A Bad Year for Goliath

To say that it was a bad year for Goliath doesn't mean it was exactly a good one for what George Bailey, in annual holiday It's a Wonderful Life reruns, calls "the little people."

U.S. public opinion has almost caught up with the rest of the world in opposing the war, but Iraqis are still being bombed and American soldiers are still dying. I write this from Buenos Aires, which attracts activists from afar for its progressive social movements, but up close is more compelling for its armies of the poor -- such as the cartoñeros who come out after dark to collect recyclables, families pushing huge loads through the summer night toward whatever pittance a pile of old cardboard brings in.

In the same way, you could focus on how Hurricane Katrina damaged the Bush administration's standing, but the suffering of people displaced on roofs, and then in sports stadiums, and now out of view (but in hardly less precarious circumstances around the country) might matter more. The most compelling images of 2005 are those of war, flood, and riot, but perhaps the most summary one wasn't even of human beings.

It was a novelty photograph that appeared in many newspapers in late September of a huge non-native python that choked itself to death trying to swallow an alligator in Florida. It proved a lasting image of overwhelming and unsuccessful greed. All around the world this year, the snake choked and the alligator refused to see itself as lunch -- if you will let "alligator" stand in here for "civil society," for all the groups, organizations, publics, and citizenries who stood up for their rights.

Nobody did this better in 2005 than the extraordinary Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which in March brought one of the biggest prepared food corporations on Earth, Taco Bell's owner, Yum Brands Incorporated, to its knees. Or, you could say, choked it on its own fajitas and forced it to swallow a compellingly better set of working standards for those who pick the tomatoes that get diced up and sprinkled by the kids in starchy blouses atop your -- if you weren't part of the enormously successful Boycott the Bell campaign -- tostada.

The largely immigrant workforce, based in the bleak Florida town of Immokalee, had been organizing for more than a decade, and their campaign to raise the price for picking tomatoes by a penny a pound (a measly sum that nevertheless nearly doubled many workers' salaries) was inspired. Creative in specific tactics like theatrical performances and marches as well as in coalition-building with college students, religious groups, and others, the CIW made undocumented farmworkers powerful again -- and they are taking on McDonald's next.

Speaking of food, just what kind of corn is in your tortilla anyway? A few years ago, microbiologist Ignacio Chapela, then an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a report demonstrating that bioengineered corn, though banned from being planted in Mexico, was nevertheless springing to Frankensteinian life there, contaminating that country's corn crops.

The preeminent science journal Nature published it with an unprecedented caveat, though the real cause for concern wasn't Chapela's credentials or methodology but the threat his work as a scientist and critic -- of, among other things, Novartis' funding of his department -- posed to multinational corporations. (A subsequent independent study validated his results.) Chapela was then denied tenure at Berkeley by a committee that appeared to have major conflicts of interest.

After a two-year campaign that included demonstrations, teach-ins, and other forms of ruckus, a higher tenure review committee overturned the decision of the highly politicized departmental committee that had rejected him. It was a small victory, but an emblematic one in this year of crumpling Goliaths.