Dear everyone,
Dr Helen Caldicott, the world renown author, writer and activist has just had her article published in todays Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. I'm sure you'll find it most interesting. If you wish to visit the website you can find this article at
www.smh.com.au/news/0001/05/features/features4.html
Wednesday 5.1.2000
- FEATURES & ARTS
Why we should be wary of the WTO's mantra of globalisation The World Trade Organisation operates mainly for the benefit of corporations, not people, writes Helen Caldicott.
HENRY Kissinger ruminated recently (Herald, December 27) that although globalisation has successfully generated unprecedented wealth for the United States, the "impact on the rest of the world has been more ambiguous".
This is an understatement.
In analysing the failure of the recent World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle, Kissinger, who urged the US to take a more imaginative approach to globalisation, concluded: "The basic challenge for America and for those who believe in free trade is to match economic growth with political imagination. The challenge is to foster an international sense of social responsibility without strangling a highly successful economic system in regulations imposed by international bureaucrats."
Many feel it is already too late. The damage has been done. There are people in Australia who, like me, believe this New World Economic Order operates mainly for the benefit of the corporations, not for the ordinary people of this country, or indeed of any country. All we have to do is look around us - from the demise of Souths to Kerry Packer's data bank of information on every Australian to the SOCOG fiasco to the devastation of our hospital system to the proposed turning of the Australian desert into the world's nuclear waste dump.
Established in 1995, the WTO emerged from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, an international body founded in 1944 by the world's nations to accelerate global economic development - in itself not a bad thing. Trade then was limited to manufactured goods.
In 1986, at the instigation of the transnational corporations, which were rapidly growing in power, a new round was held in Uruguay whose purpose was to radically reorganise the international economy.
The ensuing negotiations were conducted behind closed doors in secrecy, attended only by representatives from the transnational corporations and the major industrialised nations of Japan, Britain, Europe and the US.
New GATT rules on tariff reductions in goods and services were forged - largely by corporate lawyers for the benefit of their employers. After eight years of transformational negotiations, the WTO became the operating body of GATT. Based in Geneva, it now has full executive authority to implement GATT and more than 20 major new international agreements governing, among other things, agriculture, banking, insurance, data management and financial services.
Some 125 countries (now 134) signed on to the WTO in 1995, even though their citizens were largely unaware their national sovereignty was under threat. What was this radical reorganisation of world trade? For one thing, it now involved more than tariffs. What the corporations were after was a global playing field - without rules and access to unregulated labour, consumer markets, and natural resources without having to operate under the restrictions of national laws. And what the corporations wanted is what they got: their agenda became paramount as national and even state laws relating to environmental protection, human and consumer rights, local culture, social justice issues and even national sovereignty fell before the new hegemony of the WTO. The WTO, however, actively encourages national militarisation.
Globalisation invoked four mantras - "free trade", "deregulation", "privatisation" and "commodification" - the last meaning that even the genetic basis of life itself can be bought and sold.
International and corporate disputes relating to trade are adjudicated by a three-person WTO panel of trade officials and lawyers with little or no expertise in the subject areas they are dealing with - areas such as the environment, patents, labour laws, health care or agriculture. Dispute resolution, which places no economic value upon clean air, water, forests or biodiversity, takes place behind closed doors in absolute secrecy.
Although in this New World Order the economies of many developed countries have ostensibly never looked better, the truth is that the distribution of wealth is dramatically uneven. American CEOs are paid on average 419 times more than their workers, while the gap between the rich and poor in most societies is growing rapidly, including, sadly, in Australia. What is more, of the 100 largest global economies 52 are corporations and only 48 are countries.
The economic rationalist/free trade ethic embodied in the WTO also demands major spending reductions by nations in social programs such as health, education, wage support and support for small business. The effects of these catastrophic policies are cascading through Australian institutions as we can see every day in the news stories about our hospitals and universities. Yet as recent reportage in this paper has revealed, the very governments that are starving our medical and education systems with one hand are doling out massive subsidies to large corporations with the other.
All this is but the tip of the iceberg.
Those who dismiss critics of the WTO as economic Luddites are out of touch with reality, the reality of egalitarianism and a fair go that has until recently been the hallmark of civilised society, especially Australia's.
To participate in this flight from reality by according it our silent assent would be the ultimate folly.
The Seattle demonstrations were a long-overdue wake-up call about the WTO that the Big End of Town would have preferred we did not hear. But we did.
Helen Caldicott is a pediatrician, founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and secretary of Our Common Future Party.