Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth

possibilities for reflection and commitment based on the theme of the 2006
assembly: “God, in your Grace, Transform the World”.
1.2 For an economy of life
In 2003, 7.7 million persons owned wealth worth US$ one million or
more. The sum of their wealth reached US$ 28.9 trillion, or almost
three times the United States national product that same year. In the
meantime, 840 million people worldwide are undernourished and 1.5
billion - the majority of whom are women, children, and Indigenous
Peoples - live on less than one dollar a day. The world’s richest 20 percent
account for 86 percent of global consumption of goods and services.
The annual income of the richest 1% is equal to that of the poorest
57%, and at least 24,000 people die each day from poverty and
malnutrition. Environmental problems - global warming, depletion of
natural resources, and loss of biodiversity - loom ever larger. For instance,
we will lose 30 to 70 percent of the world’s biodiversity in a time span of
20 to 30 years. Wars rage in many parts of the world, and militarization
and violence have become part of our daily existence. Financial crises
have become more frequent and intense. Joblessness is becoming
pervasive, threatening the people’s livelihoods. In a word: human life
and the earth are under grave threat.
Many call the ideology that underlies, promotes and seeks to legitimize
this concentration of multifaceted power structures neoliberalism. 5 This
ideology drives neoliberal capitalism and neoliberal globalization. 6 In this
perspective, neoliberalism provides an ideological cloak for the project of
economic globalization that expands power and domination through an
interlocking web of international institutions, national policies, corporate
and investor practices and individual behaviour. In essence, neoliberalism
turns human beings into commodities and reduces the role of national
governments to secure harmonious and sustainable social development.
It places utmost emphasis on private capital and so-called “unfettered
markets” to allocate resources and to promote growth.
Centred on capital, neoliberalism transforms everything and everyone into
a commodity for sale at a price. Having made competition the dominant
ethos, it throws individual against individual, enterprise against enterprise,
5
Refer to section 2.2, page 9, for explanation on the origins of the theory of neoliberalism.
6
The economic school of monetarism gained strong political influence in the USA and
the UK in the Reagan and Thatcher era. Calling for a retreat of the state from economic
regulation, liberalization, privatization and deregulation became the mantra of its
proponents. At the 1982 G7 meeting in Cancun (Mexico), this approach was adopted
and began to shape national economies and their exchange. Being introduced within the
discourse of the International Financial Institutions it was also dubbed the “Washington
Consensus”.
3