NP "free trade"

[Doug Millison]

"[...]Because "free trade" has a virtuous ring,
officials and pundits supporting the ongoing
corporate globalization process use the phrase
without scruple. But recent "free trade"
agreements have been primarily "investor rights"
rather than trade agreements, and they have
focused on spelling out national rights of foreign
corporations that protect them from any
performance requirements or taxes that limit their
activities or tend to favor local companies or
local government activities. They have all aimed
at reducing the rights of governments to engage in
business, and they now regularly seek to allow
transnationals to sue governments for redress. But
"investor rights" doesn't sound as heart-warming
as "free trade," so Cassel, Ingram, or Paul
Krugman and Thomas Friedman in the New York Times,
stick to "free trade." These investor rights also
only help very large global corporations mainly
located in the United States, Europe and Japan, so
that the "freedom" arising from the new agreements
only helps those giants get larger and extend
their domination to weaker countries no longer
able to help out indigenous firms. But those
indigenous firms are "free" to invade the United
States, a bit reminiscent of that famous equality
of the law that penalizes both the poor and rich
for stealing bread.
[...]
Even more gross than the misuse of "free trade" is
the new alleged elevation of "democracy" to a
concern of the global leaders in their push for
enhanced investor rights. This is laughable at
many levels. First, consider George W. Bush,
prating about his own devotion to democracy and
belief that free trade will do it. Bush was
"elected" by a Republican activist majority of the
Supreme Court, but this was only the final
corruption of a political process that makes him
an illegitimate and undemocratic authority. He got
less than a majority of the votes, and would have
lost the election if large numbers of blacks
hadn't been illegally deprived of their vote in
Florida. But the election was a plutocratic affair
anyway, with both parties on the corporate take
and unrepresentative of the public interest. This
has long been dramatically evident on "free trade"
issues where, as I noted, the public doesn't want
these agreements, but the two property parties
(and the media) always support them. So Bush,
speaking for "free trade," already displays the
absence of substantive democracy in the dominant
superpower itself; he represents an elite minority
dominating a nominal democracy.

Second, one of the most notable features of
corporate and financial globalization is their
contribution to draining substance from democracy.
Governments must placate global finance, and the
growing centralization of corporate power has
consolidated their political influence, making
social democrats into neoliberal toadies serving
the big boys and helping them to deregulate,
privatize, and dismantle the welfare state.
Corporate globalization and the policies its
leaders have enforced have also increased
inequality, and as Mexican president Vicente Fox
stated in Quebec City, "You cannot have genuine
democracy in a society where there is so much
inequality and poverty." So the spread of "free
trade" will make any nominal democracies even more
devoid of substance.

Third, the agreements themselves are designed to
weaken democracy by establishing investor rights
that override governmental authority and that give
transnationals the right to sue governments. They
also establish secret panels to adjudicate
disputes, again a remarkably undemocratic feature
of these new arrangements that make the use of the
word "democracy" by their defenders hypocritical.
These undemocratic arrangements complement the
role of the IMF and World Bank as supra-national
instruments that override political democracies
and force them to fix policies in accord with
higher (i.e., trasnational corporate) interests.
[...]
Because of the publicity aroused by the protests,
and the hard- to-escape real world facts of
increasing inequality and poverty, surely related
to the hugely biased and corporate supportive
efforts of the IMF, WTO, and World Bank and
agreements like Nafta, the Quebec meeting
expressed deep concern over world poverty as well
as devotion to democracy. George Bush said that he
and the other leaders were also "strongly
committed to protecting the environment and
improving labor standards." Small sums were even
promised for labor training and the like. The
media and pundits have not analysed the likelihood
that Bush will be helping the environemnt and
labor on a hemispheric basis, nor have they
discussed the earlier World Bank claims of a new
anti-poverty thrust and its impact (and
inconsistency with the main effects of standard
IMF-World Bank policies of forcing cutbacks in
social expenditures).

Pundits like Andrew Cassel and Thomas Friedman
repeatedly assert that the protesters are really
injuring the world's poor, because globalization,
even with sweatshops and nasty maquiladoras,
benefits poor people who would otherwise be worse
off. They ignore both the record--e.g., Mexican
real wages are now substantially lower than they
were in 1980--and the extent to which the new
global agreements and institutions are biased
against the interests of poor people and threaten
to worsen their position. They also ignore the
fact that corporate globalization and its
supportive agreements cut off the policy options
of weaker countries, that increasingly are blocked
from helping poor people, but are also prevented
from taking a different development course that
would put the interests of the domestic populace
ahead of that of the transnationals."

from:
THE MEDIA AT THE BARRICADES IN SUPPORT OF "FREE
TRADE"
by Edward S. Herman

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