Porto Alegre, Brazil: 'Bad Capitalist! No Martini'

On the first day of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil, the hallways were buzzing with rumours of defections from the North. Top delegates were jumping ship from the World Economic Forum in New York and coming to Porto Alegre instead: a European prime minister, World Bank directors, even corporate executives.

Some never showed up, others did. But debates raged nonetheless about what it all meant. Was it evidence of the Forum's new strength (it attracted some 60,000 participants, after all) or a sign of imminent danger?

The World Social Forum was founded last year as an alternative to the annual gathering of the top 1,000 corporations, world leaders and opinion-maker who usually meet in Davos, Switzerland but this year met in New York City.

With these new high-powered arrivals, however, the WSF now risked turning from a clear alternative into a messy merger: teams of photographers trailed politicians; market researchers from PricewaterhouseCoopers trolled hotel lobbies, looking for opportunities to "dialogue"; students threw a cream pie at a French minister.

It was much the same muddle in New York, with NGOs acting like corporations, corporations rebranding themselves as NGOs, and pretty much everyone claiming they were really there as a Trojan Horse. The tone -- if not the times -- has certainly changed.

The World Economic Forum used to be a place for the rich to be utterly unapologetic about their wealth and for the elite to be absolutely defiant about their elitism. But over the course of only three years, Davos has been transformed from a festival of shamelessness to an annual parade of public shaming, a dour capitalist S&M parlor.

Instead of gloating, the ultra-rich now attempt to outdo each other with self-flagellating speeches about how their greed is unsustainable, how the poor will rise up and devour them if they don't change their ways. Again and again, delegates willingly strap themselves in for whippings from their critics, from Amnesty International to Bono.

This year, when the conference fell off its alpine perch and landed in the rubble and rabble of New York City, the abuse climbed to a peak higher than Davos itself.

"The reality is that power and wealth in this world are very, very unequally shared, and that far too many people are condemned to lives of extreme poverty and degradation," said Chief Davos Dominatrix, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. "The perception, among many, is that this is the fault of... the people who attend this gathering."

Ouch! As one protester's sign put it on the streets outside, "Bad Capitalist! No Martini."

So, are these public floggings, from the WEF to the Enron hearings, a sign of actual progress? What, to borrow a phrase more often directed at those of us who gathered in Porto Alegre, are their alternatives? Do they have clear ideas about how to better distribute wealth? Do they have concrete action plans for ending the AIDS crisis or slowing climate change? Sadly, no. The core economic policies governing globalization have only accelerated in the past year (fresh tax cuts, plans for new oil pipelines, deeper privatization programs, weaker labour protections...).

No wonder so many young people have concluded that it is not the individual policies or politicians that are the problem, but the system of centralized power itself.

For this reason, much of the appeal of the World Social Forum is that its host city, Porto Alegre, has come to represent a possible challenge to this trend. The city is part of a growing political movement in Brazil that is systematically delegating power back down to people at the municipal level rather than hoarding it at the national and international levels. The party that has been the architect of this decentralization in Brazil is the Workers Party, the PT, now in power in 200 municipalities with its leader ahead in the polls federally.