From: "Linda Muller"
Date sent: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 18:23:16 -0500
Subject: [BRIGADE] WTO: PJB - America's Decline
Dear Brigade,
"Like Gulliver asleep, we are having our pockets picked, while being tied down with strands of thread that will one day have the strength of steel cables ... " - PJB 1994
Two more items on the WTO - a column and a few quotes from Pat on the WTO
- circa 1994.
GO PAT GO!!!!!!!!
Linda
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From: "Brock N. Cordeiro" - bncordeiro@mediaone.net
Subject: WTO article from my local paper
Date sent: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 17:46:14 -0500
I thought that you might find this article in my local newspaper,
"The Standard Times" in New Bedford, Mass.
Trade conference could signal start of America's eventual decline
by Kevin Phillips
An important prelude to the 2000 elections could take place in Seattle, if
organizers can produce their hoped-for "protest of the century" against
the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization that
begins Nov. 30. Doubters scoff at this. While activists urge people to
travel to Seattle to protest the WTO, nine of 10 Americans probably can't
explain what the organization is. So they won't be paying attention to
complaints that the WTO is about to become an unelected fourth branch of
the U.S. government, or that it is a Magna Carta for U.S. multinational
corporations to further decrease their dependence on American employees
and loyalties.
The World Trade Organization, though officially only four years old,
represents a huge intrusion on U.S. politics and on national, state and
local decision-making, largely in the interest of multinational
corporations and trade lobbies. Scare talk like this has been exaggerated
before. But this is not hyperbole: Legislators in Washington could be on
the brink of understanding that they -- and the voters -- are losing
control over the evolution of America's role in the global economy in the
21st century.
This is a grave danger. The historical evidence from the two previous
great economic world powers is that whatever financial elites want --
high-profit global priorities -- is bad for ordinary citizens, who are
more vulnerable and require that domestic economics come first.
Yet, headlines from Seattle could launch a public debate, especially if
the protesters are largely American. It's this nation whose ordinary
citizens have the greatest political and economic stake in limiting the
WTO and its anticipated role.
Alienated voters bemoan losing control over U.S. policy-making, but
representatives and senators share in the loss. Where the U.S. government
once had three branches -- executive, legislative and judicial -- it now
has five. The newest branches are the unelected Federal Reserve Board,
which controls money supply, interest rates and, in many respects, the
U.S. economy; and the WTO, which not only controls trade practices but can
overrule federal, state and local laws that interfere with trade rights as
the organization defines them. Politicians and voters have little or no
control over either the Fed or the WTO.
Power, quite simply, has been shifting to major financial institutions and
multinational corporations. In the Federal Reserve system, which operates
behind closed doors, controls its own funds and is independent of
Congress, the presidents and boards of the individual regional Federal
Reserve banks are selected by the business and financial communities. Yet,
some of the regional Fed presidents sit on the Open Market Committee,
which makes Federal Reserve interest-rate and monetary policy.
This lack of democracy didn't used to matter much. But in the last decade,
the world's central banks have been gaining influence over national and
international economies and becoming increasingly independent of
politicians and elected officials.
Trade policy has similarly been moving from elected hands to unelected
private interests and global bureaucrats who better represent the
multinational trade and investment communities. This includes
international agencies, trade lawyers and lobbyists, banks and
multinational corporations of all national stripes, though U.S. companies
have the most clout.
Despite occasional talk by right-wing kooks that the WTO is dangerous
because the United States has only one vote and could be outmuscled, the
effective control in WTO -- as in the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank and other such organizations -- lies with the Quad countries --
the United States, Japan, Canada and the European Union -- whose
decisions, in turn, are dominated by multinational trade and investment
elites. The real problem is that their loyalty is to the man in the
executive suite, not the man on the street.
In the last decade, the Washington trade policy establishment has moved to
strip U.S. politicians and voters of their influence over trade policy.
For example, in 1994, the key congressional vote in favor of establishing
the World Trade Organization was held according to "fast track" rules and
during a post-election lame-duck session of Congress, when defeated
lawmakers would be pliable and the measure could be slipped through with
little discussion. The fast-track procedure was established so that
Congress could not tinker with trade agreements sent to Congress but had
to reject or rubber-stamp them, as it did with the North American Free
Trade Agreement.
The WTO is Exhibit A in the neutering of Congress and the voters. WTO
procedures allow countries to challenge each other's laws and regulations
as violations of WTO trade rules. Cases are decided in secret, with
documents, hearings and briefs kept confidential and unreleased, by
tribunals of three bureaucrats, usually corporate lawyers. There are no
conflict-of-interest restraints for these people. In addition, no appeal
is possible outside the WTO.
Under this authority, barely debated in the legislative fast shuffle of
1994, the WTO has already overturned part of the U.S. Clean Air Act and
declared illegal a recent U.S. environmental regulation. Now there is talk
of enlarging WTO's jurisdiction to include education and health matters.
Congress is being fleeced like lambs at a shearing.
Proponents of this transfer generally argue that either 1) globalization
is the inevitable and we have to guide it or 2) globalization may involve
some sacrifices but, in the long run, most Americans will profit.
History's example, however, raises major cautions. Indeed, the two great
world economic powers before the United States -- the Dutch in the 17th
and early 18th centuries, and the British thereafter -- followed the same
internationalization trajectory as their world leadership peaked and then
went into decline.
This precedent is as frightening as it is clear. As the Dutch and British
global economies peaked, their future, said the elites, lay in embracing
international rather than internal economic opportunities. As the old
industries started to fade -- textiles, shipbuilding and fisheries in the
Netherlands; coal, textiles and steel in Britain -- the elites said: Never
mind. We now lead the world in services: banking, finance, overseas
investments, shipping, insurance, communications. And that's where the
payoff is.
Within each nation -- 1720-'40 Holland and Britain in the
"Upstairs, Downstairs" era of 1900-1914 -- two things came to pass. First, common
people started losing the old industrial jobs that had made ordinary
Dutchmen and Britons the envy of Europe. The old industrial districts
deteriorated. Second, even as industrial decay worsened, finance and
investments soared, inequality mushroomed and the elites buzzed about a
new golden age. But then, something went wrong; finance, investments and
services lost their way. The golden age imploded and the economy became no
more than a shell of its old broad-based heyday -- Holland in 1770 or
Britain in 1945.
This is the enormous risk that ordinary Americans -- the huge two-thirds
in the economic middle -- now take in allowing U.S. democracy and
representative government to be undercut and restructured by the U.S.
equivalent of the financial and multinational elites that so selfishly
misdirected early 20th-century Britain and 18th-century Holland. Recent
statistics showing the top 1 percent of Americans soaring on financial
wings, even as inflation-adjusted median family incomes are about the same
as they were 25 years ago, buttress the parallel. So do efforts of current
U.S. elites to move their investments overseas, as the earlier Dutch and
British elites did, and to sell technology to nations like China that
could easily become a threat to U.S. interests.
It's easy to see why U.S. corporate CEOs and investment bankers want the
new globalism. Dozens have publicly admitted they don't want their
organizations to be American any longer; they want them to be
international so they can cut loose from stagnant median family incomes
and the future pensions and benefits for those 58-year-old workers in
Kansas and Kentucky.
The WTO is many things, some of them reasonable. To say otherwise would be
misleading. Nonetheless, too many multinational banks and corporations
silently applaud the WTO as an enabler of overseas investment that will
make it safe for U.S. companies to move more of their employment, profits
and loyalties elsewhere. Ordinary Dutchmen and Britons couldn't stop the
earlier trends, and maybe Americans can't stop these.
Even so, tens of thousands of angry people in the streets of Seattle,
giving these issues a human face, could do more than attract headlines and
evening-news coverage. They might propel the matter into an arena where
such important decisions should be made: the 2000 presidential and
congressional elections.
- Kevin Phillips is a political historian and author
Brock N. Cordeiro - South Dartmouth, MA
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Pat Buchanan - 1994:
"History Knows Where It's Going", exulted the April 15 full-page ad in the
New York Times. Dates and names preceded:
"1944, Bretton Woods: The IMF and the World Bank."
"1945, San Francisco: The United Nations."
"1994, Marrakech: The World Trade Organization."
Marrakech had just given birth, said the ad, to
"the third pillar of the New World Order." Thus did America cross yet another frontier on her long march into captivity...
The glittering bribe the globalists are extending to us is this: Enhanced
access to global markets --in exchange for your national sovereignty! ...
Like Gulliver asleep, we are having our pockets picked, while being tied
down with strands of thread that will one day have the strength of steel
cables ...
Perhaps in the Cold War there was a need to shore up foreign regimes, to
keep them "loyal." But, now, like Pinocchio, the World Bank, IMF and IADB
have taken on a life of their own. With massive U.S. funding and U.S loan
guarantees, they are siphoning off America's wealth, shipping it off to
corrupt and incompetent regimes from China to Vietnam to India to Africa
to Latin America ...
Now, liberals believe in the redistribution of wealth; they have a
visceral recoil to capitalism, and they feel the United States must make
restitution for its sins. Like guilt-ridden heirs to a mighty fortune,
they delight in squandering their inherited wealth on causes the old man
would have despised. Revenge on their forebears. But why do Republicans
approve of the socialist international's agenda? Can they not see that
America is being bled white? ...
Whether it be foreign aid, or free trade, intervention or not, what is
imperative is that only Americans decide America's destiny...
Patrick J. Buchanan - 1994