NOW with Bill Moyers; 233; Women and Poverty in Africa

You Tonight, on now with Bill Moyers, is this the true face of the global economy, while corporations get rich, the world's women stay poor. Women are actually subsidizing all this accumulation of capital because they're the lowest paid.

Her employer in Thailand disappeared overnight, leaving workers unpaid and desperate. What do they expect us to do? Go to another factory and be treated the same way again. In Senegal, the broken promises of the market economy. The market does not make education. It does not make healthcare. The market does not bother with safe water. And writer Vandana Shiva on the power of community activism. And we need a globalization that is based on countries making their decisions, communities making their decisions. A now special report, rich world, poor women. Tonight, on now with Bill Moyers, the weekly news magazine from PBS. Funding for now has been provided by our Soul Corporate Funder. For over 50 years, we've put retirement and pension products to work for those in the public service.

Now we're doing the same for the rest of America, mutual of America, for all of America, the spirit of America, and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Colberg Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Park Foundation, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Funding for this episode has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyers. Welcome to now. In this hour, we want you to meet some women who rarely turn up in the news, but have a lot to tell us about how the world works, especially the phenomenon known as globalization. Globalization has come to mean different things to different people, but stripped to the bare bones, it's about capital, money, roaming the world, looking for the best deal. These days, it's accompanied by some abstract sounding words like financial deregulation,

privatization, and trade liberalization. But for the women you're about to meet, these abstractions play out as concrete realities. We begin in Asia, in Thailand. And as we do, take a look at the sneakers you're wearing or the shirt you have on. Your own connection to these women may be closer than you think. Early every morning, hour after hour, the buses come for them and carry them from the dorms where they live to the places where they work. Every seat is filled. One in four young women in Thailand works in the factory producing goods to be sold abroad. They are the fuel on which globalization runs. All we can think about is that we have to catch the bus, we have to work. We get home at two or three a.m. and wash our clothes and try to get some rest.

During the holidays, we work all night, go home to shower and come right back. If you can't take it, they tell you to leave, but they won't pay you what they owe you for the work you've already done. If they are lucky, they make Bangkok's legal minimum wage, a bit less than $4 a day. If they catch you yawning, they find you 500 baht. 500 baht is $12, three times their daily pay. People have asked me, how can I tolerate this? Most of the people I work with come from upcountry and use their pay to help the people back home. They're 18 or 19 and they still have the energy to work the hours. My parents had 12 children. I was the youngest.

Since I wasn't as good at school as my sister and we couldn't all go, I let her be the one to go to school. I sacrificed since I wasn't as clever. I'd rather send money home. Suni Namso and Saumpit Pungkwa worked for a tie-on company called Bed and Bath Prestige. But instead of bed sheets and bath towels, they produced clothing for US companies like Levi's, Reebok and Mosley Nike. What happened to them is played out around the world as global corporations constantly search for the cheapest labor possible and the least government hassle. On October 5th last year, when the Bed and Bath Prestige workers showed up at their factory, the gates were locked. When we came to work, they wouldn't let us in. I knew that there were a lot of shipments that needed to go out that day because we'd been preparing them. So I called a supervisor about the shipment and explained that we needed to get into the factory right away in order to make it on time.

If we didn't get in by 9, we wouldn't be able to ship. In my own thoughts, I was still worried for the company. How can they treat workers this way? I had a goal to work here three to four years to save a lump sum of money, but then suddenly the factory closed down. I can't even understand why it closed. It can't be that there was no work. We were busy up until the very last day. Abandoned and cheated out of their earnings, the Bed and Bath Prestige workers headed to the center of Bangkok to ask the time ministry of labor for help. 350 of them did something that's almost unheard of here. They vowed to stay in the courtyard until the minister upstairs enforced the law. They had been left without the wages they had already earned and without the severance pay required under Thai law when the factory shuts down. We believed the ministry would help us solve our problem. We see them as authority figures, someone we look up to, someone on the side of the law.

We wanted our crew to follow them inside, but the Thai authorities said no, so some of the protesters dared to take a small video camera in with them and record what was happening. They told us to get out of here, but if we can't trust our own ministry of labor to protect us, who can we go to? They keep repeating that Bed and Bath is a small case. If it's such a small case, why don't they solve it? They had begun to sit in. They were living here, eating here, sleeping here, and caring for their children. Some shaved their heads in protest. When they began to draw outside attention and support, the ministry made it clear they were now unwelcome. When they walk by, they won't even look at us. They treat us like trash, like we are trying to shame them. They just want to solve the problem of us being here.

They've actually said, when they run out of food, they'll go home. Why do they have to be so cruel? We eat twice a day now, down from three times a day. We're not going to leave. We're in this together. We need to find out exactly what our rights are. They can't just let this drag on and on. Six weeks into the sit-in, Sunni Namso had emerged as one of their leaders. She took it on herself to try to break through the bureaucracy upstairs. They asked me what I want. All I want is for them to do their jobs. Just do what is written in the Constitution. Nothing above or beyond that. If you wrote that when a factory suddenly closes, I should go home and sleep. That's what I'll do. But you wrote so well about rights and actions. Are they just empty words?

They said from the beginning that we cannot fight them. I'd like to change it to be called the Ministry of Investors, not the Ministry of Labor. That, say, observers of Thailand's place in the global economy, describes the problem perfectly. The government had to balance between workers' interests and investors' interests. So, I think seeing that they really can't enforce, they can't be on the side of the workers if it's going to chase investors away. Like so many developing countries, Thailand is dwarfed by the power of global corporations. And like many developing countries, it has felt the pressure from international finance and trade agreements to liberalize its economy and remove barriers to foreign investment.

I think with this liberalization, we thought that when we produce something, it can go very far. It can sell to many people. And that's what we thought that is benefiting us as a poor country. But we don't look at the negative side. That it's not just only the commodity that will be freely moved around, you can export, you can import. But it's also the capital, it's also labor. You have to keep your labor cheap, the majority of your labor cheap, in order to grow. That's why you said that women are actually subsidizing all this accumulation of capital in the capitalist system, because they're the lowest paid. Women are also the first to be fired.

Like the young women at Bed and Bath Prestige, the women in this Spancock neighborhood saw their factory jobs disappear. They had no option but to go into the almost invisible world of homework. It's an increasing reality in the lives of millions of women in the global economy. Their only contact is the middleman, who drops off materials and picks up Finnish shoes. They suspect they're working for a foreign company, though it isn't clear who. You can easily spot the work for foreign countries because of the sizes. They're much bigger, big shoes, very big. Like size 30 or something, wow. The work is tedious, unhealthy, labor intensive, and they're paid much less than the legal minimum wage. It doesn't matter whether the economy goes up or down, what we're paid keeps going down. Before 10 to 12 bought, they told us the economy is down. Could they get it for less? They are paid by peace rate, and it's coming down to 9 by 8 by 7. And I could not believe it sometimes. How can they make it? So how can they make a living?

So they said they just extend their hours of work. Sometimes they have to work until midnight to finish 40 shoes. Seven bought means these women are paid less than 17 cents for every shoe they sow. We have to buy our own needles. This one's about 20 bought, very expensive. Sewing two shoes won't even buy you one needle. It's called outsourcing. Global corporations have found they can make more money this way. They use foreign subcontractors to manufacture the products they sell. They tell us if you don't want to sow, I can give it to someone else. If we don't do the work, other people would. So it's like this. They lower prices and still we sow.

Outsourcing also means corporations can distance themselves from the responsibilities of being an employer. Workers receive no benefits, and job security is a mirage. You can take any multinational corporation like Nike, I did that three times. They hold the same theory that you outsource because that will give you less problem. They just want to make it a kind of minimum responsibility to them. To look after human being. They don't care anymore about what I would be saying. What the trade union would be saying because they have this outsourcing and they have all these subcontractor workers. They have a lot of unemployed people who are waiting for their job to be subcontractor to them. Shoes that women in Thailand sow end up in department stores in the United States. But in the US, using sweatshop labor can be bad PR. So five years ago, faced with rising criticism, Nike, Reebok and a handful of other companies adopted a coat of conduct.

They agreed to monitor their subcontractors to work with them to ensure that workers would be paid the local minimum wage and would not be forced to work more than 60 hours a week. In short, what they sell would not be produced by exploited labor. At bed and bath prestige, those promises were printed on the card. The young women were required to wear around their necks. This is the factory's employee card. It says that Nike and your factory are working together by using the certification of Nike that will be posted in the factory, which dictates that you will be treated fairly with a safe working environment. If you lost it, it costs 20 baht to replace it. That's about it. No one really knows what it is.

I only started understanding after we started protesting. I know now that according to Nike's rules, over time, shouldn't have been more than 12 hours per week. The fact is, they worked at least 70 hours a week. And instead of the minimum wage, they were paid by peace rate. Five bought or 12 cents for sowing a dozen pieces. But before every inspection by Nike, the workers say they were rehearsed by their employees. They knew exactly the day the client would come, and they would stage a practice run the day before. We had to wear face masks. The company would quiz people on how they would answer Nike's questions if we were asked, and they would tell how to answer. We had to memorize it. They told us if they asked you what you earn, you have to tell them minimum wage.

The factory would tell us to lie if we were asked how late we worked overtime. We would have to answer 8 pm when in reality, we were there until 11 pm or midnight, sometimes till morning. They say that if you don't answer correctly, then we are finished. I'm finished and you're finished. There are a lot of laborers in Thailand, so it is up to you whether you want to have work or not. And there's the rub. In the global competition that pits the poorest countries and the poorest workers, one against the other, they are all trapped. If a worker tells the truth or the Thai government enforces its laws, companies will move on. I never thought it would be like this. I thought the ministry was this big power who could solve our problems, since I've been here I've realized you can't get justice without a fight. After 10 weeks, almost 200 workers had given up. They could no longer afford to protest. Their families back home needed money.

So somehow, they would have to find work elsewhere. What do they expect us to do? Go to another factory and be treated the same way again? Are we just supposed to keep taking it? Isn't there some way to create some security for us so that when we go to work somewhere else, this won't happen again? Many of my friends here have cried over their behavior. They don't help. They only step on us. Who are we supposed to go to if not them? What do we have to do? Get naked. Die? If I die and it does something, I will. I dare. But I don't want to die for nothing. Three months and nine days after their sit-in began, the government finally came through.

Offering Sunni and the protesters still on the scene, what amounted to $448 each. It was less than what they were owed by law, but without their courage, they would have received nothing. In Thailand, it was considered a victory. An economist friend told me that, well, Thailand's label was just too expensive. I mean, that's how economists see things. You're too expensive. That's why they moved over to other places. That's commodification. And basically, you can use that to measure lives as well. That means workers' lives here are cheaper than there. Young women come into these factories as little more than children. And leave exhausted or even ill, with no money in their pockets and no training or skills.

They're making globalization work, and they are being burned up as its natural fuel. It's estimated that 70% of the poorest people in the world are women. And our wager few of them have heard of the Washington Consensus. That's the name given to a set of ideas that grew up in our nation's capital two decades ago, and mutated into an ideology, a belief system about how the world ought to work. The Washington Consensus is at the heart and soul of globalization today. The market is its God, and its gospel is this. If poor countries were privatized across the board and allow resources to be allocated by market forces, instead of politics and social needs, the economy will create wealth and cure poverty.

The temples of that faith are the two most powerful financial institutions in the world, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both headquartered in Washington and both dominated by the American government. Since the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF have used their leverage to push free market economics on developing countries. But like every theology, the results have been mixed. Sherry Jones reports from Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, a country I first visited 40 years ago. Senegal had just gained its independence and were shedding its colonial past. It was a promising time. In Senegal today, the optimism has evaporated. There is a crisis in the farmlands. And women here bear the brunt of the changes that began more than two decades ago. I only harvested five bags of millet which we ate in two days.

Now, if I don't ask my neighbors for millet, my family doesn't eat. What little millet they can grow, girls grind into couscous by the traditional method of pillering. We have nothing to eat, let alone money to pay for school, $180. Without school, my kid's life will be just like this. There is also a crisis in the cities. 20% of Senegal's population lives in the capital city of Decar. More than one million people are crowded together in just one suburb, Pequim. I've been here close to ten years. I spend all the money I make.

How would I save anything? I send all the money I make to my children. I send them clothes, shoes, money, rice, sugar. I support my children, my husband and my mother. My mother doesn't have anybody to support her but me. The men can't find jobs. The women who have come from the villages do the work they know to help their families back home survive. I'm only counting on this. If it sells well great, if not, it all depends on how well it sells. If you go in areas like Pequim where I grew up, you will see women carrying water on their head at this day in age. Girls being pulled out of schools because they do not have access to water, they have to go to fetch water for their mothers and for their families. When you see fall was a girl, she too fetched water.

Back then, in the years just after Senegal's independence in 1960, nine out of ten people were illiterate. But the new government set out to invest some of its money in human capital, building schools and hospitals, providing medical care and education. And that gave you a chance. I can see that growing to Pequim today is a very, very, this advantageous situation compared to when I was growing up. Where I grew up in Pequim, the chances and the opportunities I had being a young girl in Pequim, those young people who grew up in Pequim today will not have that chance. Because I went to school, to public school, they don't have that luxury. That makes me angry. Many other women of your scene falls generation were educated in the public school. My father has young children to whom he tried to give the same opportunities as he did for me, but without success.

The reason is that between the day I was born and the day of their birth, something fundamental happened. The IMF and the World Bank came into our house. What brought these two powerful financial institutions into the house was a crisis. Like other new countries, synagogue was encouraged by Western banks to borrow money to develop. And it did. Too much, too fast. When the global recession of the late 70s arrived, these countries began to default on their debt payments. That threatened the international financial system. So from Washington, the World Bank offered loans to help keep synagogue afloat. But on the condition that the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, would direct how synagogue should restructure its economy and set its financial house in order. For more than two decades now, the World Bank and the IMF have worked together to shape economic life here.

Synagogue accepted financial terms known as structural adjustment. And that meant people were charged for medical care and education. Farmers lost their subsidies. The state-owned enterprises, like electricity and water, were sold off. This way, synagogue could balance its budget. Foreign capital would come to invest. Investment would create growth. And that would eventually benefit the poor. It hasn't worked out that way. If there had never been structural adjustment policies, there would be poverty in Africa. And structural adjustment policies have contributed very, very, very much to an increase in the number of poor people. Budget cuts meant the rudimentary public school system was virtually dismantled.

In Peking today, three or four children crowd together at desks built for two. There is only enough money for a half day of class, most days of the week. Going to school, I was able to have access to books, have access to chalk, and do have access to good teachers. Now the government spends less than $70 per child per year. So parents must scrape together the money for notebooks, for chalk, and for fees to send their children to school. When there is a choice between a girl and a boy to go to school, it is a girl that is left out and it is a boy that is supported to go to school. So any policy that does not keep into account that if I cut an expenditure on education, or if I make poor families pay for education, it is a girl that is going to pay the cost because it is a girl that is going to be left out. The World Bank's own studies argue that educating girls is key to pulling developing countries out of poverty, but that conflicts with the budget balancing demands of the IMF.

The cost is not just to the girls, you are removing the capacity of upward shift and mobility for whole population, and therefore you will find that the generation of the middle class is no longer possible in a way that it was possible during our generation. Today, just over half the girls of primary school age are getting an education. This country we have not given the time to really build the social infrastructure. And if you do not have a good social infrastructure, if you do not invest in your human capital and the country's most valuable asset is the human capital, then you are bound to failure. In the 70s, the health care system in Senegal was considered a model for emerging countries. Now it is more nearly a national disaster. Budgets were slashed.

And that meant hospitals and clinics were closed. Doctors and nurses laid off. Now the poor must pay not only for what care they can find, but also for needles, operating kits, even gloves for the doctors and nurses. And take the case of Dijio Giome, whose son Ablai was paralyzed in a hit and run accident. I can't take him to the hospital anymore. We don't have the money. I have to take care of him on my own. That's the only way we have. They told me about a device for him, but it was too expensive. $50. I don't have that much money. Because she stays home to care for her son, she cannot help her husband earn money to buy what Ablai needs.

I don't sleep very well at all because I think about him and his health. He's in my heart. I just want him to be healthy. He's my son. Because there is no money, her daughter's future is also at risk. If I can't find the money to pay for school, then I will have to take her out. I just don't have the money. I'm tired. Very tired. I want her to get a job to help her father and me. There are certain African countries where I have visited. What I found was that many women are being pulled out of the productive sector. In order to take care of the sick and the dying, there is a disinvestment in the health care system.

Because there's a cutback, because of structural adjustment programs and so on. Not only will they suffer by being pushed out of those services, not only are you not giving them those services, but the caring work of women is in fact being used as a shortfall for what the government and the international community is taking away. And they in turn pull their daughters out of school to help them. So it is a vicious cycle. Like many poor African nations, Senegal borrowed more each year from the World Bank just to make token payments against its old debts. The loans came with strings attached. Under the bottom line approach imposed from Washington, Senegal was instructed to sell off its water system. Providing free water cost too much money, the World Bank said, the market would be more efficient.

That's not the view of those who have long worked with the rural poor. From our point of view, water must not be privatized. It's a public good. We need to examine water policies to make them work better for the people. If we don't, people will never be able to overcome their poverty. It is the international policy that water should be privatized. Providization means the government no longer provides Senegal's water. It's sold at right to a multinational water giant, which charges for the service. The French company, Wigsar, controls most of Senegal's water supply. The company owns more than 15% of the world water market, including systems in five other African countries. In four countries in Africa, people are living on less than a dollar a day, paying five times, ten times more than you in Washington DC, or paying more water than a citizen in Tokyo.

That's outrageous. That's outrageous. That is scandalous. The water that flows from privately owned pipes calls more than most families can afford, so women and their daughters must walk further and work harder to fetch water from hand dug wells. And that well water is untreated and unsafe, even in urban neighborhoods like Peking. The water is polluted. Look at our kids. They're sick all the time. Look at the well that's out there. People are drinking from that well. We need help getting good water that we can drink. They said that they want to install democracy. They want to install the free market. There is no state. Just the market.

But the market does not make education. It does not make healthcare. The market does not bother with safe water. It's always about money. It's always about money. If I loan you money, you must do whatever you have to do to pay me back. Like every third world country, we're poor. We're in debt. We pay. We pay. We don't know how long we have to keep paying. The global economy is also changing the lives of women in a community called Imbal, just up the coast from Peking. Here, foreign fishing trawlers now dot the horizon. A European consortium has bought the rights to fish in the gall's waters for four years. The price is $63 million, and there is no limit to their catch.

The great grandfather and my grandfather were fishermen. The men fish and the women sell the fish. Fresh or dried or salted. This is our job. May God help us. This is our way of supporting our family. We get the fish from the boat and we bring it here. Then we smoke the fish. The government knows we depend on fishing, but now these other fishing boats have come. So I think they must have signed some sort of agreement with other countries, and that makes it very difficult for us. The women have always sung songs to pass the long hours it takes to salt and smoke the fish. But now there are fewer fish, and so fewer days when they salt and smoke are seen.

There used to be regulation of fishing. The holes in the nets had to be made to let the small fish escape. That way, the fish stock could regenerate. But because of the fishing agreements, the big fishing boats come from other countries and take everything. But when the little Senegalese boats go out to sea, they find nothing. And the women don't have any fish to sell in the market. It's not only Senegal. It's all of West Africa's Atlantic coast. Once again, it's the daughters who pay. If the waters have no fish, we have nothing to give our families. We have to send our girls to get jobs as mates. There's no other way.

That's all I have to say. We need help. If we can't make a living with our smoked fish, we won't have a job. Don't have a job. In some villages, there are women who have made up songs. We need to speak about the World Bank. One of them says, the World Bank is coming to our country. The World Bank came to our country. Soon we will be hungry. Poverty and wealth are not automatic. They are not things that just happen. There are processes that create poverty and processes that generate wealth. Then these are choices that can be made. And until we make these policy choices, we are not going to facilitate the reduction of poverty worldwide. In Washington, the IMF tout Senegal has a success story. Inflation is down. The budget deficit is smaller.

In Senegal, the people call it Capitalism Sovage. Savage Capitalism. When I go in Senegal, and I see the number of beggars in the streets of Dakar now, compared to 20 years ago, that makes me very angry. It makes me angry because I had thought that our communities, our people have invested a lot of sacrifices to build a nation, to educate people. And in the end, they have no jobs. It has regressed and regressed to be among the poorest countries today in 2003. That makes me very angry. As we've seen, there are rules that govern the global economy. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund make some of these rules.

But so does the World Trade Organization. The WTO was set up eight years ago to enforce how the game of global commerce has played. It's been called a kind of World Trade Referee. Critics, however, say the WTO is biased, that its rules are written by and for corporations, at the expense of local workers, the local environment and local democracy. These rules, critics claim, make life even harsher for poor women and poor countries. The WTO holds another summit of nations next week in Cancun, Mexico. And just as in Seattle four years ago, thousands of protesters are gathering there to demand fairer rules of World Trade. Bonan Ashiva knows about protests. She organizes people at the grassroots, the world over, including that huge demonstration of farmers protesting international agricultural agreements 10 years ago.

She's also a scholar with books on farming, bow technology, and the environment. Bonan Ashiva grew up in a privileged home in India, earned her PhD in physics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and for the last 20 years, from her base in India, has traveled the world, challenging the rules of globalization. Welcome to now. Hi Bill. Give me first your working definition of globalization. The term gets thrown around by everybody. What do you mean by globalization? It is rules written into the World Trade Organization. It is rules that say you cannot decide your agriculture policy. You cannot decide your tariff structures. You cannot decide to make sure your people have food. You cannot decide that people in your country have jobs. The market will decide it and the market will be favored on the basis of unfair asymmetric rules of trade. Who writes those rules?

Unfortunately, it wasn't governments, even though they are the members of the WTO. The rules of WTO were written by corporations. There were four new areas brought into trade that never belonged to trade. Agriculture, intellectual property, services, and investment. Now, each of these four areas had a treaty in the general agreement on trade and tariffs in the European round. Every one of those treaties was driven by a particular group of companies, the agriculture agreement driven by agribusiness. The trips agreement, the trade related intellectual property rights agreement driven by the pharmaceutical industry, the biotech industry, and the entertainment industry. The services agreement driven by the financial interest, the banks. And now increasingly driven by the water companies which want to trade in water as a trade in services. When I was in Terry last week, Terry is a town, it was the capital of our region, and it's been dammed on the Ganges to supply water now through sways to Delhi. This is a project by the big French company, Suez.

Sways, this was biggest water company, wants to privatize the Ganges. 100,000 people were displaced. And the women started to talk about how many women are starting to commit suicide because they can't walk for water and the government has cancelled every local water scheme saying now all the money, all the public wealth has gone into these mega projects. So not only are rural communities denied the water, they are denied the public investment to bring water if their own village has run dry. So we have women jumping into the Ganges because now the Ganges instead of being their mother for life has become a graveyard. So it is in a way a system of dispossessing the poor. Coca-Cola, South India, just been there on Earth Day, I celebrated a year of protests with tribal women who are fighting Coca-Cola which is sucking out 1.5 million litres of day of water for the bottling of what is called Kinlein India and the Coca-Cola bottled water, interestingly two miles radius, every tank, every well is dry, women have no drinking water.

That's how it plays out. You're saying this is depriving the people at the grassroots of the water, they need just for the sustenance of life, is that the point? Absolutely, women in the hills are being denied water so that every drop of Ganges water can flow down to be sold. So globalization commodifies what the resources that are necessary for survival. There is an argument that water is getting increasingly scarce and only the market can determine how it can be effectively distributed. You obviously disagree with that. I disagree with it because I'm enough of a scientist to know that water is created in nature and not in markets. Markets can only allocate water and take it uphill to where the money is. Usually this means that those who have destroyed water resources by abuse and pollution get new license to destroy it.

It is not an incentive to conserve, it's an incentive to over exploit. And the Coca-Cola case in Kerala is a very good example. That here is a company that can take the water, it doesn't conserve the water, depletes it and creates scarcity where there was no scarcity. Is it bottling this water for sale? It's bottling the water for sale. So water takes for free from local communities, it then sells at ten rupees a bottle. But don't they have? They've never cleared it from the community and our constitution requires that in tribal areas the tribals are the ultimate competent authority in legal terms. The community as a whole has to give clearance on any resource here. The Indian government has to be a party, right? The corporation just couldn't come in there and do what it wants to do because India is a democracy and the people are represented supposedly in the parliament. And it's a member, your government is a member of the World Trade Organization, the WTO. So how does this play out? Give me an example.

Well, the way it actually plays out is that every country, every government, which has actually implemented these rules, has lost elections and every opposition party that has said we need to call this kind of corporate driven globalization to a halt, has won elections. But once they come into power, their hands are tied by these rules because contrary to what is perceived that countries make a decision, once countries are members, they in a way are forced to adopt the whole baggage. And the Coca-Cola's of the world, the Cargill's of the world, the Monsanto's of the world, the Suases and Vivendis of the world, rest on local elites. They rest on local elites who also benefit out of destroying the livelihoods of their own people. And this is not the case that Indian elites don't join with the global elites. Globalization, in my view, is a partnership of elites to exploit the people of the world against the democratic will of people. It was just a question that earlier this week, I happened to read a report by a company here in New York saying that corruption in India is at an all-time high.

But in some states, in fact, less than one-third of the development money reaches its intended goals. And that even in the capital of New Delhi, 20% of the members of parliament have a criminal past. That 40% of famine relief stock is sold on the black market. I mean, that's a pretty devastating portrait of what's happening in your own country. And it's made worse by the kind of money that global corporations bring in. Two decades ago, every politician of India had to go house to house, ask for funding, make sure that the financial base of elections was the political base of governance. You know, kickbacks is the name given to corporate bribes. In the case of Enron, I mean, its corrupt practices here were known. But very little is known about the fact that Enron came into India along with Bechtel to set up a double power plant. And they had an entire budget item called political education that through the court hearings in India was revealed to be corruption money.

Political education has become the new name for bribes and corruption. And the scale is so different. You know, two rupees versus two billion. The amount of corruption you can spread is huge. Is the world's largest democracy in jeopardy? I think all the world's democracies are in jeopardy. And my own thesis is that this is connected to the trade liberalization and globalization. Because most people in this country who support trade liberalization say just the opposite. They say this is what brings globalization, what brings ideas, it brings wealth, it brings technology and innovation to a country. And it should create a commonwealth of prosperity. You're saying just the opposite. If globalization was founded on democratic decision making from the ground up, it would create more freedom of interaction, it would create more flow of positive ideas, more universal solidarity among communities. And globalization as it shaped right now under the coercive rules of trade under the World Trade Organization or the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment basically doesn't create wealth. It takes the wealth of the poor and puts in them in the hands of global corporations, leaving insecurity behind.

In addition, decisions that we made as national systems, whether it was decisions about how we run our intellectual property rights systems, what do we do with our water, how do we do our agriculture, what seeds we plant, what prices are crops will sell at. All those are decisions taken out of the country, put into a World Trade Organization or put into the hands of global corporations. You are very controversial. I mean, I was reading one of your critics say, Dr. Shiva, and he was respectful of much of your science and much of you. He said, but she too often feeds off the west's vision of a golden age, a pre-industrial idol when the peasants lived in mystical harmony with nature. Now, is he characterizing your view accurately?

No, he's not, because for me, my entry point into life was as a physicist. If I am today engaged in ecological research and activism or fighting globalization or fighting for peace, it is because of the reality of today a very contemporary reality in which small peasants can't make a living. I'm not talking about an idyllic past. I'm talking about a brutal today in which ordinary hardworking people are being denied the survival. I am talking about a today in which a gang is that belong to all, is starting to belong to one company. Today, where in Kerala, water rich, abundant rain, women have no water because Coca-Cola took it. It's not an idyllic past for me. It's a violent today for which I am seeking a nonviolent response. I know you're controversial in India because you stand up to the government and stand up to the powers that be, but you're controversial in this country because people say you have created a philosophy that is totally contrarian to our law, to our rights of property, that you want to create a kind of socialist, if not communist society. Is there no compromise between what you're arguing for in India and the modernization of the world?

It's very interesting that the choices that are posed are always between centralized controlling states and centralized controlling markets. There's never room left for decentralized democracy for communities. And my options are beyond centralized states and beyond the centralized market. They are about communities making decisions about how their rivers will function, how their forests will be protected, what food they'll grow. And I think the US had a deep, deep loss in imagining that societies could be built on individuals alone, that atomization can be the ground of coherent structures. I think what we really need is bringing back community, bringing back comments as the next step of humanity across the world, not just in India, also in the United States, also in England, and that will be a peaceful world. I know that you don't believe everything in the West is repulsive because you came to a Canadian university. That's where you did your graduate work, isn't it?

I've never talked about the West being repulsive. I've talked about the colorizing West trying to present itself as the liberator being a bit of a falsehood. I have never been against interaction. I've never been against internationalism. I talk about earth democracy, about all of us being citizens on the planet. We need a globalization that is based on countries making their decisions, communities making their decisions. The current globalization is trying to build a roof by eating out the foundations. And there is panic because it's a false building. It's a building that's going to crumble. It is already crumbling. And there is no reason to not have international trade. There's no reason not to have international interaction. There's no reason not to have international democracy. But an international democracy is a genuinely democratic, only if national democracies are intact and local democracies are vibrant. Dr. Bandana Shiva, thank you very much for joining us on now. Thank you, Bill.

There is a lot more about globalization at PBS.org. That's it for now. Thanks for watching. David Burkaccio will be here next week. I'm Bill Moyers. Good night. Now with Bill Moyers continues at PBS Online. Learn more about the people and issues from tonight's show and join the online discussion at PBS.org. To order this episode of now with Bill Moyers on Video Cassette, call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

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