The following 4 pieces are dealing with the World Social Forum being held in India, if you want more information, email me at wwolfvan@yahoo.com and I can send you more links to articles.

1)  Mumbai conference calls for boycott of America, Inc. author: Antonio Gramsci 

Activists in Mumbai, India at the Mumbai Resistance Conference have called for a boycott of major American corporations in response to US military aggression, and the call has been endorsed by some noted participants (including Nobel laureate Arundhati Roy) at the World Social Forum that is happening there in parallel. Activists in India and elsewhere are spearheading a call for an international boycott of corporate America, starting with the ten biggest donors to the George Bush Jr campaign. You can read more about it at: http://india.indymedia.org/ and [2] http://www.motherearth.org/USboycott/index.php Bush Boycott Website

2)  http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/18/stories/2004011800181400.htm Online edition of India's National Newspaper 

Sunday, Jan 18, 2004,  Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving? By Arundhati Roy 

It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on something." After a tour d'horizon, the author of The God of Small Things calls for a " minimum agenda" as well as a plan of action that prioritises global resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Here is the text of her speech at the opening Plenary of the World Social Forum in Mumbai on January 16, 2004: PHOTO Arundhati Roy LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared — reiterated — that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing. Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs — to further what many call The Project for the New American Century. In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to `debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it? In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep. Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a `market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value — oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq. This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works. Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of 2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the Government that oversaw them was re- elected ... all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war. Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, like Saddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV. But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism. Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is `natural ally' — India, Israel and the U.S. are `natural allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy. A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice. In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants. Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits. Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents — corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people! Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism. The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!) That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way? Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives. In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be that the U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa bean produce only 5 per cent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year? For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance. No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity. Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in the world will exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the Movement for Global Justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's Salt March was not just political theatre. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow non-violent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre. It is a very precious weapon that needs to be constantly honed and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media. It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people in five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15th was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonised — as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes. This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we — all of us gathered here and a little way away at Mumbai Resistance — need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an over- arching pre-ordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda. If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly. Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that — after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO. So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted? How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba'athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?) We have to become the global resistance to the occupation. Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S. government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them. I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win. The Project For The New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival. For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war. ©Arundhati Roy

3)  The Times of India -- Monday, January 19, 2004 World Social Forum (WSF) seeks alliance against Bush 

MUMBAI: Anti-globalisation activists called on Sunday for the world to unite against the United States as 100,000 people from 130 countries met off a Mumbai highway in the movement's first forum since the Iraq war. The World Social Forum .. is holding discussions and demonstrations on issues from Iraq to child labour. But the common thread for the diverse set of activists is opposition to US President George W Bush, who is accused by forum leaders of endangering world security and bending trade rules to satisfy corporations. (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/430560.cms) 

4)  Agricultural activism, Bove's style, By Gargi Parsai, MUMBAI, JAN. 19. 

Jose Bove of the Confederacion Paysanne, France, seems to be in the habit of going to jail. Or rather, the authorities seem to be in the habit of jailing him for his protests.

Mr. Bove, a farmers' rights leader, is here to participate in the World Social Forum (WSF). He is against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and has launched here the movement to get the anti-farmer organisation out of the farm sector.

The 50-year-old cheese manufacturer from France, came to fame when he first dismantled a MacDonald's restaurant in France. The reason: Taking advantage of the WTO regulations, the U.S. was forcing imports of "beef injected with hormones" on France. "The hormones were cancerous," he told The Hindu in an exclusive interview. He said the authorities in his country told him there were no courts he could approach. So he went ahead with a "symbolic protest".

"It got me into jail but it made local people sit up and take notice of what was happening around us and to us,'' he said.

It was clear at the WSF that Mr. Bove's reputation has travelled far and wide.

He was jailed again when he raided a godown of Monsanto seeds and mixed them with traditional seeds "so that they did not know one from the other'', he said with a smile.

In his last protest last year, he was joined by 500 farmers from Karnataka.

They participated in uprooting Genetically Modified Monsanto rice plants that had been surreptitiously planted. All of them were jailed for that. He was in prison till August last.

Mr. Bove recognises that in India too Monsanto-grown BT cotton seeds have been surreptitiously planted. "There is no transparency in what these multi-nationals do," he said. Asked about Cancun negotiations, Mr. Bove said the WTO had destroyed all agriculture. "The problem is that in Cancun some countries were using agriculture in the negotiations to bargain for other things. They were divided."

He said there had been no change in the stand of developed countries on agriculture. "So we have to take a stand that all negotiations end and WTO get out of agriculture."

Mr. Bove firmly believes that countries should have sovereign right over their food and agriculture and should be able to feed their people.

Asked why governments agree to what is detrimental to their people, he said perhaps they did not understand what was happening, taken in as they were by new economics and informatics.

On the future of their protests against the WTO, he said, "the future depends on what we do. We can stop the process. It is possible if we put pressure on our governments."

http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/20/stories/2004012004861200.htm 

This isn't exactly related but I thought it was interesting

CRIME & TOURISM

Judge Chooses San Mateo County as Site of Murder Trial By DEAN E. MURPHY SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 20 — 

Tourism officials in San Mateo County cheered wildly on Tuesday when a judge announced that the murder trial of Scott Peterson would be moved there. "You couldn't hear us screaming?" asked Anne LeClair, president and chief executive of the San Mateo County Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is in Burlingame, about 15 miles south of San Francisco. "This is wonderful." Ms. LeClair predicted the trial — or more precisely, the news coverage it is expected to generate — would inject at least $8 million into the county's economy, which remains in the doldrums because of the dot-com collapse there and throughout the Silicon Valley. "I haven't even had time to play back all of my voice mails," said Ms. LeClair, fielding inquiries by reporters around the world. "Every time I talk to somebody, they build up." Mr. Peterson, who is accused of killing his wife, Laci, and their unborn son, has been a favorite subject of television newscasts and talk shows. Even the most routine hearings in the case have drawn convoys of television satellite trucks to the Stanislaus County Courthouse in Modesto. About 400 journalists are registered with the authorities to receive updates on the case. "Depending on what is happening, we can get 3,000 hits a day just on our media Web site," said Kelly Houston, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department. The judge in the case, Al Girolami of Stanislaus County Superior Court, chose San Mateo, from among four counties under consideration, during a hearing in Modesto. Over the past two weeks, some officials had been quietly positioning their counties for the trial. Ms. LeClair sent Judge Girolami a package of promotional materials by overnight delivery. Judge Girolami determined earlier that the trial needed to be moved because so many people in Stanislaus County had made up their minds about Mr. Peterson's guilt. The trial was to begin next week, but officials said it would probably be delayed for several weeks because of the change of venue and the possibility that Judge Girolami might not continue with the case. The judge said on Tuesday that he would prefer that a retired judge be appointed to handle the trial so that he could remain in Modesto. Mr. Peterson, a former fertilizer salesman, has pleaded not guilty to the deaths, which occurred sometime between Dec. 24, 2002, when Mrs. Peterson was reported missing from the couple's home in Modesto, and early last April when her body and their son's fetus were found washed up on the shores of San Francisco Bay. In choosing San Mateo County, which is about 70 miles from Modesto, the judge said the trial would be close enough to Modesto for the convenience of the prosecution and witnesses but far enough to distill some of the emotion from the case. Another important consideration, Judge Girolami said, was that San Mateo County officials had indicated that the trial would be assigned to a courtroom in Redwood City, which has a jail next door where Mr. Peterson could be kept. "Clearly they are close and ready to proceed," Judge Girolami said. "I'm satisfied that we can get a fair and impartial jury in San Mateo County." Wasting no time in capitalizing on the decision, Ms. LeClair's staff spent much of Tuesday stuffing media packets. She also began brainstorming ways to draw publicity to the county, coming up with one idea to supply journalists with videotape of houses and neighborhoods in the mostly upscale county to help illustrate reports about jury selection. "I think out of the box, way out," said Ms. LeClair. "I read a lot of John Grisham books." Government officials in the county were less enthusiastic about the decision, in part because of concerns about the disruption it would create in the courthouse schedule and because of questions about how the county would be reimbursed for playing host to the trial. Officials in neighboring Santa Clara County, which was also in contention, had estimated a four-week trial would cost the host county $300,000. "My first reaction was, `God help us,' " said Mike Nevin, who is on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. "Maybe there is a county that can absorb it better. But I am willing to do our share." The last prominent murder trial in the county lasted about nine months and cost the county more than $3 million. In that trial in 1992, Joe Hunt, the leader of an investment group known as the Billionaire Boys Club, was accused of the 1984 murder of a former official in the shah of Iran's government. The jury in that case could not agree on a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. The murder charge was later dropped, though Mr. Hunt was already serving a life term for another murder. "It wasn't a cheap date," said John L. Maltbie, the county manager in San Mateo County.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA UNREPORTING OF WORLD FORUMS

Where's the Globe? Where's the Post?  Proclaiming their allegiance to corporations and capital

by Anthony Fenton, January 19, 2004 http://www.oneworld.ca/external/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rabble.ca%2Feveryones_a_critic.shtml%3Fx%3D29738

Well over a million Canadians will have read The National Post or The Globe and Mail this past weekend. Socially conscious readers may have noticed that a major event, the World Social Forum (WSF), went unreported by our national dailies on both Friday, the opening day of the forum, and Saturday, the heaviest circulation day for the papers.

Maybe it is the case that there is nothing about the WSF that is deemed fit to print. Perhaps if asked, Globe and Post editors would cite “irreconcilable differences” between the interests they represent and those represented by the WSF. Herein would be found an admission, however: a cocktail of bias, partisanship and ideology. For if they were to admit a reason or motive for lack of coverage, they would be contradicting their “liberal” and “objective” raison d'etre.

How else are readers to construe the silence of our only two national newspapers but as a concerted act of censorship? The lone sentence that was published in this context came, rather fittingly, from the National Post's arch-conservative columnist Diane Francis. As she discussed the World Economic Forum (WEF, taking place January 21-25, in Davos, Switzerland), Francis made a passing — and derisive — comment about the WSF:

“That same week, the world's impoverished — or more accurately, those who represent them on expense accounts, will be gathering at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, to trash and demonize globalization as well as those in Davos.”

The WEF, whose membership includes CEOs from the world's 1,000 largest corporations, has a history, dating back to 1970, of influencing the direction of economic and, consequently, social policy, worldwide. Identifying the alarming consequences of public policy so influenced, world civil society leaders created the WSF as a counter to the WEF four years ago.

Francis announces that she, rather than join the “demonizers,” is “going to Switzerland,” where she can rub elbows with the world's elite. Through her column, Francis manages to distance her paper from the “leftist” Globe and Mail. Indeed, where The Globe and Mail managed to maintain strict silence with respect to their censorship efforts, Francis and the National Post justified their own censoring by proclaiming their allegiance to corporations and capital.

This censorship and accompanying justification for it can actually be seen as encouraging for those tuned in to the real world. In part, this becomes clear when we assess how Francis distorts the intentions of the WSF in order to bolster her apologetics.

Consider the following: the WSF purports to represent the underprivileged, the oppressed, and, according to Francis, the world's impoverished. Their own Charter of Principles states: “The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations' interests, with the complicity of national governments.”

So, if the WSF is “trashing and demonizing” anything, it is that which gives rise to continued oppression, impoverishment, lack of human rights, illegal wars and the like. Much of the increasing gap between the world's wealthy and the world's poor is directly attributable to corporate-style globalization and its corresponding policies, according to civil society researchers and activists.

In effect then, Francis is providing us with a false justification, due to her distortion on the one hand, of the aims of the WSF, and, on the other, the measurable consequences of WEF-like gatherings.

How are we to respond to the censorship and false justification for it?

There are numerous responses to this one, all of which are contingent upon the level of our commitment to our responsibilities as citizens, and as human beings. Getting actively involved, in some capacity, with the civil society movement is a first step. A boycott of our national newspapers accompanied by a campaign of protest against blatant censorship is another line of action.

The only way to prevent this process from repeating itself — and it has been repeating itself — is by raising the social costs attributable to continued dishonesty, partial news coverage and censorship on the part of our news providers. Only the public can raise this bar, and only the public will suffer if we fail to raise it.

Francis and her cohorts are all too aware that they are a part of the “process of globalization” to which the WSF is proposing alternatives. It is incumbent upon Canadian mainstream journalists to know their place in this process. Neither The Globe and Mail nor the National Post can offer a rational criticism of the WSF or the more pervasive movement of which it is a part. Left with little else, all they can offer is silence through censorship or, as in the case of Francis, distortion and lies. So long as Canadian publications are owned by large corporations, with boards of directors who are among our ruling elite, the demand will be that the ideology of these elites be protected by their cadre of journalists cum mandarins.

Perhaps those Canadians who are aware of the tacit censorship campaign of our only national newspapers will voice their concerns over this recent Orwellian exercise. The 21st century, while young, has given rise to new methods of propaganda with old aims: the advancement and protection at all costs of elite interests. It would be ineffective to counter their silence-through-censorship with our own, for there is a tangible difference between the silence of the corporate media on vitally important social matters, and the silence of the population in response to this. Their silence — or derision — speaks volumes; ours only gives the mainstream media carte blanche to print the news as they see — or don't see — fit.

Anthony Fenton is a graduate student of political science at the University of Alberta. He is currently researching for his MA thesis on the global social justice movement: visions and strategies