Video Reviews: The WTO Produced by the International Network on Disarmament and Globalisation; Abolition 2000; End the Arms Race; Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility; and the Northwest Disarmament Coalition. - Dennis Small This is a 24 minute video which takes highlights from speeches at a seminar held in November 1999, in Seattle, as part of the protest and civil education campaigns at the time of the failed launch of a new World Trade Organisation (WTO) Round. The Seattle protests helped to check the momentum of corporate globalisation and this video is another of the follow up resources flowing out of the mass people's movement against free trade/investment which has been so successful internationally in recent years. The video is a simply made, talking heads one but the speakers are certainly worth our attention. There are four: Susan George of the Transnational Institute is a renowned analyst of transnational corporations (TNCs) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), etc. predation on the Third World; Mark Ritchie is the President of the American Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, an excellent US research and activist group; Alice Slater is a spokesperson for Global Resource Center for the Environment (GRACE) and Abolition 2000; and Steven Staples is a spokesperson for the International Network on Disarmament and Globalisation. What the speakers present is a range of views on how the WTO is causing the conditions for war, and, indeed, generating war - both within countries and between countries. Susan George stresses the growing instability that the WTO and its connected agencies are fostering in the Third World. As she succinctly summarises, globalisation is a process that sucks money from the bottom to the top; that concentrates power at the top; and that creates "myriad losers" across the planet. Internationally, in broad terms, there is the formation of a three tier society: the exploiters at the top; the exploited; and then those who are not even worth exploiting directly - the "outcasts". This WTO system is a scenario for tremendous instability and George quotes "The Lugano Report" of the Oslo Peace Research Institute to show how IMF-imposed structural adjustment has been a critical factor in the instigation of civil wars during the 1990s. Between 1990 and 1996 there were 98 major wars of which the overwhelming majority were civil wars. These took place mainly within poor countries where agriculture was dominant, land degraded, fresh water scarce, and population high in number. Other key factors involved were high debt, falling commodity prices, and IMF-imposed "structural adjustment" programmes. The horrific slaughter in Rwanda in 1994 has been the most graphic example of civil war in such a country. In contrast, Mark Ritchie takes a longer view and points to the effects of European colonisation of the American continent for the sort of impact that the WTO represents today. Slavery of Africans, then repression of farmers and workers have all been elements of the same pattern of politico-economic repression. Peace demands justice but the WTO/IMF/World Bank complex is producing ever greater injustice. Ritchie looks to the peace movement for inspiration for the future in countering the WTO and the global war system. Alice Slater obviously comes from a peace movement perspective and warns about the new militarisation which the US is now undertaking. The US Space Command programme has a vision of a space-based "war-fighting" system that will protect American interests and investments. TNCs like Lockheed and Boeing are the big guns enforcing the rules of the WTO. But this new militarisation is putting us all in increasing danger. The Article 21 Exception Finally, Steven Staples builds on what Alice Slater has to say. He talks about the military corporate complex and how globalisation is engineering new relations between governments and TNCs. Globally oriented TNCs are merging, e.g. Boeing took over McDonnell-Douglas. They are also shaping governmental policy on a hugely unprecedented scale, e.g. British Aerospace, Europe's largest weapons TNC, has been extended the same treatment by the US Administration as its own homegrown firms, i.e. given so-called "national treatment" under the WTO regime. Staples signals the importance of Article 21 of the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) - now incorporated into the WTO - which is the most powerful exception in the WTO. It protects the war industry from the trade agreement's other liberalising provisions. It ensures that the only legitimate rule of government is in defence and the maintenance of internal order. Under the new global order this means that governments are free to boost the war system as much as they want. It guarantees a uniquely special connection with governmental policy for the arms firms and channels concern about employment, growth and so on into the protected military area. Thus the military take even greater control. In a multitude of reinforcing ways, then, free trade/investment promotes war over peace. "The WTO and the Global War System" is a really useful visual resource for stimulating group discussions on the problems and what we need to do. It comes complete with a set of informative notes. This video should be especially good for making constructive links between peace groups and those working for justice. "GLOBAL VILLAGE OR GLOBAL PILLAGE?" Produced by the World Economy Project, Preamble Center, US, 1999 - Murray Horton This is the more televisual of these two North American videos (although, conversely, it’s not available in the PAL VHS format that NZ televisions use. We had to import it in the US format, and get it converted here, with a consequent loss of picture quality). It has a big time US TV star – Ed Asner – as narrator; it was filmed on several continents (boasting a "cast of billions"), and has some endearingly amateurish graphics. "Global Village or Global Pillage?" was made to accompany a book of the same title, and the video comes complete with excellent written material. It is an American video, and thus has an American perspective. The featured speakers are either nearly all American (such as Ralph Nader, veteran activist and Green Presidential candidate for the 2000 election), or American-based, such as long time anti-apartheid activist, Dennis Brutus. There is a heavy focus on the export of American jobs south of the border to the Mexican maquiladoras or further south to the hellholes of El Salvador (where female workers endure physical abuse and wages of a few US cents per hour to produce garments for US clothing giants). Within the US itself, there is a proliferation of non-union, unregulated, non-taxpaying sweatshops. The 26 minute video is divided into several chapters. "The Race To The Bottom" illustrates how transnationals move all over the world to get the cheapest labour, the lowest taxes, the least environmental restrictions, and the most profits. "The Lilliput Strategy" learns from the tiny Lilliputians who, by working together, immobilised the giant Gulliver. Hence First World unions fight Third World sweatshops as an act of solidarity and one of self-interest. If no floor is put under the global economy, then there will be no end to the race to the bottom. "Combatting Sweatshops" shows how a campaign by US unions and human rights groups got sacked clothing workers reinstated to their El Salvadoran jobs, and their major US employer opened up to independent inspections. US students campaigned against their universities selling clothes made in sweatshops. "Workers Helping Workers" shows how the favour was repaid by Third World workers, who staged go slows (in Brazil) and protest marches (in Japan) to support sacked US tyre factory workers, who had struck in protest at wage cuts and longer hours. The Japanese transnational had replaced them with scabs; the international pressure forced the company to reinstate the workers. "Resisting Global Oppression" details the grassroots campaign, in India and throughout the world, to fight a gigantic and hugely disruptive dam project. It highlights the international Jubilee 2000 campaign to call for the cancellation of Third World debt. The Group of Eight meeting in Okinawa, in July 2000 was the latest rich countries leaders’ summit to be the target of this massive campaign. And, finally, "Reversing The Race To The Bottom" ends on an upbeat note. As Dennis Brutus says: "A pattern is very clearly emerging of global oppression. But that global oppression is generating global resistance. We will have to get it together to take on this monstrous system – and we’ll have to take it on together". Prophetic words. Made before the 1999 Battle of Seattle, this video is part of the burgeoning industry of all kinds of media that has sprung up in the fight of internationalism versus globalisation. A people’s internationalism, as opposed to transnational corporate globalisation. This whole movement, the fightback against globalisation, is one of the most hopeful developments in years. Foreign Control Watchdog, P O Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa. December 1999. Email |
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