THE
GLOBALIZATION AGENDA - GRAVE NEW WORLD - THE DEMOCRACY
GRAB Ralph Nader and Lori Wallach
Imagine a
new governing system with enormous control over the lives
of most of the world's population. Under this system,
decisions made in secret by unelected bureaucrats dictate
how much pesticide can be put on the food Californians
eat; how the citizens of Thailand can regulate cigarette
sales; and whether Europeans have the right to ban the
use of dangerous hormones in beef.
Imagine
the predominating drive behind this system was not the
advancement of the health and economic well being of the
people, but the health and economic well being of the
world's largest corporations and financial institutions.
While
this sounds like something out of a science fiction
novel, such a scenario is evolving before our eyes. In
the name of "free" trade, economic and
political control is shifting away from local, state and
national governments to inaccessible, unaccountable
international bureaucracies.
In
approving the far-reaching, powerful new World Trade
Organization (WTO) and smaller international trade
agreements, nations have ceded large swaths of their
legal capacity to protect their citizens. Approval of
these agreements has placed every world government in a
virtual hostage situation at the mercy of the globe's
largest corporations.
Corporate
Rules Replace Democracy
The
recent expansion of the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), which transformed the GATT from a trade
contract into the World Trade Organization, allows for a
circumvention of the democratic process altogether.
What is
now being characterized as "trade" includes
wide portions of each nation's economic and political
structures. GATT and other trade agreements are moving
beyond their traditional scope of quotas and tariffs to
provide transnational corporations with new and
unprecedented freedoms, such as: investment anywhere in
the world without restrictions; uniform gobal
environmental and safety standards (with the practical
result being that standards are watered down to a lowest
common international denominator); monopoly rights
governing ownership of intellectual property (patents,
copyrights, and trademarks) in forace throughout the
world.
While
American Express, Cargill, and other megacorporations
rejoice at the prospect of global commerce without
commensurate democratic global law, the rest of the world
is left vulnerable to unrestrained corporate activity and
plummeting living, health and environmental standards.
In GATT
and NAFTA, not all "fetters" on commerce are
targeted for elimination. Rather, the agreements are
comprehensive sets of trade rules that promote
watering-down or eliminating restrictions that protect
people, while increasing protection for corporate
interests. For instance, labour rights were left out as
inappropriate limitations on global commerce. But
regulation to protect property rights - such as
intellectual property - was expanded. The right for
capital to invest in any country in any area was also
strengthened.
Under the
WTO, domestic legislatures are forbidden from pursuing
certain goals, such as significant subsidies to promote
energy conservation, sustainable farming practices or
environmentally-sensitive technology. Laws with mixed
purposes, such as the provision of the U.S. Clean Air Act
whicih implement the international ozone agreement are
suspect under the Uruguay Round's requirements.
To
encompass a vast array of national, state and local
environmental, health, consumer and worker safety
standards, the Uruguay Round expanded coverage of
"non-tariff barriers". A "non-tariff
barrier" is trade jargon meaning any measure that is
not a tariff and inhibits trade. Unfortunately, what free
trade advocates see as non-tariff barriers we see as our
basic environmental and health protection.
With the
concept of non-tariff barriers, corporate interests focus
on safety, health or environmental regulations that they
don't like, develop arguments about how they violate the
rules of a trade agreement, and then demand that the
regulation be revoked.
If the
threat of using non-tariff barriers seems unrealistic,
consider the following partial list of laws which have
either been attacked as non-tariff barriers under
existing free trade agreements or specifically threatened
with future challenges under the Uruguay Round rules:
Canadian plain packaging rules for cigarettes, Thai
cigarette sales limitations, a Danish and several U.S.
states' recycling programs, the U.S. asbestos ban, U.S.,
Filipino, Malaysian and other countries' restrictions on
exports of unprocessed logs, U.S. fuel efficiency
standards, driftnet fishing and whaling restrictions,
U.S. laws designed to protect dolphins, and European bans
on smokeless tobacco.
The World
Trade Organization's non-tariff barrier rules promote a
race to the bottom in consumer, environmental, worker and
health standards, as companies push countries to lodge
challenges against other countries with higher standards.
Thus, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)
initiated action under the old GATT against the European
ban on bovine growth hormones, a consumer protection U.S.
citizens' groups have been pushing for in the United
States. The USTR is currently threatening Europe with a
WTO challenge against an EU ban on sale of furs caught
with steel leg hold traps.
Enforcing
Global Corporate Rules
To
organize and enforce this new system of limits on every
nation's laws and policies, the WTO was crafted as a new
"governing" structure. As an institution with
"legal personality" - the same status enjoyed
by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF - the
WTO serves as a global corporate government to judge
countries' compliance with the rules, enforce those rules
with sanctions and provide a legislative capacity to
expand the rules in the future.
The WTO's
mandate looks backward to an era when environmental and
other citizen considerations were not taken into account.
The binding provisions setting out the WTO's functions
and scope do not incorporate any environmental, health,
labour rights or hurman rights considerations. In fact,
the only reference to the environment is in the rhetoric
of the WTO's preamble, which does not having the binding
legal effect of the agreement. Labour and human rights
are not mentioned in the preamble at all.
Moreover,
there is nothing in the institutional principles of the
WTO to inject any procedural safeguards of openness,
citizen participation or accountability into the
governance of this body or its functions. The WTO has no
structural capacity for its citizens or non-governmental
organizations to have any role, and in several key
provisions, requires that documents and proceedings
remain confidential.
The WTO's
rules and restrictions apply to the federal, state and
local laws of its members. Under the WTO's operations,
laws in any Member country that fall outside of the 500
pages of the Uruguay Round's rules would be exposed to
challenge by other countries through a new powerful
dispute resolution system, an enforcement arm of the WTO.
Through this system, decisions made by closed tribunals
of three trade officials automatically become binding on
a country whose law has been successfully challenged
unless all the member
countries vote not to make the
decision binding. If a country losing a trade challenge
does not change a measure found to be in violation of
GATT rules within a prescribed period, other countries
challenging that measure have an automatic right to
impose retaliatory trade sanctions.
These
changes effectively remove the possibility for an
individual government to express its people's democratic
will in opposition to a WTO ruling. Thus, when a popular
law has been overruled by the WTO, its supporters can
expect their government to say: "What can we do? If
we do not change the law, our economy will be crippled by
trade sanctions. Sorry."
Unlike
past rounds of GATT negotiations, members of the World
Trade Organization must agree to be bound by all the
Uruguay Round accords. From a trade perspective, this
all-or-nothing rule eliminates the problem of "free
riders". From a democracy perspective, this rule
forces countries to accept trade in areas that might be
undesirable or to face exclusion from the world trade
system.
How could
such a major power shift and democracy grab have occurred
without more debate, and opposition, from citizens, or
for that matter, from the elected officials worldwide
whose powers the WTO would directly curtail? Secrecy,
abstruseness and unaccountability: these are the
watchwords of global trade policy-making.
Every
element of the negotiation, adoption, and implementation
of the trade agreements is designed to foreclose citizen
participation or even awareness. The WTO's aversion to
democratic process is so comprehensive that even
countries that might choose to release certain WTO
documents are forbidden from doing so under WTO rules.
Thus, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has
stated that is current obligations under the WTO prohibit
it from providing documents relating to a particular
trade dispute that it would otherwise be willing to
release.
Negotiations
One can
be properly suspicious of the intent of these trade
agreements given the process by which they are
negotiated.
Trade
negotiations invariably take place behind closed doors
between unelected and largely unaccountable government
agents who are mainly representing business interests. In
the case of the WTO, talks took place in Geneva,
Switzerland.
Secrecy
predominates even within the GATT negotiating process
itself. Through a variety of stops and starts in the
eight-year Uruguay Round negotiations, small cliques of
powerful nations regularly retreated to "green
rooms" to cut deals that were then forced on other
GATT signatory countries as "consensus"
positions. The very conclusion of the Uruguay Round talks
was held hostage as U.S. and European Union negotiators
retreated into almost a year of private discussions over
agriculture while over 100 other nations cooled their
heels waiting for the outcome. The result of these
negotiations, narrowly tailored to suit U.S. and European
agribusinesses, was then declared the outcome of global
agriculture negotiations.
Corporate
lobbyists, cruising in the halls outside the negotiating
rooms, exerted tremendous influence over the
negotiations. On occasion, business groups admit their
influence over the process. The business coalition
calling itself the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC)
- its members include IBM, Du Pont, General Electric,
Merck and Pfizer - has bragged in its own literature that
its "close association with the U.S. Trade
Representative and [the Department of] Commerce has
permitted the IPC to shape the U.S. proposals and
negotiating positions during the course of the [GATT]
negotiations." Citizen groups, short on resources to
hire lobbyists and coordinate global lobbying campaigns,
have not been able to play a parallel role.
As if the
advantage in resources were not enough, the corporate
lobbying function has been institutionalized in the
United States in a set of official trade advisory
committees to the U.S. trade negotiators. In 1974, during
the Tokyo Round of GATT talks, President Richard Nixon,
renowned for his disdain for democracy, proposed to
Congress a new way of handling trade negotiations. Nixon
proposed "fast track", a uniquely
anti-democratic procedure under which Congress must vote
yes or no on a trade agreement and all changes to U.S.
law required to conform them to its terms - with no
amendments permitted.
Under
fast track, Congress agrees to conduct such a vote within
a brief 60 to 90 days of the President's submission of
the agreement, and must limit its debate on the
agreements to not more than 20 hours in either the House
or Senate. In exchange for removing Congress from greater
involvement in the negotiation process, Nixon proposed a
system of private sector trade advisory groups. These
advisors, appointed by the President, have enormous
access and influence on the process.
During
the Uruguay Round negotiations, the advisory committees
were composed of over 800 business executives and
consultants, with limited labour representation, five
representatives of environmental groups who were
supportive or neutral on NAFTA, and no consumer or health
representatives.
Meetings
of the advisory groups are closed to the public and all
documents are considered confidential, with
representatives required to obtain a security clearance.
Under a blanket closure rule, now being challenged in
court by Public Citizen, USTR Mickey Rantor has locked
out not only citizen oversight of these committees for
two years, but even notice in the Federal register of the
meetings' occurrence.
Once the
agreements are completed - or on those rare occasions
when a draft of the agreements is "liberated" -
any person who wants to figure out what the agreements
say faces a Herculean task. The agreements are very
complex and written in arcane, almost impenetrable
technical jargon that bears only a passing resemblance to
the English language. Only those with extensive knowledge
of GATTese and NAFTAese can comprehend what the trade
jargon means for their jobs, food, or environment.
This
difficulty in obtaining and understanding the actual
agreements was not an accident; it reflected a purposeful
effort by proponents of globalization to conceal the
Agreements' terms and effects from the public, the news
media, and even parliamentary bodies that approved the
GATT. Globalization proponents would rather have citizens
read a sanitized summary suitably interpreted by the
agreements' boosters. In their view, it is completely
anathema that citizens should be informed of trade issues
- never mind actually having a say in their approval.
"Approval"
Political
approval of the Uruguay Round agreement by legislators
around the world has legitimized and empowered the WTO,
but in most countries that approval process was a sham of
democracy. Most legislators had little idea what they
were approving because they relied on the propaganda of
their negotiators rather than independent analyses of the
text. Even though the WTO has an agenda rivalling the
United Nations, with much grater power to enforce its
rules, it was not the cause of major national public and
parliamentary debates. Rather, it was rubber-stamped by
the very elected officials whose democratically-derived
power it will seize.
When a
challenge was issued to the U.S. House and Senate in 1994
for any member to sign an affidavit that he or she had
read the 500-page GATT text and answer ten questions
about it, not one of the 535 members accepted. Few
members - and almost none of the U.S. press - would
report having read the text.
Meanwhile,
despite unified opposition by U.S. citizens organizations
- from every environmental group and labour group to
major family farm, religious and civil rights groups -
and U.S. public opinion polls showing majority opposition
to the very concept of the autocratic WTO, the U.S.
Congress passed it.
Such
perversities of democracy abounded in many nations'
consideration of the Uruguay Round. Filipino citizen
opponents noted they had "God against GATT",
with the Catholic Church taking up official opposition,
along with a broad array of civic groups. Ultimately,
after street riots in opposition, the Filipino Senat
approved the deal.
In Spain,
public opposition had kept the vote off the parliamentary
agenda. On Christmas Eve, without public notice, a rump
session of the parliament approved the deal in the dead
of night.
In
Belgium, citizen protesters were dragged by police out of
the parliament building so the deal could be hastily
approved.
In India,
powerful public opposition had forced out of the domestic
implementing legislation provisions adopting the Uruguay
Round's intellectual property rules. After the parliament
had voted on the limited package, on New Year's Eve, the
Indian Prime Minister exercised extraordinary
constitutional powers by issuing an executive decree
authorizing the deleted provisions.
Operations
Not
surprisingly, the operations of the agreements continue
the secrecy and lack of public participation. Because the
implications of the globalization agenda could not
sustain democratic support, the WTO's structure imposes
upon the world's many weak democracies, an autocratic
system of governance.
By merit
of joining the WTO, countries have authorized that body
to conduct ongoing negotiations to expand and amend the
initial substantive provisions. Whether such additions
and changes will themselves ever be submitted to
democratic approval by national governments is a matter
of each country's laws. Certainly the intent of the WTO's
supporters is to take decision-making out of such
democratic fora.
The
decision to initiate negotiations under the WTO is taken
by a simple majority vote. Because the WTO reires an
all-or-none adhereence to its rules by countries, there
is no protection for the minority. If a majority of
countries decides to initiate negotiations, all countries
must go along regardless of how strongly opposed such
negotiations might be at home. In several instances,
changes, adopted through supermajority votes, are
automatically applicable to all WTO members; others
require a country's consent with the caveat that if
countries do not approve, their continued membership in
the WTO must be authorized by the other members. Such
procedures do not provide any role for democratic input
at home into WTO positions.
The WTO
dispute resolution system acts as the practical mechanism
toenforce the WTO's autocracy over government democracy.
As mentioned earlier, the WTO dispute resolution process
allows any member nation to challenge the domestic laws
of another member as violations of WTO rules.
The very
terms of establishment of the panels ensure they will
only promote a trade uber alles philosophy. WTO
disputes are decided not by elected oficials or their
appointees, but by secretive panels of foreign trade
bureaucrats pulled off a preset roster. Only national
government representatives are allowes to participate in
the dispute resolution process: state and local
government representatives are locked out. The
qualifications for WTO panelists, such as experience as a
trade lawyer bringing a trade dispute, result in
panelists with a uniformly pro-trade perspective.
Furthermore,
there are no conflict of interest or other procedural
safeguards to guarantee that a panelist does not have a
direct economic interest in a decision. In a recent
dispute over timber issues under the Canada-U.S. Free
Trade Agreement, which has a similar dispute resolution
system, two of the five panelists were attorneys whose
law firms represented Canadian lumber interests directly
affected by the timber subsidy case under dispute.
There is
not even a mechanism to guarantee that such panelists wil
be exposed to alternative perspectives or expert opinions
on environmental, health, labour rights or human rights
issues. The text also forbids identification of which
panelists supported which positions and conclusions. This
additional layer of secrecy adds to the lack of
accountability of the WTO decisionmakers.
The new
WTO dispute resolution rules make the decisions of the
three-person review panels automatically adopted 60 days
after completion unless there is a consensus among WTO
members to reject the ruling, or the losing country files
an internal appeal. Thus, within 60 days, over 100
countries, including the country that has won the panel
decision, must be persuaded in order to stop its
adoption.
The
tribunals have the power to impose trade sanctions to
ensure their decisions are enforced. If a country fails
to change its law within a set time, the winning country
can request trade sanctions against the country that has
failed to change its law. Such as request is
automatically granted unless there is unanimous consensus
of all WTO members to reject the request.
Sign
of What's to Come: The Mexican Crisis
The
recent NAFTA peso debacle is an example of what can be
expected in the future if we do not fight to take back
our democratic rights from the globalization behemoth.
Two weeks after President Clinton lauded NAFTA and Mexico
as an exampleof free trade success, Mexico fell intomajor
economic chaos. Overnight, the poster child for the
neoliberal economic model was forced into revealing what
this model had done to its economy and people. The
Mexican peso had been artifically propped up in a Ponzi
scheme of foreign cash infusions to push NAFTA approval
and investment in Mexico following NAFTA. Despite rapidly
shrinking foreign reserves, the charade was continued
until after the U.S. Congress had approved GATT.
Three
weeks later, the Mexican government announced it would
devalue the peso to shrink the current account deficit
that had grown in the first year of NAFTA; U.S. imports
would be made too expensive for the Mexican market and
Mexican exports and labour costs would become even
cheaper. But the devaluation spun out of control as
investors focused on Mexico's $200 billion debt, growing
concentration of wealth and citizen despair that was
boiling into revolt. Left to float on the market, the
peso quickly devalued 40%. The Mexican banking system
teetered on the edge of collapse. The Mexican President
announced wage caps and a harsh austerity program instead
of the promised fruits of a first year of NAFTA. Wall
Street investors, holdings tens of billions in short term
high profit Mexican bonds, came howling to Washington for
help. The facade of globalization was peeling away and
the grim reality was becoming apparent for all to see.
Warning
of global economic collapse, the Clinton Administration
sent Congress a request for $40 billion in taxpayer funds
to bail out investors in Mexico an prop up the corrupt
Mexican regime. But with Congress unwilling to approve
the money and U.S. public opinion strongly against the
bailout, the Administration suddenly withdrew the deal.
To cover
up the globalization reality, democracy had to be
trammeled. President Clinton quickly announced a bigger
bailout deal that included at least $20 billion of
taxpayer money directly out of the U.S. Treasury. The
backdoor bailout entirely circumvented Congress, with
President Clinton taking extraordinary unilateral action
to use Treasury funds reserved for stabilizing the U.S.
currency.
Turning
Back the Tide of Globalization
As the
world prepares to enter the twenty-first century, the
globalization agenda is leading the planet in exactly the
wrong direction. One of the clearest lessons that emerges
from a study of industrialized societies is that the
centralization of the power of commerce is
environmentally and democratically unsound. No one denies
the usefulness of some international trade and commerce.
But societies need to focus their attention on fostering
community-oriented production. Such smaller-scale
operations are more flexible and adaptable to local needs
and environmentally sustainable production methods. They
are also less likely to threaten to migrate, and they may
perceive their interests as more overlapping with general
community interests.
Similarly,
allocating power to lower level governmental bodies tends
to increase citizen power. Concentrating power in
international organizations, as the trade pacts do, tends
to remove critical decisions from citizen control. You
can get a hold of your city council representative, but
not some faceless international trade bureaucrat in
Geneva, Switzerland.
Instead
of NAFTA and GATT's global limits on how governments can
protect people, we must fight to put in place global
limits on corporate behaviour. Countries and citizens
must have the political space to build the diversified,
more self-reliant, localized economies that promote
citizen control, distribution of wealth and environmental
protection.
All over
the world there is a bubbling up of citizen activity. In
part, this activity is in reaction to the initial effects
of globalization. In India, millions of peasant farmers
have banded together and are now organized village to
village to defend their indigenous seeds and medicinal
and cultural knowledge from multinational prospectors who
want to patent and profit from such knowledge. These
Indian activists have ripped down a Cargill Corporation
plant by hand.
In the
United Kingdom, a growing sector of the population is
taking to direct action against the invasion of huge
supermarket chains which are replacing locally produced
food at local shops with chemically preserved foods
shipped from all over the world. In addition, anti-road
building and animal welfare protests have forced
companies to change their plans.
While
citizen movements worldwide must continue fighting the
symptoms of the corporate-driven agenda, we must also
make the sources of these miseries abundantly clear. If
we do not make the connection between our local problems
and the multinational corporate drive for economic and
political globalization, then others will blame these
unavoidable and increasing problems on other causes.
"It's the immigrants!" "It's the welfare
system!" "It's greedy farmers or workers!"
Allowing such camouflage for the real causes of these
multifaceted problems means not only that they won't be
the target for attack and demolition, but that citizens
will be divided against each other to the benefit of the
corporate agenda.
How will
citizens reverse the devastating globalization agenda? It
will require a revitalized citizen democracy here and
abroad. The opportunity to save ourselves and our planet
from globalization's ravages is now. But there is no time
to waste as the globalization agenda eats into
ourdemocracy like a cancer. The struggle citizens around
the world must wage to protect and expand democracy will
ultimately decide the fate of the planet. The worst fear
of supporters of globalization is our greatest hope: that
citizens will take control of their civil institutions.
Reproduced with the
permission of Edward Goldsmith, co-editor with Jerry
Mander, of The Case Against the Global Economy and
For a Turn Towards the Local - Sierra Club Books; fax
1-415-957-5793.
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