Atelier 19, article 23


© John McMurty :
April 2001

                                                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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