----- Forwarded message from Bob Olsen <bobolsen@interlog.com> -----
THE FTAA AND THE WTO:
THE META-PROGRAM FOR GLOBAL CORPORATE RULE
by John McMurtry, PhD.
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
The "Free Trade Area of the Americas" (FTAA) is the latest major campaign
for the occupation of the planet by the global corporate system. Like its
predecessors, it will not respond to resistance, or move beyond dictation
of more of the same. This is because its program is structured to be
life-blind. Only the rights of non-living corporations are recognised.
Only further extension of these corporate rights is in fact implemented
- whatever the latest propaganda about "consulting civil society", or
the crocodile tears about "losing efforts" in Paris and Seattle. All the
new public relations packaging means is that the propaganda about
"inevitable change" and "global prosperity" has failed, and so it is
time to calm the people by agreeing with their concerns, and carry on
instituting and enforcing the program just as before.
The world, however, has woken up to the global corporate coup d'tat, and
people are taking to the streets, now in Quebec City in April 2001. Yet
the corporate media will continue to block out the life-and-death issues
at stake, focus on the salable spectacle of a large public confrontation,
blame and trivialize the thousands of opponents who are assaulted for
putting themselves on the line, and return to selling other images and
distractions once the violence entertainment is over.
Meanwhile the deepest and most systemic threat to civil and planetary life
the world has ever faced will persist and increase. Behind the unfolding
disasters of regional economies and planetary ecosystems melting down, the
threat is driven by an underlying meta-program, in terms of which every
decision, every policy, every regulation and implementation is demanded
and instituted by servant governments. The meta-principles constituting
this mind-set are robotic, much like the mind-set of a fanatic cult. But
because they are presupposed by the corporate party and its media and
political servants as the given order of the new world, they are never
exposed as a deranged program of mind. Only fragments and partial themes
are discerned, not the underlying structure as a dictatorial whole. The
invisible prison of this agenda for world rule always conforms to the
following meta-principles.
(1) The ultimate subject and sovereign ruler of the world is the
transnational corporation, operating by collective prescription and
enforcement through the World Trade Organization in concert with its
prototype the NAFTA, its European collaborator, the EU, and such
derivative regional instruments as the APEC, the MAI, the FTAA, and so
on. Together these constitute the hierarchical formation of the planet's
new rule by extra-parliamentary and transnational fiat.
(2) Individual transnational corporations are the moving parts of this
global corporate system. They are non-living aggregates of dominant
private stock-holders who, as individual persons, are made legally immune
by "acts of incorporation" from any liability for corporate harms done to
societies, to other individuals, and to the environment, as well from
accumulated corporate debts or offences against national and international
law. This is the legal armour around the agents of the global corporate
system which affords them with unaccountable impunity for whatever damage
or crime they impose on individuals, societies or environments around
the world.
(3) Transnational corporations acting in concert through the WTO and its
related supranational constructs prescribe to and are represented by
financed national government parties which act in these matters solely on
behalf of transnational corporate access to foreign markets and resources
with no barriers. This private corporate rule over governments everywhere
is evident from the general facts that no binding regulation yet protects
any right but that of transnational corporate investors, and not one
article of any already signed international covenant or treaty protecting
human rights, labour or the environment is binding on any part of any one
of these unprecedentedly enforced "agreements". Indeed, the Kyoto Treaty
on climate-altering gases, the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting
chemicals and emissions, the Basel Convention on transboundary pollutants
as well as the entire body of established international solemn agreements
and covenants on human and labour rights have been consistently overridden
by transnational corporate practices or the explicit judgements of WTO
trade panels.
(4) All such treaties and agreements obliging compliance with
transnational corporate rights are proposed, negotiated and finalised
behind closed doors and wide perimeters of armed force, with police pepper
spray, shackles, harassment or surveillance for those who publicly
protest. All these agreements, moreover, rule out any other public
participation in or appeal against their decrees by anyone except
corporate or state representatives, and adjudicate all disputes in secret
before unelected authorities and tribunals, with no public or elected
observers of these proceedings permitted, and with no record of their
proceedings published for public view. Yet publics across the world are
obliged to pay all the costs of negotiating, instituting and enforcing
these absolutist prescriptions to the world's nations, and are forced also
to pay all the fines and trade penalties imposed on their own elected
governments for legislating democratic or environmentally protective
policies which are deemed to conflict with this unaccountable
transnational regulatory regime. This Orwellian arrangement is known
as "investor-state dispute resolution".
(5) All executive authorities within individual corporate bodies are all
the while bound by the "fiduciary duty" to maximize monetized returns to
their corporate stockholders (including in particular themselves) as the
overriding obligation of decisions and actions , thereby compelling them
by corporate charter prescription to minimise all expenditures on
protecting human and non-human life by worker pay, social benefits or
environmental regulation. In this way, it becomes a violation of legally
binding corporate morality for its operations to take account of the life
interests of employees, surrounding communities and environments, or even
the future life of the world ahead of shareholders' continuous
maximisation of money profit.
(6) The system's universal principle of "rationality" is, in consequence,
to externalise all costs onto other individuals, societies and
environments so that no form of human existence or responsibility such as
"citizen" or "person" or "respecter of other life" is recognised by the
corporate calculus or its state servants. Only self-maximising "profitable
enterprises" and their "consumers" exist to the mindset. This form of life
is then everywhere prescribed as "inevitable" for all peoples, and is
proclaimed by its agents to offer societies across the world "no
alternative".
(7) "Consumers", in turn, are not co-extensive with human beings or even
the majority of human beings. This is because only humans with sufficient
money-demand to purchase corporate products are recognized by this global
system as possessing any right to access any good - from food and water
to housing, health-care and whatever else can be privatised for
profit. What can be "privatised", or in reality, corporatised for
profit, is accordingly assumed to include ever more of the conditions of
planetary existence without any limit. Genetic structures, the body's
most basic means of life, the elements of nature, and publicly funded
knowledge are all now being rapidly disassembled, restructured and
appropriated by transnational corporations for their maximum private
control and profit.
(8) Any alternative mode for production or distribution of any priceable
good - socially owned or controlled, publicly subsidized or assisted
domestically, self-sufficient or co-operative, or declared without genetic
modification or corporate additive is made illegal under transnational
trade regulations. If any society or government is resistant, its economy
is denounced through state finance and trade offices and global mass
media as "non-competitive", "protectionist", "monopolist" or
"communist", and attacked on the ground by every means available to the
global corporate system, including transnational trade embargo and armed
invasion in abrogation of international criminal law. This is the true and
grave meaning of "global market freedom" in the corporate system.
(9) Consumers and investors with sufficient money-demand to exchange
within the global market are, in fact, the only bearers of freedoms
recognised by this system, and are axiomatically assumed to have no upper
limit to their commodity consumption or their demand acquisition, even if
an increasing majority of their fellow citizens or humanity have few or no
means of existence. This is the "non-satiety" principle of neo-classical
economics. It is also the unstated meaning of "equality of opportunity" in
global market doctrine and practice - the equality of money demand for
those who have it, and no-one else.
(10) There is within the global corporate system no requirement of any
kind, theoretical or practical, to recognize any life need of any
individual (eg. nourishing food) or society (eg. non-toxic air) as
rightful, or as a priority, or as an issue of choice within this system,
however massive and extreme the gap between life-deprivation and
over-consumption grows. As a few hundred "investors" exponentially
increase their money demand to more than the total income of the majority
of the world's population with their "investments" irreversibly stripping
the world's ecosystems at the same time, no policy is even mooted by the
U.N. to regulate this planetary disaster. The U.N. Secretary-General, on
the contrary, has instituted in 2001 a U.N. "Global Compact" to require
all U.N. agencies to enter into "corporate partnership" with the world's
richest transnational corporations.
(11) Whatever pollution, degradation, overloading, exhaustion or
destruction of local or planetary ecosystems occurs, and however
irreversibly devastating in consequences to human and biodiverse life
these damages from corporate extractions, effluents, and commodities are,
there is not one binding article in any transnational trade treaty or
agreement (excepting intra-European) which protects or seeks to protect
any human or environmental life condition or good. All "scarcities" thus
arising are assumed, with no scientific evidence to substantiate the
assumption, to be correctable by market price mechanisms alone. This is
why the U.S. Congress refuses to comply with the Kyoto Treaty until it
makes all pollution abatement measures conform to a system of salable
pollution credits - which have never reduced pollution, but which accord
instituted corporate rights to pollute which can be sold as new and free
equity, and which can be profited from at another, new level of the
global market.
(12) However many millions or billions of society's or the world's human
population are misemployed, underemployed or starvation-waged with not
enough to live on, and however life-destructive and chronically
debilitating their hours and conditions of work are -- a majority of the
world altogether -- there is no principle, norm or standard in
neo-classical market theory or global market practice which recognizes or
can recognize any of these depredations of human life as an issue or a
problem. On the contrary, this life-blind paradigm can only compute these
strippings of most of the world's people as a new "flexibility of labour
supply" and a multiple "opportunity to reduce the costs of labour" by
exercise of new transnational corporate rights to produce in the
lowest-cost zones of the world and sell in the highest-scale markets
with no "barriers to trade".
(13) Any public or government intervention in the presupposition and
implementation of any and all of principles (1) to (12) in any way is
attacked as "an interference in the free market". Any prior cultural,
historical, or democratic achievement or institution limiting the
systematically life-destructive effects of their unrestricted operation is
deplored as "a distortion" or "impediment to market competition", and
targeted for elimination by transnational trade and investment
instrument. This is a cumulative and always advancing line of demand by
endless transnational regulatory "agreements", and it moves across
national borders and domains of life like a sustained military campaign in
its relentless uniformity of prescriptions to target populations, and its
blanket denials of the destructive effects which follow wherever its
occupying forces usurp evolved ways of life.
(14 ) No autonomy of domestic market in any good or service, strategic use
of any natural resource or necessity, protected public utility or social
sector, product-safety, quality or licensing standard, local procurement
practice or grant is consistent with the defined principles of this
transnational market regime. All have been and continuously are,
therefore, slated for challenge and irreversible elimination by trade
prescription or scheduled regulatory assimilation. This is a pattern
everywhere documentable, but concealed by corporately financed
politicians, the corporate media, and former corporate employees who
negotiate the agreements. What remains constant through the cumulative
momentum and volume of trade and investment decrees is that every article
of tens of thousands is constructed to guarantee that dominantly
transnational corporations can exploit and increasingly control domestic
economies and public sectors across the world with no curtailing limit
permissible in law.
(15) Local, national and global management of the money-demand drivewheels
of this system is over 95% controlled by for-profit corporate financial
and banking institutions which have covertly appropriated control over
almost all government bond issues and investor and consumer lines of
credit from government currency creations, national bank loans and state
statutory reserves. With no gold or other non-paper standard remaining to
control it, corporate bank and financial leveraging has become effectively
limitless, with central bank interest-rate raises in the new regime
applied only to decrease workers' rising wages and social-sector
spending. This is the always hidden underside of the system's propelling
domestic and transnational force, why covert financial deregulation of
money-demand supply is the secret to its every advance, and why no deep
limit can be drawn against world occupation by corporate financial
chicanery until the creation of money demand is constitutionally
re-appropriated by public authority as its essential basis of
sovereignty and investment in the common interest.
Together these underlying principles of the global market system
constitute its fixed and largely unseen meta-structure of perception,
understanding and judgement in accordance with which all its policy
formation and enforced regulation of societies and economies across the
world proceed. There is no principle of "the free market", "investment",
"competition", "comparative advantage", "efficiency", "fiscal
responsibility", "labour flexibility", "inflation control", "growth",
"sustainability", "social welfare", "national prosperity", "justice",
"civil society participation", "poverty reduction", or other old or new
slogan promulgated by global market institutions and advocates that does
not conform to all of (1) through (15) in doctrine and effect. Whenever it
is claimed otherwise, ask for the evidence from any "free trade
agreement" on the planet. The response will always be silence, diversion
to another topic, and, if the question is pursued publicly, surveillance
by the police.
However well-placed its hirelings, this mind-locked creed is corporately
self-driven and self-referential, and threatens to usurp every level of
social and ecological life condition still existing. Given its
invasionary past and history, we should not be surprised. Like every
Pharaoh of the past, it will topple - the more totalitarian, the more
complete the collapse. But remember who advocates for this regime now,
for they are agents of the corporate occupation of all of the world's
societies and ecosystems by decreed financial and market mechanisms
never electorally agreed to by any people on earth.
- - - -
John McMurtry PhD. is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Guelph, and the author of Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an
Ethical System (Toronto and Westport Ct: Garamond and Kumarian Press),
1998 and The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London and Tokyo: Pluto and
Springer-Verlag, 1999 and 2001). He is completing his forthcoming book,
Value Wars, which will be published by Pluto Press in 2001.
- - - -
Send a message to <bobolsen@interlog.com> and ask for McMurtry-RTF
if you want this document in RTF format, or if you are able to post
the RTF format on the web.
............................................
Liberate democracy from corporate control
Bob Olsen, Toronto bobolsen@interlog.com
............................................
----- End forwarded message -----
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\ | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those |
ivar | | who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe |
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