By GREG ANSLEY
CANBERRA - Kerry Packer could have done little more to promote anti-capitalism than by losing $47 million in a three-day baccarat spree in Las Vegas.Worth an estimated $A8.2 billion ($10.98 billion), Mr Packer is the face of wealth and power in Australia.
He also owns Melbourne's Crown Casino, where the World Economic Forum will be holding its Asia-Pacific economic summit from September 11-13 and from where many of Mr Packer's global peers will continue on to the Sydney Olympics. This confluence of money, influence and excess has given grim satisfaction to the organisers of protests planned for the summit, who have blended traditional street tactics with cyberspace to mobilise a new wave of anger against global capital.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 protesters, including activists from Britain, the United States and New Zealand, are predicted to blockade the casino in an effort to shut down the summit.
The threat of violence is real. The moderate Melbourne University Students Union has withdrawn its support because of the belligerence of extremists and slogans urging a repeat of the street battles at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) conference in Seattle and the Washington DC meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Protest posters have included the slogan Seattle + Washington = Melbourne. This has meaning beyond the words.
The forum action is the latest in a series of worldwide protests mounted and coordinated over the internet and embracing a broad spectrum of dissent, leaping unlikely gulfs from anarchists to churches to the Far Right.
Recapturing and reshaping the momentum of the 1960s and 1970s, the wave of protest has washed across global business, forcing many corporations to try to soften and polish their images and policies, and forged a political mass that has helped to sap the will for further trade liberalisation.
It is a mood that has been gathering force in Australia, where unions, churches and non-Government organisations have joined forum protests organised by S11, a loose, headless but nonetheless effective coalition of largely left-wing activists.
The conservative Government of Prime Minister John Howard had already bowed to this political reality when he deferred the planned demise of tariff protection for the motor vehicle and manufacturing industries.Now, as a new round of comprehensive world trade negotiations becomes increasingly elusive, there is growing pressure against globalisation and free- trade within the Labour Opposition, which has a reasonable chance of winning power next year.
Led by the large, 160,000-member Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), the push represents a rising groundswell that erupted at this year's party conference in Hobart in a demand that Labour drop its support for free trade and adopt fair trade instead.
Supported by the similarly powerful Community and Public Sector Union and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, AMWU national secretary Doug Cameron argued passionately that free trade had cost Australians jobs and contravened Labour's commitment to human and labour rights overseas.
Cameron lost conclusively, but will continue the fight at the next election through a campaign against free trade in key marginal seats that have seen high job insecurity and shown more than 90 per cent support for further protection of Australian manufacturing from unfair competition and from imports from low-wage countries.
Cameron and the AMWU will be at the forum demonstrations, along with the Victorian Trades Hall and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), demanding a just global future.
"I'm happy that demonstrations against the closed-shop of the forum and the WTO take place," he said. "The forum will make decisions that will impact on Government, will impact on living standards, and I think workers are entitled, and the community is entitled, to join together to voice opposition to that."
The forum expresses surprise that it should be targeted in Melbourne, pointing out that this is the first time a regional summit has attracted this sort of attention, although the global summit in Davos, Switzerland, had felt the lash of growing anti-globalism.
A spokesman was at pains to demonstrate the organisation's bid to extend the boundaries beyond large corporations and economic leaders, to include young Asian e-commerce and IT entrepreneurs and a range of ideological opponents.These include the ACTU, international trade unions and prominent academics and other critics, included in a deliberate policy to stimulate debate.
The forum is not by definition a champion of globalisation, the spokesman said.
In fact, the agenda has been shaped in the tradition of Davos to cover issues such as social justice, sustainable development and environmental policies.
Protesters turn this against the forum, claiming the inclusion of critics and of social and environmental issues is little more than a bid for legitimacy. A paper produced for S11 by Sydney University of Technology lecturer James Goodman argues that with the rise of corporate globalisation the forum has taken on an unprecedented role as a rallying point for global elites and as a vehicle for class power.
But faced with an international backlash against transnational corporate activities, Mr Goodman says, the forum is now charting a new globalisation agenda that embraces rather than rejects social issues.
The forum is thus placing itself at the centre of debate about the revision of neo-liberalism, asserting that Davos can play an important role in forging the new (world economic) geometry.There is in any case the irresistible lure of the truly great and powerful.
Among the about 800 attendees will be such international heavyweights as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, PricewaterhouseCoopers US chief executive James Schiro, Supachai Panitchpakdi, who will replace Mike Moore as head of the WTO, Masayoshi Son, chairman of Japan's Softbank Corporation, Philippine central bank governor Rafael Buenaventura, and a raft of senior regional politicians and officials.
The summit has attracted the corporate A-list: among them, Merrill Lynch, Compaq, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Sun Microsystems, Nestlaacé, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, Fuji Xerox, McDonald's, Shell, and Australian giants like Telstra, BHP, Boral, Westpac, NAB and North Ltd.For a movement tempted to call itself the New, New Left, this places the World Economic Forum squarely in the same target zone as the WTO, World Bank and IMF.
"The forum is an extremely powerful and unaccountable body who are [sic] making major decisions about what we will read in the media, what food we will eat, what we will study in school, where, when and in what conditions we will work - almost every aspect of our everyday life," says the S11 website.
The Melbourne demonstrations are the latest in a series of globally coordinated protests, each named for the date of a given event, J18 for the June 18 meeting last year of the G8 leaders, for example.
Using the internet, anti-globalisation activists have assembled an amazingly diverse and effective machine able to plan and coordinate a shifting worldwide alliance ranging from anarchists and Trotskyists to animal rightists, human rights advocates - even drawing support, if unwelcome, from xenophobic White supremacists in the US and Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in Australia.
The net is used to form a loose pyramid based on small local affinity groups, which work together to form larger clusters, in turn delegating representatives to a daily council which arranges accommodation, feeding, legal advice and sophisticated protest tactics.
International action can be timed precisely, as it was from simultaneous J18 demonstrations in Britain, Europe, Africa, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Street tactics, including blockades using chicken wire, PVC pipes and human chains, are coordinated through the internet and practised at training camps.
Demonstrators are given first aid advice and warned to wear chemical-repellent clothing sealed at the neck, wrists and ankles, rubber gloves, goggles to protect eyes from sprays and tear gas, and scarves soaked in vinegar as substitutes for gas masks.
And while most forum demonstrators will be non-violent moderates from a variety of causes, the language of the anarchist and hard-left-dominated S11 supports fears that militants will provoke confrontation with police in a replay of Seattle.
Britain's M15 has warned Australian counterparts of a possible influx of militants behind the J18 global carnival against corporate tyranny in London, which injured 46 people and caused £3 million of damage.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has also warned of the spread of Europe's violent Third Position, and of North American groups such as Black Bloc and the Black Army Faction.
Perhaps more significantly, the service says militants are turning technology back on large corporations - during J18 protests, the computers of at least 20 companies were subjected for five hours to more than 10,000 attacks by hackers.
More recently, hackers for 19 hours redirected almost 900,000 hits on Nike's website to the S11 site.
And activists have already confirmed intelligence predictions that Melbourne will be only one in a continuing chain of global protests.
Many forum demonstrators are expected to move on to the Olympics and organisation has begun for S26, this month's World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague.
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