-Caveat Lector-
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Excellent article. Thanks for posting it.
Joshua2
Nicky Molloy wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> Online Article
>
> http://www.exposuremagazine.com/
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> This article was printed in Exposure Magazine Volume 5 Number 1 (APRIL-MAY
> 98) and is protected under copyright laws.
>
> Exposure Magazine is published by Contact Network International.
> P.O. Box 118, Noosa Heads, Queensland 4567, Australia
> Tel/Fax + 61(07)54852966.
> Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Web site : www.exposuremagazine.com
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
> ENTER THE NEW WORLD ORDER
> BY GRAHAM L. STRACHAN
>
> Since September 1995 representatives of the 29 countries of the Organisation
> for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been meeting in secret
> in Paris every six weeks, writing what Renato Ruggerio, World Trade
> Organization (WTO) Director General has called "the constitution of a single
> global economy". If the product of this conclave, the Multilateral Agreement
> on Investment (MAI), is signed in May 1998 as scheduled, national
> governments will no longer be in control of their economies. This means that
> whatever control people may have had over their economic future through the
> democratic process will also be a thing of the past.
>
> While superficially the MAI is about newly created "rights" of Transnational
> Corporations (TNCs) and global investors to invest in nations, it is really
> about overriding the sovereign power of national governments to protect
> their countries' resources, businesses, farms and people from exploitation
> by outsiders. It is becoming increasingly evident that the independent
> nation state is no longer compatible with the global interersts of
> international big business and finance, which are to make ever-expanding
> profits by investing wherever they want, whenever they want, without any
> restrictions or imposed obligations. For countries like Australia the MAI
> spells the end of the right of national self-determination in the economic
> sphere. For TNCs and global investors, it means from now on they can treat
> the world as their own private oyster.
>
> The MAI creates a corporate bill of rights through investment protection,
> investment liberalisation, and investor-to-state dispute settlement
> procedures. It consists of a set of rules which place new restrictions on
> what governments can do to regulate international investment and corporate
> power. These rules seek to protect and expand the power of corporations and
> wealthy international investors by guaranteeing them:
>
> a stable investment climate
> easy repatriation of profits
> open market
> access by establishing National Treatment (which requires countries to treat
> foreign investors at least as well as domestic investors) and Most Favored
> Nation designations
> freedom from complying with regulations and legislation pertaining to
> environmental, social, and health safeguards
> and freedom from any obligation to serve local needs.
>
> Most alarmingly, the MAI grants private investors and corporations direct
> legal standing to sue governments and seek monetary compensation at
> international tribunals for failure to provide all of the MAI's benefits.
> And sue they will. Under similar provisions in the NAFTA treaty, Ethyl Corp.
> of America is suing the Canadian government for $367M for trying to ban the
> use of MMT, a controversial gasoline additive it produces in Ottawa. The
> corporation is demanding "immediate compensation for imposing legislation
> which hinders its operations".
>
> FREE MARKET FOR SOME
>
> By making it easier for TNCs and investors to move investment between
> countries, the MAI will enable them to exert downward pressure on wages,
> work conditions, and job security, and upward pressure on the "inducements"
> national governments are obliged to offer to attract their patronage. In
> addition, it will become more difficult for governments to insist on
> standards for workplace safety and to protect surrounding communities from
> industrial pollution and catastrophic accidents like the one in Bhopal,
> India. As it has been pointed out elsewhere, when capital can move when and
> where it likes but labour cannot, there can be no "free market".
>
> While in many respects the MAI seems to create a "level playing field" for
> domestic and foreign investors, in reality the sheer size and huge capital
> resources of the globals will give them an absolute advantage, spelling the
> end of nationally-based industries and investors, and of any truly national
> economy. Once the MAI is in place there will be nothing to stop global
> investors from owning and controlling the lot.
>
> Signatory governments will be legally bound for at least 20 years, which
> creates the impression they can then pull out if dissatisfied. But after 20
> years under this Agreement a signatory nation will be in no position to
> withdraw, since they will have no independent national economy left worth
> speaking about. All will be absolutely dependent on foreign investment for
> their economic survival. They will either stay in, or starve.
>
> Why The Secrecy?
>
> Silence on the MAI has been deafening worldwide, confirming that something
> sinister is afoot. The secrecy has been due partly to a gag order by the
> OECD, but also the willingness of the world media to aid and abet the forces
> behind globalisation. It is evident that along with the right of national
> self-determination, the public's "right to know" is a thing of the past.
> Information about the MAI was almost impossible to obtain until February
> 1997 when a draft text was leaked and placed on the Internet by French
> activists. Since then opposition to the treaty has been taken up by an
> increasing number of pressure groups worldwide. Whether or not they will
> have any effect, remains to be seen. Chairman of the MAI negotiating group,
> Frans Engering, has stated that there could not possibly be any delay in the
> passage of the MAI, that "we are entering the last stages".
>
> Once the MAI was finally brought to the attention of the Australian public,
> bureaucrats and big business representatives were quick to deny any secrecy.
> When Independent MP Pauline Hanson raised the matter in the media in January
> 1998, accusing the government of intending to secretly "sign away the future
> of the country" to multinational companies, a spokeswoman for Assistant
> Federal Treasurer Rod Kemp accused her of "scare-mongering based on
> ignorance", denying there was any secrecy surrounding Australia's
> involvement. Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive
> Mark Patterson agreed, saying that industry had been consulted extensively
> on the agreement. In other words, the government and big business knew about
> it, so who else mattered?
>
> Who Benefits?
>
> The driving force behind the MAI is the US Council for International
> Business, an American big business lobby coalition. US officials have openly
> stated that the objective of the MAI is to protect US investors abroad.
> These include the Transnational Corporations (TNCs), international bankers
> and finance houses, and speculators.
>
> There are now over 40,000 TNCs, the top 200 of which control over a quarter
> of the world's economic activity. They owe allegiance to no country, even
> their country of origin. Their sole allegiance is to their own profit
> maximisation. With combined revenues totaling $7.1 trillion, these 200
> giants are bigger than the combined economies of 182 countries (out of a
> total of 191). Indeed, their combined annual revenues amount to almost twice
> the combined income of the bottom four fifths of humanity. They are not all
> American by any means. Fortune's Global 500 includes 153 US based and 141
> Japanese based corporations. The rest are European and others. But the US
> sets the trend, and if the others want to stay in the game, they have to
> play by the same rules, or lack thereof if the MAI is adopted.
>
> Their ideology is "economic rationalism" where "rational" means "guided by
> reason, not emotions". Discarded as non-rational considerations are things
> such as concern for human beings and the environment, and ordinary morality.
> People are "human resources", adjuncts to commercial activity as labour or
> consumers, a means to profit.
>
> Noam Chomsky describes the international business community as "....highly
> class-conscious...always fighting a vicious class war [with the masses] and
> very well aware of it." The alarming thing about their possession of
> inordinate private economic power is their lack of accountability as to its
> exercise. There will be even less accountability if the MAI is signed.
> "Insofar as power is shifted to the transnational arena," says Chomsky,
> "[the ordinary person] is not even a spectator, because only the real
> experts and specialists know what's going on in the IMF...." Include now the
> OECD.
>
> What Benefits?
>
> While the advantages of the MAI for TNCs and global investors are obvious,
> the alleged benefits to the rest of the world in exchange for relinquished
> economic sovereignty are pie in the sky.
>
> According MAI Policy Briefs now on the Internet, Foreign Direct Investment
> (FDI) will "promote economic growth, jobs and rising living standards
> world-wide". In fact the opposite is true. Since the Hawke/Keating
> government opened the Australian floodgates to foreign investment in 1983
> the people looking for work, or more work than they have, has risen to 25%
> of the workforce. Big business is shedding jobs at the rate of 500,000 per
> year, offsetting whatever job creation there is in the small/medium sized
> business sector, the very sector threatened by the MAI. In the same period
> foreign debt has grown from $23 billion to a massive $220 billion. As for
> living standards, Australia has slipped from 6th to around 26th in the
> OECD's own list of good countries to live in.
>
> Foreign Direct Investment in countries like Honduras has led to the setting
> up by governments of "free trade" zones which are little more than slave
> labour compounds. In these zones governments build factories to which they
> then induce foreign investment with promises of cheap labour, no unions,
> tax-free profits, minimal rent, and no import duties on products sold to the
> local elites. In the factories women are paid around $3 a day under
> conditions as bad as any endured during the worst days of the Industrial
> Revolution, for sewing brand name garments such as Levi's for the US market.
> The only contribution FDI has made to countries like Honduras has been a
> number of temporary dead-end jobs. It does not help the host country pay off
> foreign debt, or provide revenue which the government might use for health
> or education.
>
> Along the Mexican/US border there are over 1800 "maquiladoros", foreign
> owned export-only factories in which foreign investors exploit cheap Mexican
> labour. The Mexicans live in shanty towns around the factories with no
> sewerage, running water or electricity. Filthy waste disposal practices by
> the investors mean that toxic waste runs through the shanty towns in open
> drains. Since offending the investors might cause them to take their
> investment elsewhere ( ie. the Hawaiian pineapple industry was moved to the
> Philippines virtually overnight, leaving 6000 jobless) it is difficult for
> the Mexican government to get them to observe better standards. After the
> signing of the MAI it will be impossible.
>
> The MAI proponents claim that FDI will "provide consumers with increased
> quality, wider choice and lower prices". Economic rationalists repeatedly
> make these claims, but they bear no relation to reality. They are based on
> the irrational expectation that oligopoly, the near monopolistic control of
> markets by a few huge conglomerates, can somehow provide all the benefits of
> a truly competitive market. It never has, and never can, as Galbraith showed
> convincingly years ago.
>
> The Third World
>
> MAI Policy Briefs also claim that the Third World needs FDI to get it out of
> the poverty trap, pointing to WTO "studies" which allegedly show that "low
> levels of trade and inflows of FDI are symptoms rather than the causes of
> the plight of many of the poorest countries." WTO "studies" notwithstanding,
> the evidence against that theory is overwhelming. The plight of the Third
> World has been extensively analysed and documented. Third World poverty is
> the result of debt to the First World, and the crippling interest burden
> that goes with it. As for the benefits of FDI, observers report that Third
> World people watch their children die of starvation while foreign investors
> reap record harvests and profits from export "cash-crops" grown on the best
> available land. FDI in its present form is in large part responsible for the
> Third World's tragic predicament. To suggest that more of the same can
> reverse the situation, especially when the MAI will ban conditions on FDI
> ensuring it provides lasting real benefit to local populations, is an insult
> to the memory of the Third World dead through starvation.
>
> The fact that the MAI is being negotiated through the "rich nations" club,
> the OECD, and not through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as originally
> intended, should ring warning bells for the developing world. The official
> MAI explanation is that the OECD countries are the ones with the major stake
> in the Agreement, accounting as they do for most of the world's FDI (447 of
> the world's 500 largest TNCs are members). But there is another explanation.
>
> The WTO includes developing countries among its members, and the United
> States (US) feared that their opposition might "water down" any consensus
> reached. The US therefore decided that the best way to achieve a high
> standard investment treaty was to negotiate it through the OECD, and build
> an accession clause into it which allows non-OECD countries to sign into the
> pact, provided they "meet certain conditions".
>
> According to Ward Morehouse, Co-Director of the US-based Program on
> Corporations, Law and Democracy, an anti-MAI lobby, "The choice of venue for
> negotiations is a clever strategy, designed to exclude participation by
> governments representing most of the world's population. Once approved by
> governments of OECD countries the Agreement will then be presented to the
> rest of the world as a fait accompli. If they want to have access to
> principal world capital markets, they will have no choice but to sign on."
>
> Threshold Question
>
> Groups opposing treaties like the MAI tend to argue that they "won't work",
> or that their requirements are "too harsh" and need to be tempered through
> side agreements on labor and environment. Such arguments play right into the
> hands of the proponents. Once the details of the thing are being discussed,
> it has already been accepted in principle. As Ayn Rand (ironically a great
> defender of capitalism, though not this sort of capitalism) said, "never
> accept unquestioningly your opponent's premises". The premises in this case
> are: "We must have globalisation. We must have the MAI, it's just a case of
> getting consensus as to its clauses." Wrong! This thing is bad in principle.
> There is no a priori rule which says international investors have a right to
> own and control the world and its resources, or to reorganise the world to
> suit their own purposes. The premise that the world cannot survive without
> FDI is also flawed: civilisation progressed for 10,000 years without it, and
> it could happily do so for another 10,000.
>
> There is a threshold question to answer before the MAI is even considered:
> Whose World Is This? In whose interests should it be organised: big
> business', or the people's? The two no longer coincide. It may well be they
> are incompatible, unless big business very quickly learns to temper its
> greed with human concerns. #
>
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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