A group of American, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua and Kalimantan. A Foreign Investment
Law, hurried on to the statutes by Suharto, made this plunder tax-free for at least five years. Real, and secret, control of the Indonesian economy
passed to the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), whose principal members were the US, Canada, Europe and Australia and, most importantly, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.” 
It was this configuration of issues-that effectively boils down to the notion that there are inequalities of power, modes of exploitation
in need of regulation-which led to the Seattle, Genoa and Cancun etc. demonstrations and organisations such as the World
Social Forum. It is the perception that there are viable business values other than the prevalent orthodoxy of certain economic models and that merely
chanting mantras about free markets, freedom of movement for capital, the necessity of corporate freedom from control and so on is not an answer to very
pressing questions about social justice on a global scale. |
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Globalisation critics may be a mixed bag, but they do have the support of many experts including at least one Nobel prize winning economist
who points out how certain international institutions have become perverted by neo-liberal dogma: “In its original conception, then, the IMF was based
on a recognition that markets often did not work well - that they could result in massive unemployment and might fail to make needed funds available
to countries to help them restore their economies.  The
IMF was founded on the belief that there was a need for collective action at the global level for economic stability, just as the United Nations had
been founded on the belief that there was a need for collective action at the global level for political stability. The
IMF is a public institution, established with money provided by taxpayers around the world.” This is, of course, a long way from statements such
as “market mechanisms regulate themselves.”
In its particularity of location, Summer in Italy refers us to global events and asks us also to investigate hand-me-down paradigms
of economic behaviour and social responsibility, to reconsider those traditionalist beliefs which are generally presented as natural and inevitable and
to look at the power structures behind events.
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