NOTHING NEW will happen at the WEF. Of course, they'll chat, and they'll say things like "we feel your pain" and such junk. But my own reading is that we won't see anything significant in terms of direction.

As you probably know, nothing ever comes out of the WEF--it's all kind of a nod and wink over beer or champagne. There's a chance that they'll issue some communiqué at the end, because we've flushed the beasts out of their warren. As usual, these guys will say, "We admit we made mistakes, folks, but we've changed." That's what they always say.

I heard [World Bank President James] Wolfensohn speak recently--I was within a few feet of him and wished that I had a pie--and that's what he said then, and that's what they say every year.

I think that the greatest thing we achieve by this demonstration in a sense has already been achieved. What we've done is, first, brought them out of Davos. Second, we put a spotlight on them for the world to see. It's going to be in the media, and people who knew nothing about them are going to be educated. Third, around those that are already educated, some will understand why the world is a mess--and better yet will join us in the coming days.

Of course, we can't transform the WEF. We can only expose them. The transformation or abolition or whatever has to be directed at other institutions--the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and all their subsidiaries.

I THINK that there's an enormous educational and propaganda victory, even if the mainstream media ignore us. We're reaching people all the time, so the educational process is important.

And for the world at large, it's important to expose the WEF and its connection with the WTO and the others--to show how corporate power works. When we get to the WEF, we've gone past the facade--we're really at the festering sore.

Exposing where the corruption takes place is taking our own movement to a more sophisticated level. Instead of just railing against Starbucks, we're actually going after the source in a very valuable way--and exposing their essential immorality and greed and ruthlessness, even while they posture as these human guys who set up foundations and send money to NPR.

THE PEOPLE who engineered this crash in Argentina were in the West. The IMF and the World Bank were directly responsible for imposing certain economic policies on Argentina.

Argentina, in the most dramatic way, demonstrates the failure of their prescriptions. This is one case where they can't say, "Okay, the policy didn't work because they didn't follow our advice." The Argentine government followed their advice.

So what's at stake in the most globally important way is the credibility of this prescription toward any country in the world. If it didn't work in Argentina, why should it work anywhere else?

The few countries that have managed to survive were those that actually resisted the prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF, and they're doing rather better. I'm thinking of countries in Asia that introduced some control on the free flow of capital into their country.

Even now, there are people who are gloating about what happened in Argentina, saying, "We can go in and buy their banks and buy their industries at fire-sale prices." The currency has been devalued, the country is desperate for investment of capital.

I'M NOT sure that there was an explicit retreat--that people said we're not going to do this anymore or we don't think it's wise to protest. Though I must admit, even that came up in Washington, D.C., with Fifty Years Is Enough and the Mobilization for Global Justice in September.

The scars are still around for people who refused to take the mobilization [set for September 30 against the IMF and World Bank] and turn it into a mobilization for peace--because they said they would lose some of their allies if they combined a mobilization for global justice with a mobilization for global peace.

Bush and Cheney have been very clever in saying to people in the United States, "We will go to war, we will bomb them into the Stone Age, but in the meantime, you should just go drinking café latte at Starbucks. You have to carry on with your normal life, accepting the fact that there's a state of war, we're going to suspend your human rights and search your bags. We'll take your money, and we'll bomb people."

This kind of schizophrenia has been very successful. People know that there's a war out there and that people are getting killed every night--just like there are people being killed in Gaza and in Nablus every night.

But we've been told to go shopping. I hope I don't sound cynical, but I really think this is what happened.

There is this whole phony patriotism, with the church as an ally in blessing the troops. These people say, "God Bless America." But the America that they're asking God to bless is bombing the hell out of people elsewhere.

There are people who don't understand yet that a capitalist society is a society based on competition. It's based on conflict. It's based on war.

You have to make that kind of huge connection to say that if you want a world at peace, it's going to have to be a world in which capitalism does not exist--a new kind of world.

At the World Social Forum, I will be serving on a reparations tribunal, which is only one segment of the very much larger Social Forum.

The whole notion of a new world order based on humane values as opposed to corporate values, of course, implies the end of a corporate capitalist world--a challenge to that and the creation of a new world based on humane socialist principles.

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