed and developing countries average only 45 per cent and 64 per cent of the population, respectively, in contrast with 99 per cent for the industrial nations.

Most important is the interaction of all the above characteristics. They tend to reinforce and perpetuate the pervasive problems of poverty, ignorance and disease that restrict the lives of so many people in poor countries.

In October 2000, the world population reached 6 billion, double the 1960 figure. The world population is projected to reach 7.2 billion in the year 2010, of which almost 5.9 billion will be living in poor countries.

The population of what comprises today’s Pakistan (the former West Pakistan) was only 37 million at the time of the first post-independence national census in 1951. Today, Pakistan’s population is close to 150 million, more than four times the 1951 figure. This very high rate of population growth lies at the heart of Pakistan’s economic problems.

As the authors of the “The Marketing of Nations” study note, the explosive birth rate found in many poor countries means that these nations have the burden of supporting millions of people younger than 15 (in Pakistan, for example, 40 per cent of the population is under 15).

Today, millions of children in poor countries are working in farms, factories, workshops, street corners and garbage dumps. Enhancing educational opportunities is a way to make schooling a real alternative for these children. However, the immediate challenge is, how will the poor countries build enough schools? And some years later, how will these countries provide enough jobs for young people entering the job market?

Discussing the job shortage problem, the authors of the study note that technology improves productivity but may reduce the number of jobs. The growth in GDP and unemployment in many countries indicates that employment has consistently lagged behind economic growth.

Developing countries have also experienced jobless growth. The labour force in developing countries continued to increase by 2.3 per cent throughout the 1990s, requiring the creation of an additional 260 million jobs – a staggering task for which the economies of developing countries were simply not equipped.

In Pakistan’s case, an estimated two million new jobseekers enter the job market each year. To create jobs in the large-scale manufacturing sector for so many jobseekers would be prohibitively expensive for a country of Pakistan’s means, given the fact that creating one job in large-scale manufacturing at today’s prices requires an investment of between Rs 300,000 to Rs 500,000.

The answer to the problem lies in adopting social sector policies aimed at reducing the population growth rate to below two per cent, and in creating more jobs in the agricultural sector, the small manufacturing sector and the services sector, which create more jobs per dollar of investment than the capital-intensive large-manfucturing sector. But success in this endeavour depends, among other things, on continuity in policy — something that has often been lacking in Pakistan.

www.zwire.com Candid Comments January 30, 2003

Joel P. SmithI've been fascinated with our good neighbor from Plains, Jimmy Carter, ever since Election Day, Oct. 16, 1962, when Quitman County's political boss tried to steal the Georgia senate seat from him. Days before the announcement in Oslo that the former senator-governor-president had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Sam Singer from Lumpkin stopped by The Tribune. He reminded me it was exactly 40 years ago the ballot box was stuffed in Georgetown and Carter challenged the system.

The 39th President wouldn't have made it to the White House nor to Oslo, Norway, to pick up the Peace Prize if the peanut farmer and peanut warehouseman hadn't gotten riled up and taken on the powers that be.

I didn't make it to the inauguration in 1977 when Ann Singer and several other members of the Peanut Brigade decorated the White House for the reception. But I was front and center for the proud home folks' Jimmy Carter Nobel Peace Prize Celebration last Saturday night in Americus.

The B.W. and I were Sam and Ann's guests when the Plains Better Hometown Program-similar to Eufaula's Main Street Program-held the local celebration in the recently restored 1900s Rylander Theatre, complete with a big band concert and gala reception next door in the Habitat For Humanity's international headquarters.

I told President Carter that ever since I read his latest book, "An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood," I've plotted to bring him back to Eufaula. Fendall Hall would be the perfect venue to reflect on the life and times of James Earl Carter, his family and the Lower Chattahoochee Basin.

I joined the First Baptist's Tired and Retired Sunday School Class' visit to President Carter's Sunday School Class in Plains a year ago. There was such a large crowd in the sanctuary I didn't get to buttonhole him, but I did leave him a copy of my pictorial history, "A Eufaula Album."

Saturday during the reception, Singer jokingly told the former President that he and I were going to write a book about him. Carter laughed and looking at Sam and said, "Not you." Well, Sam Singer could write a darned good book.

He was politickin' for Carter with the Peanut Brigade, knocking on doors in New Hampshire at his own expense. His life has been almost as interesting as the Navy Academy graduate's.

Plains Mayor Boze Godwin presented Carter with a joint resolution on behalf of his hometown, Americus and Sumter County. He touched on his fellow townsman's varied careers: Habitat for Humanity volunteer, best selling author, President and statesman.

The celebration could very well have been held at the Carter Center in Atlanta, "where Carter mediates conflicts throughout the world and works to improve race relations," with national press coverage, but this was a Sumter County and its municipalities' local celebration for their favorite son.

When Mill Simmons, Plains Better Hometown chair, made remarks about Carter's hands-on involvement with downtown revitalization, I thought the President could also bring his message to Eufaula's Main Street proponents, if we can lure him across the river.

I reminded him of the time Tom Mann hosted him and me for breakfast before a fishing trip in Eufaula. He said to tell Tom hello, and said he had fished for a different kind of bass in Venezuela a few days before when he was in Caracas. He was there to propose a plan to lead Venezuela to elections and end a strike against President Hugo Chavez, which has drastically cut production in the number five oil-exporting country.

President Carter couldn't have been more gracious or more appreciative of his home folks' hospitality. "This is a very important night to me," he told the crowd following the enjoyable concert. "I was 17 when I left Georgia Southwestern College." He recalled his career and added, "I didn't hesitate to come back to the community."

But he quipped, "Oslo was my favorite place," when he visited Norway recently to accept the Nobel Prize.

"The Nobel Peace Prize has come to Georgia an extraordinary number of times." He was the 19th American, the third U.S. president and the second Georgian to be awarded the prize. President Theodore Roosevelt, whose wife was from Georgia, won the award in 1906 for his role in drawing up a peace treaty between Japan and Russia. President Woodrow Wilson won in 1902 for his role in founding the League of Nations.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the other Georgian recipient, selected for his civil rights movement.

Acknowledging the Sentimental Journey band's concert filled with music of yesterday, Carter mused, "This is a changing world." He recalled the unprecedented efforts of the Peanut Brigade's trips to New Hampshire, Iowa and Pennsylvania to campaign for him at their own expense.

"I'm thankful for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Carter Center and I'm very proud of the country.

"My faith can reach across chasms that divide people in a spirit of love that binds us together."

The mayor of Plains says I might lure the former president to Eufaula, if I use Tom Mann as bait.

Sam Singer and I might be successful, if Venezuela, Cuba and all the other trouble spots in the world would behave.

We could bring the Nobel Peace Prize celebration to Eufaula and Georgetown.

www.dailytimes.com.pk

I’ve been asked to speak about “How to confront Empire?” It’s a huge question, and I have no easy answers, says Arundhati Roy When we speak of confronting “Empire,” we need to identify what “Empire” means. Does it mean the US Government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?

In many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts — nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization.

Let me illustrate what I mean. India — the world’s biggest democracy — is currently at the forefront of the corporate globalization project. Its “market” of one billion people is being prized open by the WTO. Corporatization and Privatization are being welcomed by the Government and the Indian elite.

It is not a coincidence that the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Disinvestment Minister — the men who signed the deal with Enron in India, the men who are selling the country’s infrastructure to corporate multinationals, the men who want to privatize water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education and telecommunication — are all members or admirers of the RSS. The RSS is a right wing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild which has openly admired Hitler and his methods.

The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program. While the project of corporate globalization rips through people’s lives in India, massive privatization, and labor “reforms” are pushing people off their land and out of their jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers are committing suicide by consuming pesticide. Reports of starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country.

While the elite journeys to its imaginary destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed are spiraling downwards into crime and chaos. This climate of frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground, history tells us, for fascism.

The two arms of the Indian Government have evolved the perfect pincer action. While one arm is busy selling India off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a howling, baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism. It is conducting nuclear tests, rewriting history books, burning churches, and demolishing mosques. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the definition of who is an Indian citizen and who is not, particularly with regard to religious minorities, is becoming common practice now.

Last March, in the state of Gujarat, two thousand Muslims were butchered in a State-sponsored pogrom. Muslim women were specially targeted. They were stripped, and gang-raped, before being burned alive. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, textiles mills, and mosques.

More than a hundred and fifty thousand Muslims have been driven from their homes. The economic base of the Muslim community has been devastated.

While Gujarat burned, the Indian Prime Minister was on MTV promoting his new poems. In January this year, the Government that orchestrated the killing was voted back into office with a comfortable majority. Nobody has been punished for the genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, proud member of the RSS, has embarked on his second term as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. If he were Saddam Hussein, of course each atrocity would have been on CNN. But since he’s not — and since the Indian “market” is open to global investors — the massacre is not even an embarrassing inconvenience.

There are more than one hundred million Muslims in India. A time bomb is ticking in our ancient land.

All this to say that it is a myth that the free market breaks down national barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines democracy.

As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their “sweetheart deals,” to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.

Corporate Globalization — or shall we call it by its name? — Imperialism — needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.

Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, or — god forbid — justice.

So this — all this — is “empire.” This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them.

Our fight, our goal, our vision of Another World must be to eliminate that distance.

So how do we resist “Empire”?

The good news is that we’re not doing too badly. There have been major victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many — in Bolivia, you have Cochabamba. In Peru, there was the uprising in Arequipa, In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the US government’s best efforts.

And the world’s gaze is on the people of Argentina, who are trying to refashion a country from the ashes of the havoc wrought by the IMF.

In India the movement against corporate globalization is gathering momentum and is poised to become the only real political force to counter religious fascism.

As for corporate globalization’s glittering ambassadors — Enron, Bechtel, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson — where were they last year, and where are they now?

And of course here in Brazil we must ask ...who was the president last year, and who is it now?

Still ... many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair. We know that under the spreading canopy of the War Against Terrorism, the men in suits are hard at work.

While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and George Bush is planning to go to war against Iraq.

If we look at this conflict as a straightforward eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation between “Empire” and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.

But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to “Empire.”

We may not have stopped it in its tracks — yet — but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all it’s brutish, iniquitous nakedness.

Empire may well go to war, but it’s out in the open now — too ugly to behold its own reflection. Too ugly even to rally its own people. It won’t be long before the majority of American people become our allies.

Only a few days ago in Washington, a quarter of a million people marched against the war on Iraq. Each month, the protest is gathering momentum.

Before September 11th 2001 America had a secret history. Secret especially from its own people. But now America’s secrets are history, and its history is public knowledge. It’s street talk.

Today, we know that every argument that is being used to escalate the war against Iraq is a lie. The most ludicrous of them being the US Government’s deep commitment to bring democracy to Iraq.

Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is, of course, an old US government sport. Here in Latin America, you know that better than most.

Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, a murderer (whose worst excesses were supported by the governments of the United States and Great Britain). There’s no doubt that Iraqis would be better off without him.

But, then, the whole world would be better off without a certain Mr. Bush. In fact, he is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. So, should we bomb Bush out of the White House?

It’s more than clear that Bush is determined to go to war against Iraq, regardless of the facts — and regardless of international public opinion.

In its recruitment drive for allies, The United States is prepared to invent facts.

The charade with weapons inspectors is the US government’s offensive, insulting concession to some twisted form of international etiquette. It’s like leaving the “doggie door” open for last minute “allies” or maybe the United Nations to crawl through. But for all intents and purposes, the New War against Iraq has begun.

What can we do?

We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar.

We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the US government’s excesses.

We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair — and their allies — for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.

We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.

When George Bush says “you’re either with us, or you are with the terrorists” we can say “No thank you.” We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. —Outlook India

www.corpwatch.org By George Monbiot www.monbiot.com January 28, 2003

Mr Bush and Mr Blair might have a tougher fight than they anticipated. Not from Saddam Hussein perhaps - although it is still not obvious that they can capture and hold Iraq's cities without major losses - but from an anti-war movement that is beginning to look like nothing the world has seen before.

It's not just that people have begun to gather in great numbers even before a shot has been fired. It's not just that they are doing so without the inducement of conscription or any other direct threat to their welfare. It's not just that there have already been meetings or demonstrations in almost every nation on Earth. It's also that the campaign is being coordinated globally with an unprecedented precision. And the people partly responsible for this are the members of a movement which, even within the past few weeks, the mainstream media has pronounced extinct.

Last year, 40,000 members of the global justice movement gathered at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This year, more than 100,000, from 150 nations, have come - for a meeting! The world has seldom seen such political assemblies since Daniel O'Connell's "monster meetings" in the 1840s.

Far from dying away, our movement has grown bigger than most of us could have guessed. September 11 muffled the protests for a while, but since then they have returned with greater vehemence, everywhere except the US. The last major global demonstration it convened was the rally at the European summit in Barcelona. Some 350,000 activists rose from the dead. They came despite the terrifying response to the marches in June 2001 in Genoa, where the police burst into protesters' dormitories and beat them with truncheons as they lay in their sleeping bags, tortured others in the cells and shot one man dead.

But neither the violent response, nor September 11, nor the indifference of the media have quelled this rising. Ever ready to believe their own story, the newsrooms have interpreted the absence of coverage (by the newsrooms) as an absence of activity. One of our recent discoveries is that we no longer need them. We have our own channels of communication, our own websites and pamphlets and magazines, and those who wish to find us can do so without their help. They can pronounce us dead as often as they like, and we shall, as many times, be resurrected.

The media can be forgiven for expecting us to disappear. In the past, it was hard to sustain global movements of this kind. The socialist international, for example, was famously interrupted by nationalism. When the nations to which the comrades belonged went to war, they forgot their common struggle and took to arms against each other. But now, thanks to the globalization some members of the movement contest, nationalism is a far weaker force. American citizens are meeting and de bating with Iraqis, even as their countries prepare to go to war. We can no longer be called to heel. Our loyalty is to the principles we defend and to those who share them, irrespective of where they come from.

One of the reasons why the movement appears destined only to grow is that it provides the only major channel through which we can engage with the most critical issues. Climate change, international debt, poverty, the hegemony of the G8 nations, the IMF and the World Bank, the depletion of natural resources, nuclear proliferation and low-level conflict are major themes in the lives of most of the world's people, but minor themes in almost all mainstream political discourse. We are told that the mind-rotting drivel which now fills the pages of the newspapers is a necessary commercial response to the demands of younger readers. This may, to some extent, be true. But here are tens of thousands of young people who have less interest in celebrity culture than George Bush has in Wittgenstein. They have evolved their own scale of values, and re-enfranchised themselves by pursuing what they know to be important. For the great majority of activists - those who live in the poor world - the movement offers the only effective means of reaching people in the richer nations.

We have often been told that the reason we're dead is that we have been overtaken by and subsumed within the anti-war campaign. It would be more accurate to say that the anti-war campaign has, in large part, grown out of the global justice movement. This movement has never recognized a distinction between the power of the rich world's governments and their appointed institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization) to wage economic warfare and the power of the same governments, working through different institutions (the UN security council, Nato) to send in the bombers. Far from competing with our concerns, the impending war has reinforced our determination to tackle the grotesque maldistribution of power which permits a few national governments to assert a global mandate. When the activists leave Porto Alegre tomorrow, they will take home to their 150 nations a new resolve to turn the struggle against the war with Iraq into a contest over the future of the world.

While younger activists are eager to absorb the experience of people like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Lula, Victor Chavez, Michael Albert and Arundhati Roy, all of whom are speaking in Porto Alegre, our movement is, as yet, more eager than wise, fired by passions we have yet to master. We have yet to understand, despite the police response in Genoa, the mechanical determination of our opponents.

We are still rather too prepared to believe that spectacular marches can change the world. While the splits between the movement's marxists, anarchists and liberals are well-rehearsed, our real division - between the diversalists and the universalists - has, so far, scarcely been explored. Most of the movement believes that the best means of regaining control over political life is through local community action. A smaller faction (to which I belong) believes that this response is insufficient, and that we must seek to create democratically accountable global institutions. The debates have, so far, been muted. But when they emerge, they will be fierce.

For all that, I think most of us have noticed that something has changed, that we are beginning to move on from the playing of games and the staging of parties, that we are coming to develop a more mature analysis, a better grasp of tactics, an understanding of the need for policy. We are, in other words, beginning for the first time to look like a revolutionary movement. We are finding, too, among some of the indebted states of the poor world, a new preparedness to engage with us. In doing so, they speed our maturation: the more we are taken seriously, the more seriously we take ourselves.

Whether we are noticed or not is no longer relevant. We know that, with or without the media's help, we are a gathering force which might one day prove unstoppable.

www.monbiot.com

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