Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth

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agreements. Failure to comply with these policies, and the failure of
these policies, once implemented, to produce their promised benefits,
are blamed on “bad governance” rather than on the neoliberal model
itself. Yet the most fundamental understanding of democracy, justice
and self-determination underlines that the only way to secure genuine
good governance is through the regulation of capital and markets to
serve the needs of the people, as defined by the people themselves;
• that free markets, free trade, self-regulation and competition will
liberate the “invisible hand” of the market for the benefit of everyone.
Yet there is no divine force that guides markets. To suggest that markets
have such saving powers amounts to idolatry. In any case, “free” markets
are not free. The myth of “unfettered”, “unregulated”, “uncontrolled”
market capitalism must be directly challenged. The reality is that
markets and capital are highly controlled to secure the maximum
benefits for the owners of capital. Liberalization “frees” capital and
markets from social obligation, and is therefore immoral and
irresponsible by definition. This “freedom” is achieved through the
agency of the states dominating the international institutions of the
IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO);
• that integration into the global economy will ultimately benefit every
nation and empower every individual, even if some make greater gains
than others. Yet the legacy of neo-liberalism is the deepening of
inequality of wealth and power between and within nations. As
instability, resentment, resistance and rejection increase, the global
economy resembles earlier eras of colonialism that depended for their
protection on mounting levels of repression and militarization. In other
words, as markets become global, so do the mechanisms that protect
them. In recent years, we have seen the dramatic convergence of
economic globalization with political and military hegemony in one
imperial power network.
Many people feel numb and powerless in face of the massive misuse of
mal-distributed economic and political power and the arrogant use of
military force. Jesus speaks of mammon and empire when such powers
force people and nature to conform to their own spirit and logic, and when
life is sacrificed for their sustenance. We experience this reality in various
ways in different places and social locations, with the commonality that
powers, intended to serve life, degenerate into structures of sin and death.
In their message “Serve God, not mammon”, participants in a June 2001
Budapest consultation on globalization highlighted these very structures
of sin and death, and called the churches to a decisive stand against
mammon, arguing:
“In challenging economic globalization, the church is confronted with