The World Trade Organization (WTO) meets in Seattle next week to begin what would be the largest NAFTA-like trade deal in human history. Negotiators at this meeting will attempt to sell off everything -- including your healthcare and the education of your children -- to multinational corporations. In this global monopoly game, our government is not on our side.
Most Canadians are by now all too familiar with the many negative effects of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, on their personal and work lives.
"Jobs jobs jobs!" Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney bellowed, with the business-backed Fraser Institute singing a sweet chorus behind him.
What we got, everybody knows. Job cuts as privatized companies like Bell and CN and Air Canada were suddenly free of the "burden of government regulation".
NAFTA has concentrated wealth as never before at the top in Canada, while the livelihoods of the working class and poor decline.
The WTO will follow NAFTA and transfer the powers to annul Canadian laws to a secret body of unelected trade lawyers who scrutinize every public policy decision by judging how it serves the business elite.
The WTO is set up, in its own words, as a "constitution for a single global economy". The problem is that the constitution only grants citizenship to corporations, and leaves 99% of the world's people without a vote. It's a government of the Fords and Monsantos by the Yahoos and E-Trades.
The WTO has new and unprecedented institutional powers that are equal to those of the United Nations. The WTO has the power to override the decisions of "democratic" governments if the laws that they enact prevent a company from making a profit.
The WTO promotes "free" trade. What do they mean by "free"?
After five years of experience with WTO rulings, we know that the freedom the WTO wants means a loss of freedom for Canadian working people.
In each ruling, the WTO has consistently declared that public health protections, environmental protection, and laws protecting culture and the arts are so-called Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade. WTO freedom is a free ride for corporations on the backs of working people.
Take as an example the case of MMT.
In 1997, Ethyl Corp. backed by the USA, challenged Canadian laws banning the sale of MMT. A gasoline additive containing the neurotoxin manganese, MMT is forbidden in gasoline in California, where it is made! Ethyl Corp. developed MMT after it was banned from selling leaded gasoline in the United States.
Faced with this dilemma, and requiring a return on investments made to develop and produce this "trade good", it became imperative for Ethyl to secure the sale of its poison in foreign markets no longer able to protect themselves because of NAFTA and the WTO.
This trade practice used to be called dumping.
Canadians, not wishing to be poisoned by Ethyl Corp, lobbied their government to ban MMT's sale and distribution in Canada. The Government enacted legislation, Bill C29, prohibiting the sale and inter-provincial distribution of MMT.
But as a signatory to NAFTA and the WTO, Canada had agreed to provisions granting Ethyl Corp the right to sue the Canadian government for damages due to "uncompensated expropriation", which Ethyl promptly did.
NAFTA was the first international trade agreement to grant corporations the status of persons in private international law. Prior to this, only another state could directly sue the government of another country. WTO greatly enhances the international legal status of corporations.
As the USA is Canada's biggest trading partner, the outcome of Ethyl Corp. vs. Canada was a foregone conclusion. The Canadian Government backed down, and simultaneously declared victory. Except that the Canadian Government, and thus Canadian taxpayers, had to pay Ethyl Corp ten million dollars for denying them their right under NAFTA and the WTO to pollute the air we breathe.
How was prosperity served by this decision?
Ethyl certainly did well. It got a "free" market in which to dump a product it could not legitimately sell at home.
Who stands to profit by virtue of any new expansion of the authority of the WTO based on NAFTA principles?
Large multinational business does.
Who stands to lose? Everybody else: those Canadians who are paying taxes to subsidize the sale of a poison product and all those Canadians who breathe air. Anyone not able to mount a multi million-dollar lawsuit and mobilize the PR industry behind their unjust cause is disenfranchised by a new WTO trade agreement.
What is the purpose behind this insanity? Why are we being fed this nonsense disguised as truth as a cover for garbage disguised as legitimate products?
One can take comments by US policymaker George Kennan as a touchstone for the problem of US economic policy in a world that wishes that corporations would just leave them alone:
"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to retain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization."
This statement was made in the 1950's but it represents a continuity in US and UK foreign policy. The strategy has merely changed.
Cold War foreign policy and its imperative of domination has been transposed into a "commercial key". The overarching imperatives of technological and commercial development at any cost have become overriding principles of a new imperialism whose processes and terminology are akin to those of war.
What can we do about a world where a free bus pass for a disabled person is a tax upon corporations wishing to make a buck from privatizing public transport, where a law limiting smog emissions is a tax upon a chemical company that has a "right" to pollute?
We can and must fight back. We must get organized and get militant.