Thank you very much Mr. Hogen, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen; I have had some very good conversations before this session convened, and in looking at the program I can see that many important questions have been addressed and raised, and many tributes to the impact of the civil society across national boundaries, such as the successful treaty on landmines, which my government has not yet ratified. And other work dealing with nuclear weapons and [the] international criminal court and environmental progress. But I noticed that in this program most of the questions are posed in the following format: What can be done to advance this? What can be done to cooperate with that? What can be done to strengthen this? What can be done to inform about that? That is a very typical United Nations approach. There is another approach which is to ask: why is it, in a world with so many solutions and so many proven approaches to advance peace, help safety, education, and a sustainable economy and environment to advance the fulfilment of human possibilities, why is it that these solutions and these approaches, some of them really working in some parts of the world, others still on the preverbal shelf; why is it that they are not being applied?

The theory of democracy is that when there is a concentration of power and wealth in too few hands, there are enormous replications of avoidable injustice. And clearly, in this world of ours, there is not only concentration of power and wealth in too few hands, there are new forms of concentration of power and wealth in too few hands. We not only have the concentration of capital, of land-ownership, and the concentration of government power and in the hands of concentrated economic power; we not only have governments that do not recognise elementary human rights, we not only have the concentration of natural resources in the hands of the few, but we have the concentration of solutions in the hands of the few. We have the concentration of new technologies in the hands of the few. We have the concentration of propaganda in the hands of the few. And so, my approach, and the approach of our colleagues as we establish different citizen groups and reach out around the world, is to focus on the concentration of power and wealth and to see how it can be de-concentrated; how it can be used by billions of people.

Our freedom can be defined as Cicero defined it over 2000 years ago when he defined freedom as participation in power. The concept of the public citizen, in contrast to our private citizen roles and self-absorbtion, is a person who engages in the civil society individually and in collaboration with other citizen groups. Which, in turn, engage in confronting an injustice. The purpose of democracy is to de-concentrate power in order to allow more people to use it in an accountable fashion, under due process of law, so that that power can liberate solutions, that at the present time are either solutions that challenge vested ways of doing things, vested capital, vested concentration of power.

It is important, I think, to address it in this way because in international conferences there are languages of avoidance that transcend individual language differences. And whether you speak one language or another, international conferences impose a homogenization where we speak a lingua franca called the language of avoidance. One reflection of the language of avoidance is to avoid the use of proper names. And I am going to focus on the concentration of multinational corporate power. Corporate power that is utilised by Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds in the tobacco industry to hook millions of youngsters all over the world into an addiction that will take out of every three of their lives.

I wish to focus on the pharmaceutical industry, whose great profits subsidised by American and other tax payers, has caused them to be indifferent to a necessary research for drugs and vaccines to deal with global infectious diseases. Those are the true weapons of mass destruction: malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and the variety of other diseases, some of which are spreading around the world in drug resistant strains. I wish to focus on the concentrators of capital, the giant banks and insurance companies which have become very innovative in the nonproductive, or unproductive, use of capital, so they can expend it in ways that do not benefit the many or privilege the few so they can engage in profitable speculation instead of productive investment. Companies, and the drug companies like DrugSharp and Dome, Pfizer and many other companies, companies in the financial area like bank of America, Citibank--it used to be Citibank, Citygroup now--and other large banks here and abroad. Businessweek once called the new capitalism a casino economy; an economy that grows massive wealth in misdirection so that a few command it against the interest of the many.

You have heard this figure: the poorest three billion people on this planet have wealth equal to the richest three hundred people on this planet. And that disparity devolves down to the national, regional and local level. I think what we have to do in building a civil society is to start with a theory of democratic power and how it has been used in the past to achieve justice. Societies that have more justice are societies that need less charity. It is important, of course, to recount the successes of the recent past, especially the extraordinary success of The Hague Appeal for Peace and its Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice in the 21st century. It is important to acknowledge groups all over the world, from different cultures and different languages and different races, but when they meet have an instant rapport and understanding because they have a common philosophy of justice for all peoples in the world. It is important to note, just as in our country and in many of your countries, that the greatest advances of social justice come first and foremost from civic action and the action of small numbers of citizens advancing value systems passively supported by many larger numbers in their society. Whether it is a struggle against slavery in our past, the struggle for woman’s rights, the struggle for workers’ rights, the struggle for a sustainable agrarian society, whether it is a struggle for environmental advancement, whether it is a struggle for consumer protection and many other advances. When you ask yourself, "where do these start," they usually started with a very small number of people who had a level of urgency to them and who brooked no sign of discouragement, and who defined determination as that quality which puts human beings’ dreams on wheels. Determination. It is important that we begin and ask ourselves: how can we speak justice to power and not just truth to power?

Justice is an instrument of democratic power. It is an instrument that itself produces new civil society, new citizen groups. It is an instrument that leaves open options for revision in the light of new facts. It’s an instrument of education of very young children through their schools teaching them how to practice democracy, teaching them to understand first and foremost their immediate neighbourhood and community. Teaching them to connect the classroom to society. Teaching them the skills of citizenship. And it is important to ask ourselves: what are the skills of citizenship? We know what the skills for computer programming are, the skills for marketing are, the skills for business management are, and the skills for athletics are. And they are all taught in our schools, but we do not know what the skills of citizenship are for most people and that is something that can be taught.

Time does not permit to illustrate those skills other than to give you two Web sites: www.essential.org, which features a book called Civics for Democracy, a Journey for Teachers and Students, and features a multinational clearinghouse, for people all over the world who want technical answers to the information about the behaviour and misbehaviour of multinational corporations. The other Web site is: www.citizen.org, under which you will see the global tradewatch initiave which helped launch the Seattle coalition and helped connect millions of people into a greater understanding of what the new corporate globalization world order entails. Corporate globalization is different than civic globalization. We must never use that word "globalization" without an adjective, because the difference between corporate globalization and civic globalization is the difference between a concentrated oligarchy and a deconcentrated initiatory democracy and democratic process. Corporate globalisation concentrates power in the hands of major corporations that are always merging into fewer corporations. These corporations walk a stride of planet commanding capital, technology, labour and all to many government officials. They confront governments with ultimatums, with the loss of international loans, with the loss of access to markets with the very loss of access to western governments. In my judgement, and in the judgement of many citizen groups in the United States, and in the judgement of George Soros himself, a successful financier, the global corporation is now the major threat to the democratic processes in our world. Whether it is the impact on the environment, from the forest to the oceans to the land, to global warming to ozone depletion, corporate technology is short-ranged and myopic and destructive of long-term environmental sustainability. Wheter it is the transfer of natural resources and the genetic inheritance of human beings and flora and fauna, biotechnology companies, like Monsanto and Novartis and their ally-chemical companies going into this field, are determined to convert the commonwealth of nature into proprietary 20-year patent designations.

The sheer extremism and radicalism of this commercial venture is proceeding at an accelerated rate without any legal, ethical, or spiritual frameworks whatsoever. A technology whose ambition is to change the nature of nature and convert it into private corporate property with the continued help of taxpayer subsidies, such as from our government. The technology that challenges the very meaning of democracy, accountability, and decision-making. In the area of so-called free trade, there is no free trade under corporate globalization. It is corporate-managed trade often in connection with oligargich and dictatorial forces. And when factories in our country are closed down and re-open in other countries where the price of labour is oligarchily or dictatorially repressed, where the opportunity to form trade unions is an invitation to be jailed, or the opportunity to have one’s own democratic expression under due processes of law is stifled, then our multi-corporations are taking advantage of dictatorially, oligarchily repressed cause, capitalising this repressed labour, and this freedom to pollute and contaminate into a formula that they can then throw back into Western countries against companies and labour trying to play by a different set of rules.

We must re-negotiate international trade agreements so that they are democratic and open processes, not closed tribunals under the World Trade Organisation, or closed harmonization committees, that harmonise standards downwards rather than upwards. We need international trade agreements that do not subordinate health safety in the work place, market place and environment to the dictate of international commerce. We need international trade agreements that stick to trade and allow environment, worker, consumer, peace, demilitarisation all to be co-operated with across national boundaries, with their own individual treaties and trade agreements. The corporate globalization that is commercializing childhood, that is filling the minds of children, no matter what cultural background they are from, with a homoginized melange of pornography, violence, low-grade sensuality from the food that they are induced to eat to the medicines that they often are given in an over-medicated manner. This has, in effect, affected fundamental cultural traits and patterns in a very subversive manner. Not to mention the health care that has [been] denied to these children. A world that can spend four billion dollars a day on arms and watch tens of thousands of children die from wholly preventable sources is a world that must call itself to an emergency status, where all the leaders of the world convene and pledge to avoid all platitudes, to avoid all resolutions and only to concentrate how to give more power and more information on the democratic processes to more people in their respective roles as voters, as workers, as peasants, as tax payers, and as people who share a common heritage of justice for human beings everywhere.

This last January, I read in the newspapers that the head of AOL Time Warner Corporation, Mr. Gerald Levin, at a press conference had made the following statement which we must all ponder. He said: "The global media is more important than governments, educational institutions and non-profits." I think that if any corporate executive can say that in public, it behoves us to ask: what does he mean by that statement? Does he mean that he is going to envelope with other media conglomerates, billions of people and swirl of commercial entertainment of a low grade fashion, snuffing out indigenous tradition? And engulf the people of the world in a virtual reality of corporate propaganda where commercialism dominates other value systems? It is important to open up the discussion in that fashion. I hope that, in many ways, we can come out of this conference where so many important issues where discussed and deliberated, and so many ideas where exchanged with a severe focus on the need for peace education in a very, very practical manner, for developing civic skills in adult education around the world. Exchanges with civic skills for having our children grow up learning how to defend and promote the human right that is their heritage and should be their inheritance. Let me conclude with one set of examples: The IMF and the World Bank, suffer from an excessive degree of hubris. They think they know how to engage economic development. They think they know how they can further the taxpayer subsidies that they are budgeted with, represent corporate interest, and still advance the interest of people. If you don’t think that is ambitious… In my trips around the world, I have managed to observe the genius of indigenous cultures, a genius that never is allowed to flower because it is not linked with democratic prophesies around the world. I saw how the Egyptian architect for the masses taught Egyptian peasants how to build housing from the soil under their feet; and rather elegant housing as that, however modest. I saw in Brazil how Paul Freire cheaply and effectively the literate peasants could be educated and made literate. I have read about the spread of micro-credit in Bangladesh and how it has helped put woman into thousands of small productive businesses in the villages where they live. And you will have many other examples of that, of course.

I have asked myself: what is it about our media and what is it about our conferences, and what is it about our scholarships that does not advance efficiently these solutions to such fundamental human problems? In the last three years I have been trying to get our government to increase its budget to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and to support the World Health Organisation more extensively. And unfortunately, one B2 Bomber, that now goes for 2 billion dollars, and that is no longer strategically necessary even in the judgement of the Pentagon which does not want any more of them, one B2 Bomber is equivalent to more than ten times what our government spends here and abroad on research and application against malaria and tuberculoses; both of which are now taking about three and a quarter million lives. When the UN development programme can say to us that for 31 billions of dollars a year all the poor people in the world can have clean water which will save millions of lives, can be made literate which will lead to the fulfilment of millions of lives and can have primary healthcare--just 31 billion dollars a year. And we contrast that with the 650 billion dollars a year that the United States and its allies are spending on their military budget against non-existing enemies.

I say it is time for a level of urgency and a level of emergency that has never happened before in the world. You know the difference between concern and awareness. You know the difference between awareness and initiative. You know the difference between initiative and striving for justice daily. You know the difference between striving for justice daily and fire in our bellies, and that is what we need; fire in our bellies that becomes contagious, that is fuelled by the shame of a world full of knowledge unwilling to apply it to the most grave human problems, brutalities and injustice. More people today are undernourished and starving than ever before. People are dying from global infections and diseases then ever before in an era of modernization, globalization, modern medicines and modern technology. And I think we should either be driven by guilt al la Freud or shame al la Jung. Take your choice. Each one is a very propelling force to raise the estimate of our own significance and replicate it through millions of other fellow citizens throughout the world.

Thank you.

Accreditation
Form 2006

22-23 Feb. 2006 Annual DPI/NGO Orientation
Programme