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When the announcement was made in Washington that Pittsburgh would be the site of the G-20 summit, reporters laughed. Clearly, the significance of the city in the nation's history is poorly understood.
There is something symbolic in the holding of this potentially watershed event in Pittsburgh at a moment when America's global leadership is being seriously challenged by rising Asian economic superpowers as well as by numerous political revolts in the hemisphere it once dominated. The industrial collapse of Pittsburgh and American manufacturing in the 1980s propelled the crushing trade imbalance and indebtedness of the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world. In a sense the chickens are coming home to roost.
The American global agenda in the triumphant capitalist expansion that followed the disintegration of the Soviet empire proved to be disastrous for the American working class, as well as for workers and the environment around the world. Free trade, privatization and deregulation pursued with varying degrees of ardor by both Republicans and Democrats over the past 30 years has concentrated wealth and increased the poverty of the majority of humanity by undermining local, traditional and indigenous economies -- all while polluting and degrading the natural world at an extremely dangerous pace. God knows there are reasons enough to protest.
The United States, the prime purveyor of this toxic cocktail of economic dogmas has seen its productive capacity collapse, its governmental and individual debt obligations increase exponentially and its once muscular and productive economic engine reduced to an increasingly untenable global military presence. Our best defense is not endless foreign war, but a sustained reinvention of our economic life at home.
The world needs to change direction in a fundamental way. We need to move resolutely away from fossil fuel and nuclear energy toward decentralized solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and other sustainable sources of energy. The United States needs a crash economic program to manufacture and construct magnetic-levitation vehicles, rail and mass-transit systems to provide a realistic alternative to the highway.
The world needs a system that emphasizes resource conservation and quality production while eliminating waste and pollution. The Earth, if humans are to survive on it, needs global standards of human behavior. Strong labor rights, human rights and environmental rights are needed to balance and restrain the forces of unbridled competition and greed.
The two key players on the global scene are China and the United States. In both countries, the working classes have borne the burden of a severely distorted international economic system based on degraded labor standards characterized by human rights violations. Many Chinese workers toil 80 hours a week and more while American blue-collar workers cannot find productive family-supporting jobs. In both countries, labor standards are lowered and effective worker organizations are undermined.
Global labor and human rights standards are critical to any hope of a rebirth of American manufacturing. Global environmental standards are urgently needed to protect sustainable agriculture and fisheries, preserve the shrinking remnants of our tropical and old-growth forests and coral reefs, and stop the production and dumping of toxic substances that are killing us and the Earth that we inhabit. We need stronger institutions to foster international dialogue and conflict resolution.
It is fortuitous that the G-20 summit will follow close on the heels of the national AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh. New leadership for the labor federation will attempt to point the way out of the economic crisis and develop an American response to the global attack on workers. Pittsburgh's role as the cradle of labor organizations as well as its history as the American city on the cutting edge of deindustrialization provides both lessons and a context for reflection.
A number of individuals and groups have been trying to arrange venues for peaceful protest, free speech and education. Pittsburgh police and local protesters know the rules. The city has a long tradition of marches, protests, picket lines and demonstrations, but there is reason for concern over outside protesters and outside law enforcement. The best way to marginalize the forces of violence is to accommodate the labor, anti-war and environmental voices that seek to be heard.
Charles McCollester, a retired professor of industrial and labor relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "The Point of Pittsburgh: Production and Struggle at the Forks of the Ohio."
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