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'etat, 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.
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