Member Contributions

Take Social Justice work seriously and you'll be dealing with tear gas, pepper spray, plastic bullets hitting your body. All because you've taken democracy seriously, moved to the streets, began to speak and organize as if your life depended on it. There is something blowing in the wind. Those who call the shots literally and figuratively don't like it. Well, think of what happened in Genoa with the death of a young Italian activist, short through the head.

In front of the World Bank in April 1999, I heard young women and men in affinity groups pushing their imaginations, redefining power relationships, speaking in a way where everyone had a voice. No one was left out. Thousands repeated in unison so all heard what was being said and could have imput in decisions that effected their lives as they took on the "Washington Consensus" and its claim to impose violence on humankind unabated.

The demonstrators claimed to be delegates of the women of the world, workers and indigenous people. They claimed to be delegates in a world where two Hiroshimas and Nagasakies happen ever two days in human lives. They're attempting to take on this urgent role of being in solidarity with all that capital threatens. They are doing it at a time when paradigms of civilization are unable to take account of the many problematic knots that go on unnoticed in the world, unable to attend to the clamor of the poor throughout the world.

Courageously, they are going through the process of passing over into the third world, I prefer to use the term majority world, a phrase that Ignacio EllacurÌa, one of six Jesuits murdered in El Salvador, used to sharpen his take on reality. And in the passing over seeing it not only as a geographical space but as a cognitive one as well: thinking from the perspective of the excluded, violated, crucified ones. Refusing to participate in the logic of exclusion. Refusing to be defined by those who see the world as nothing more than merchandise and the movement of goods. In their refusal to accept the way things are they did what Central Americans did so well during the decade of the eighties they opted for those without any voice and challenged those with too much voice.

They are doctors concerned about the health of society. When a patient walks into an office it is hard to tell whether they are ill or not simply from their appearance. Once they examine the feces they are able to get a clear look at the health of the patient. The third world is the feces of capitalism. Job Sobrino says when we encounter the poor we see injustice in all its nudity.

There are more poor than ever before. More inequality. More children dying before the age of five ­ those lucky to survive damaged from lack of protein. The sweat, toil and agony of the majority world doesn't get any better; even life in the dominant market countries not looking so good either as poverty and low paying, demeaning service sector jobs spread.

As poverty spreads wealth accrues into the hands of a few. Speculative capital produces big money. Those with huge fortunes play casino capital and they end up winning because they control the house. They buy bonds. Bonds are a safe place to make sure you're going to come out ahead and especially when they are sold in emerging market economies with high interest. There are lots of bonds around and brokerage firms making a killing on them. During the eighties they were sold big time the United States turned from a creditor country to the most heavily indebted country in the world. Japanese banks own over a third of the US debt.

Lets look at the figures. The market in bonds grew big time from $2 trillion in 1980 to around $25 trillion in 1997. Of course all of the financial melt downs over the last five years helped this increase in the selling of bonds. Since 1994 ten emerging markets went under. These are countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia where investors moved what know as "hot money" and made fortunes over night.

When big corporations and investors were bailed out to a tune of over a hundred billion dollars the poor were left out of the picture ­ the money went to the big investors. In this case the brokerage firms ended up as creditor the one doing the bailing out. It was a win-win situation for them especially when it had Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers doing the front work for them, both of whom with strong connections to the masters: Ruben with Goldman Sachs and Summers has lead economist for the World Bank.

Who decides around issues of life and death for the more than five and a quarter of billion human beings around the planet that Citibank says are "unbankable." They don't have a phone so they can't be called and asked to bank with the transnational. They lack money to save in the bank that accrues more than 20% of its profit from Latin America. They comprise seventy percent of the Mexican population who couldn't be polled in recent elections because they had no phone.

A peasant woman attends a meeting in her turgurio , a slum, in El Salvador. She is one of the unbankable ones who mistakenly says los imajenables ­ the imagined ones. She had just returned from a meeting where she heard someone use the word "marjinados ­ marginalized ones" and tried to use it later at the meeting. But she is correct in her use of the word "imajenables" for that is how the dominant sees her. She doesn't exist because she can't spend much on consuming goods.
This woman lives outside the economy. She lives a subsistence livelihood one that World Bank wants to destroy so that she becomes dependent on the market, so that she becomes dependent on goods made in her country exported to the United States then returned to be sold at high prices.

We try to discern what social Justice means at a time when politics, discourse and economics precludes the impoverished. All that matters is the place of the market and obeying the law of the invisible hand that governs it.

We now attempt to discern the meaning of social justice outside of a context of a bipolar world that brought nations opposed to each other to give the appearance of concern for the poor. A concern that had little to do about bringing justice to the poor but in destroying power relationships that allowed the wretched to have a voice to define their world outside the grasp of the arrogant and powerful. All that mattered for those who controlled wealth was to keep poor countries from moving toward a non-aligned status. Nicaragua illustrated this when its people toppled the dictator Somoza.

Once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union emploded and so called "real socialism" went down the tubes Africa was left to its own. Latin America had gone through the "Lost Decade" a decade that brought unprecedented profits to the North where major shifts in the economic paradigm had taken place. Financial Capital had become source of a capitalist utopia. It brought prodigious profits the like of which has never been experienced in human history. The market ruled and anyone who didn't give it obedience the IMF and World Bank disciplined.

As the wealth moved to the North, economic pillage of the South exacerbated. Dean Brackley who teaches at the UCA, in San Salvador, who took the place of one of the six murdered Jesuits who taught there says "The experience of injustice that peasants and campesinos suffer in the Third World today boarders on slavery."

The Bretton Woods Twins devised a strategy to destroy the psychic energy of peoples so that they couldn't say "Venceremos", or "El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido." The market can only function where there is lack of hope. Breaking the hope became the strategy of bankers, brokerage firms, transnational CEOs.

Meanwhile, two powerful institutions, the IMF and World Bank that lack any democratic mechanism open to listening to the poor forced governments to privatize their economies. The second largest investment firm in the world, Goldman and Sachs made billions off of garage sale prices offered after economic meltdowns in Mexico and Indonesia. . During the eighties the economic havoc was so horrendous in the Southern Hemisphere that Central American economists said what happened during the area of the conquistadors was pale in comparison to what happened during the Lost Decade. We can no longer look to Nicaragua and say with a Canadian folk singer "Nicaragua you are what we want to be." Half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, unlike during the eighties when the poor had a place and voice in public policy.

Youth have begun to develop a language and way of acting that calls into question the growing gap between rich and poor. Poverty is unacceptable because it can be overcome.

Globally, arms manufacturers have produced more than a trillion dollars a year during the eighties: equal to the income of 2.6 billion people. Since the Second World War there have been hundreds of wars. Where the blood spills, mostly in poor countries, the World Bank and IMF have a played a part in squeezing dollars away from the public sectors. The squeeze has created informal sectors where the poor eke out a living. Where the blood flows usually a country's environment has gone to hell to pay debts. Trees are downed, lumber exported to earn dollars. The money earned ends up in the hands of foreign banks. A modern day debt trap fuels growing desertification.

So when youth say as they did in front of the World Bank that they are delegates for humanity, for the environment, it means developing a strategy for abolishing institutions that violate that humanity. It means a refusal to participate in logic of exclusion that effects most of humankind. The task is to unmask the systemic creation of poverty, expose it, confront it; develop a way of acting that brings the crucified down from the cross

Fr. Ignacio EllacurÌa lived in the thick of the Central American reality and tried to develop a way of thinking and acting that would allow human beings to be present to the great majority ­ La mayorÌa ­ as he put it to describe those suffering throughout the world.

In these times it's important to bring about conversation that opens a space to remember the poems, statements, forces throughout the planet that reinforce the need to look critically at a system that generates only dollars and produces unheard of violence. We need to explore what Leonardo Boff is trying to do when he wants to expand the reality of democracy to have cosmic and social dimensions woven into it. If we were able to do that it would mean we would see animals and trees as "new citizens" of this planet. And in doing so we'd take a much closer look at how crop dusters sprayed thousands of acres of land in Colombia as part of the US-financed and directed Plan Colombia.

Seattle, Prague, Quebec and Genoa challenge an overwhelming pessimism about the human spirit. They illustrate its grandeur, our ability to come together in common cause: making an option for the poor. Creating a democracy not built on the backs of the poor, or based on exclusion, never came easy. Those who tried to create a space where all would have a place ended up in prison or died.

So perhaps there will be teargas and in the case of Genoa, more death, as we try to relate to a species in crisis. And we'll meet the police, who try to stop us from taking democracy seriously. Taking on more democracy, living it and breathing it makes it a little more difficult for powerful financial institutions, so removed from it, to pillage and impoverish the majority of people on the planet. Taking on a little more democracy, never getting enough of it would definitely put us in common cause with the "crucified" of this earth.