Globalisation documents: PART 4.

"In secret governments are negotiating the end to all not-for-profit public services. In less than two years, 130 plus governments expect to quietly sign an agreement called GATS."

Not so long ago things like health, education and water were regarded as rights, which governments were to extend to all citizens. Now they have been transformed into commodities private corporations sell to the highest bidder, and if some can’t afford them that’s too bad.

"The philosophy of GATS is the auctioning of vital resources and essential services and transforming them from fundamental rights of citizens to markets for global corporations."

"The promise is that services would be provided more efficiently and prices of essential services would reduce. But the experience of water privatisation in Bolivia, Puerto Rico and Argentina and energy privatisation in California and Maharashtra state in India shows that this is totally false."

"…water, health and education cannot be guaranteed to all members of society because theyare no longer rights provided through public services, but are commodities to be bought in the market place."

"The; US and European Union pressure to commercialise essential services through GATS so that their corporations can make money out of the survival needs of the poor is a new wave of the genocide unleashed through WTO."

"Trade liberalisation of agriculture is killing thousands of farmers, the TRIPS agreement is denying cures to millions suffering from Malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS."

Commerce moving into education:

The Youth News Network provides Canadian schools with television etc equipment…in exchange for the right to broadcast 2.5 minutes of advertisements into all classrooms each day.

One undesirable effect of the increasing commercialisation of education is the reluctance of academics to jeopardise their institution’s capacity to earn money from the corporate world.

The Australia Institute found "…that more than half the academics in a nation-wide poll, believe that growing dependence on private sector money prevents them from criticising the oganisations on which their university depends.

One in three said they could not shard knowledge because of "commercial in confidence" arrangements.

17% said they had not been allowed to publish contentious results. Academics tend to focus on safe research topics.

Note that academics now have to solicit more of their research funding from business, again meaning they will be reluctant to study or say things that are critical of the corporate world.

Because universities must attract fee paying students they will be increasingly inclined to offer vocational courses.

Problems will only be studied if they promise profitable conclusions. Problems suffered by poor people will be ignored.

McMurtry refers to "...a plan for systematic takeover of public education and higher research, a bigger prize in net monetary value than past colonial occupations. The ...domestic public sector has replaced the external colony as the target for private capital occupation and growth."

Extracts from THE LAST FRONTIER: M. Barlow, The Ecologist, 31, 1, Feb., 2001, pp 38-

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You probably haven't heard of GATS - few people have… But you should know what it will mean for you. ..negotiations are still, quietly, going on. Their purpose is, simply, to prise open the whole world's public services to corporate takeover; to make the very concept of public services not only unlikely, but probably illegal.

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GATS is paving the way for the privatisation of public services all across the world. Nothing will be exempt - education, health care, social services, postal services, museums and libraries, public transport; all will be opened up to corporate interests. Every and any service currently provided by governments in the name of the public good will be opened up to private corporations, and run for profit. GATS could, quite simply, be globalisation's last frontier: the end of the very concept of not-for-profit public services.

GATS will come into force in over 130 countries, quietly and with little fuss, in less than two years. If nothing is done.

The General Agreement on Trade in Services is one of more than twenty trade agreements administered and enforced by the World Trade Organisation. …

The mandate of GATS is the liberalisation of trade in plain English, this means the dismantling of government barriers to the privatisation of public services. Its aim is to make it impossible for governments to run public services on a not-for-profit basis, without the participation of private companies. GATS will allow the WTO to restrict government actions relating to public services through a set of legally binding constraints. Any government disobeying the rulings of the WTO will face sanctions.

So what will happen if GATS is implemented? … Between them, the corporations identified the following priority areas for trade liberalisation: health care; hospital care; home care; dental care; child care; elder care; education primary secondary and post-secondary; museums; libraries; law; social assistance; architecture; energy; water services; environmental protection services; real estate; insurance; tourism; postal services; transportation; publishing; broadcasting and many others.

The implications of this are chilling. It means that 137 countries of the WTO are about to agree to open up public services, lock stock and barrel, to free trade laws which have allowed the WTO to strike down health, food safety and environmental laws in dozens of countries. The corporate wolves being allowed into the last remaining fold. And once will be too late to ever get them out.

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Unlike any other global institution, the WTO has and the lelgislative and judicial power to challenge the laws, practices and policies of individual countries and strike them down if they are 'trade restrictive'. The WTO contains no minimum standards to protect labour, human rights, social or environmental standards; every single time (but one) that the WTO has been used domestic health, food safety, fair trade or environment the WTO has won. Over the past six years, the operation show that it has become the most powerful, secretive, and ant-democratic body on Earth, rapidly assuming the mantle of government and actively seeking to broaden its powers and reach.

Public services are next in line for the WTO's corporate battering ram. Global corporations have been so successful in persuading governments everywhere that their agendas are the same — that the pursuit of corporate profit and the good of society are one and the same — that their access to many areas of public life has already been improved. Now they want to go the whole hog. Services is the fastest-growing sector in international trade, and offer rich pickings for canny corporations. And of all public services, health, education and water are shaping up to be the most potentially lucrative. Global expenditures on water now exceed $1 trillion every year; on education, they exceed $2 trillion, and on health care, they exceed $3.5 trillion.

In many parts of the world, what GATS will accelerate has already begun.

The USA might suggest a model for the dismantling of public services which GATS will unleash all over the world. In America health care has already become a huge business, with giant health-care corporations registered on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Many parts of the 'Third World' have been forced to dismantle their public infrastructures in recent decades under Intern Monetary Fund-imposed structural adjustment programs. I to be eligible for debt relief, for example, dozens of 'developing' tries have been forced to abandon public social programs over the last 20 years, allowing foreign corporations to come in and sell health and education ‘products' to 'consumers’ who can afford them and leaving millions without basic social services. Latin American countries are currently experiencing an invasion of US health corporations and Asian countries allow branch plants of foreign university and health care chains. Recently, the World Bank has been forcing the same countries to privatise their water services openly working with corporate water giants like Vivendi a Lyonnaise des Eaux, to establish their 'rights' to profiteer in the World.

Now, through the GATS negotiations, these corporations want binding, global and irreversible rules guaranteeing them access to government service contracts everywhere in the world. And they are succeeding. Already, over 40 countries, including all of Europe, have listed education within the realm of the GATS, opening up their public education sectors to foreign based corporate competition. Almost 100 countries have done the same with health care.

As the new talks progress, it will be very hard for any country to swim against the tide - even if any are brave enough to try.

The existing GATS agreement - which is by no means finalised, and could get even worse - covers all service sectors and most government measures, including laws, practices, regulations and guidelines, written and unwritten. No government measure that affects trade in services, whatever its aim, even for environmental or consumer protection, universal coverage or to enforce labour standards, is beyond the reach of GATS. Nothing public is safe.

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Together, these proposals will hugely expand the authority of the WTO day-to-day business of governments. They will make the exercise of democratic control over the future of basic public services ! al impossibility.

HOW GATS WILL AFFECT YOU.

Every single aspect of public life will be affected by GATS. Already as a result of economic globalisation, every country in the world is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Wealth is gushing to the top as a growing economic chasm separates those who are benefiting from the system from an ever-expanding underclass. To ensure what American education writer Jonathan Kozol calls 'survival of the children of the fittest,' a tiered system of education and social security becoming the norm all over the world as we collectively abandon earlier dream of universal rights. We are creating top schools and health care systems for the elite of the world and a tiered system no system at all for those who don't count.

The GATS serves this corporate, profit-driven vision of society. It’s important to understand, in no-nonsense terms, what is at stake.

Under the proposed GATS regime, foreign health and education corporations will have the right to establish themselves in any WTO country. They will have the right to compete for public money with public institutions like hospitals and schools. Standards for health and education professionals will be subject to WTO rules to ensure they are not an 'impediment to trade'. Degree-granting authority will be given to foreign-based education corporations. … countries won’tybe able to stop the trans-border competition of low-cost health and education professionals.

Already, the WTO Services Division has hired a private company called the Global Alliance for Transnational Education to document worldwide policies that 'discriminate against foreign education providers'. The results of this 'study' will be used to pressure those countries that still retain a public education sector to relinquish it to the global market.

Disturbingly, GATS also includes authority over 'environmental services' and natural resource protection. Our parks, wildlife, river systems, and forests could all become contested areas as global transnational 'environmental service' corporations demand the competitive model for their 'management'. Profit-hungry child care chains would invade every country, as would prison chains like Wackenhut its reputation for violence and abuse against both prisoners and staff. Virtually unlimited access to foreign suppliers would have to be given to municipal contracts in construction, sewage, garbage disposal, sanitation, tourism and water services.

Simply put, the 'commons'- or what's left of it - will come under full assault if GATS is enacted. What used to be areas of common heritage, like seeds and genes, air and water, culture and heritage, health care and education, will be slated to be commodified, privatised and sold to the highest bidder on the open market countries like Canada and France, which have (and cherish) national universal health care and education systems will lose them.

The World Trade Organisation will soon set up a new working group to study 'transparency in government procurement practices' and develop elements for 'an appropriate agreement'. Whilst the study and the agreement only cover transparency (and not the practices themselves), the major countries pushing this issue have made clear their ultimate goal: to fully integrate the lucrative multi-billion-dollar government procurement market into the WTO rules and system. This will have serious implications. For, if the North gets its way, governments in developing countries in future will not be allowed to give preference to local companies to supply goods and services or to carry out development projects.

. .

But the prime mover of this initiative, the United States, has made it clear that in its scenario, this is only a first step towards a full-scale opening up of the 'market' for government procurement for foreign companies.

What the major countries especially want to see eradicated in developing countries are the types of government procurement policies and practices that currently favour local enterprises and people–practices that the major industrialised countries had followed not too long ago within their countries and which had benefited some of their giant corporations.

"Powerful transnational groupings like the Coalition of Service industries in the US have long protested that the public ownership of health care in many countries has been an impediment to the ambitions of American private sector interests - with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries at the forefront."

The WTO argues that in health systems in which there is a combination of public and private funding, health service provision "...should be wide open to foreign corporations. In other words, in much of the developing and developed word everything from hospitals and outpatient clinics to home care facilities will be up for grabs. Income and health inequalities will continue to widen."

The corporations are out to control water supply. "Instead of letting countries treat it as a commonly held resource allocated for the general good, they want it considered as a commodity traded by private investors for profit." The claim is that "...water, ...is merely one form of goods, subject to the new rules of global trade. We're talking about ...whole lakes and acquifiers bought and mined, rivers siphoned off, the Great Lakes themselves on the market. ...multinationals are ready to use supertankers, pipelines, canals, river re-routing, and their mammoth schemes to shift the product from the water-rich to those willing to pay top dollar."

"Global Water Corporation...has cut a deal with Sitka, Alaska, to haul 18 billion gallons of water per year from nearby Blue Lake to China."

"The great Recycling and Northern Development Canal involves building a dike across James Bays to capture water from 20 rivers that fed it, converting the bay into a giant reservoir, then building a network of canals, dams, and locks to move the water 400 miles south to Georgian Bay, where it would be "flushed through" the Great Lakes into pipelines that would take it to America's Sun Belt for lawn watering, golf course sprinkling and other essentials."

"The McCurdy Group hopes to 'harvest' some 13 billion gallons of water a year from one of that province's lakes, pipe it to the coast, pump it into old oil tankers, and ship it to the Middle East for a hefty profit."

The pressure is intense to let the market decide who gets water.

"Sun Belt Water Inc, based in Santa Barbara, California, has filed the first NAFTA water case. It had an agreement with a British Colombia (Canada) company to ship water in tankers from British Colombia to Southern California. But such an outcry ensued when the scheme became public the provincial government enacted a moratorium on all water exports. The corporation sued Canada in 1998...under NAFTA's Chapter11, and claimed that Canada owed it $468 million."

The corporations "...will deliver the water to whoever will pay the most"

The …(proposed GATS)…treaty does not allow a country to discriminate in favour of its own community values and systems for delivering aged care, communications, transport, child care, health, education, environmental services, etc. Profits will have to be made from services, not just community need determining delivery. Overseas, water and education are two services already badly distributed by privatisation. The rich usually end up with lots more services than the poor. Even the environment will be labelled as a service to be privately administered!
Under GATS, Australia will not be able to " subsidise" (= give taxpayer‚s money) to hospitals, schools, universities, aged care, childcare, the arts or any other without giving equal amounts to similar private, usually foreign-based, corporations that have won a contract to operate a service in Australia. Health and education corporations will ship in cadres of cheaper workers.
If you ask your local pollie, he will parrot the WTO line that countries can protect areas they wish, but deep in these thick legal documents there are clause saying we can only protect services with no private element. All services do and should have some private element, so none can be protected.

The application of conventional economic policies in Eastern Europe is a deliberate strategy to cause immense destruction and then take over these economies:

There are clear political objectives; to dismantle the production structures of the countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR in order to reincorporate them into world capitalism as subordinate peripheries…to demoralise working classes, and to reinforce the new comprador bourgeoisie…" 21

The collapse of the USSR has been an enormous boom for capitalism; huge opportunities for takeover and investment.

According to Martin Khor of the Third World Network in Malaysia, "What is called globalization today has been called colonization the Third World for the past 500 years, ever since the Indians discovered that Columbus had landed on their shore." What globalization means to the South is that an already bad situation will get worse.

What they want is the right to enter any country they want, establish operations in any country they want, buy whatever they want, repat ate as much profit as they want and demand the "harmonization" environrnental and labour laws to any extent they want. This would strip governments of their ability to regulate corporations and investment.

World Bank funded projects often "...displace the poor so that the lands and waters on which they depend for their livelihoods can be converted to uses that generate economic returns, meaning converted to use by people who can pay more than those who are displaced."

The World Bank is perhaps the most important instrument of the developed capitalist countries for prying state control of its Third World member countries out of the hands of nationalists and socialists who would regulate international capital’s inroads, and turning that power to the service of international capital.

Colonies provided the means by which the European powers could secure access to cheap food, cheap raw materials and cheap labour, plus new markets for manufactured goods and new investment opportunities. It was as simple as that. Where economic penetration could be achieved through trade, was no need to annex countries outright. Where this could not be achieved the West sought to impose its will by gunboat diplomacy, eg the opium forced on China, or through direct political rule, as in India. 1944 saw the Bretton Woods agreement. Its main objective was to reduce the possibility of another 1929 depression. The best means of doing so , it was decided, was to bring the colonies further into the orbit of the Western industrial system so as to provide a continuously expanding market for w manufactures, whilst maintaining the supply of cheap food and raw materials.

Three key institutions were set up to implement the policy: The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and in 1948 the General Agreement on tariffs and Trade. Together these agencies formed a single integrated structure, dominated by US interests, and effectively in control of the world’s economy. The original role or the IMF was to make sure that member nations pegged their currencies to the US dollar or to gold, of which the US held 72% of the world supplies. This made it difficult for debtor countries to get out of their financial obligations to the Western Banking System by manipulating their currencies. The World Bank, after the reconstruction of Europe, turned its attention to the Third World, its main aim being to prevent Third World countries from making goods locally which could be bought from western countries.

The IMF complements the work of GATT. Loans either from the IMF or World Bank have only been provided by governments that have undertaken to observe IMF conditions. These are

• Scrap import quotas and reduce import tariffs thereby preventing Third World countries from protecting their fledgeling industries
• Devalue their currency to make their exports cheaper to the larger nations - and which means that the Third world has to pay more for imports;
• Cut expenditure on Social Welfare, especially on subsidies to the poor;
• Undertake to mechanize agriculture, thus providing an important market for Western agricultural machinery and agro chemicals.

Those nations which have resisted these policies have quickly discovered that the gunboat mentality of the colonial era is far from dead!

But despite all the measures taken over the past forty years to open up markets in the Third World, multinational corporations, despite the fact they already control 80% to 90% of the trade in tea, coffee, cocoa, cotton, forest products, tobacco, jute, copper, iron ore, and bauxite, still insist that they do not have sufficient access to world markets and are seeking further concessions. In particular, they want to extend GATT so that it encompasses services such as advertising, stockbroking, and banking. They want the few remaining restrictions on investment to be removed so that they have total freedom to invest how they want and where they want.

If the new rules are implemented, it would be "GATT-illegal"

• To re-regulate the investments and operations of foreign companies if the regulations can be deemed a barrier to trade. Logging companies, toxic waste companies, mining companies, etc would have a free hand to act as they liked within World countries;
• To restrict in any way, the importation of cheap agricultural produce. This would drastically undermine the livelihoods of local farmers who cannot compete with foreign imports;
• To take vulnerable eroding land out of use.
• To take measures to protect scarce resources if such measures are judged to be in restraint of trade;
• For one country to impose stricter pollution controls than those in force elsewhere, if those controls interfere with trade.

The recently signed Canada - US Free Trade Agreement provides a foretaste of what is in store. The Canadians have been forced to abandon measures to protect threatened Pacific salmon. Canada is prevented from restricting the sale of its water resources to the USA even in times of drought. Canadians have been forced to bring their pesticide regulations into line with the far laxer US standards. Canada's ban on the sale of irradiated food has been judged illegal, as have Canadian proposals to reduce emissions from lead, zinc, and copper smelters.

The Economic Reformer, 729 April, 1990, 3.4.

Operating in conjunction with transnationalist interests in the South, northern capital has skilfully exploited the weak bargaining position of

indebted Southern countries to force through programmes that further open up the South to northern commercial interests. State enterprises have been privatised; whole sectors of the economy deregulated; tariffs and other trade barriers removed; and controls on the movement of capital "liberalised’"

North’s intention to open up markets.

The expressed intention of major countries was primarily to open up all remaining national economic spaces in developing countries by removing their present legitimate barriers and safeguards that were now in place, so that the big corporations of the North could have greater and greater 'market access' in the South.

…WTO rewards the strong and ruthless and punishes the weak and poor. In fact it defines the criteria for success and failure, for survival and collapse. Its paradigm places profits and greed above all else, and its unregulated operation will continue to downgrade development, social and environmental concerns at both national and international levels.

It is the antithesis to sustainable development and to global partnership.

J. Mander, "Facing the rising tide", In J. mander and E. Goldsmith, Eds., The Case Against the Global Ecohnomy, 1997.p. 12.

"...almost every politician in the US and Australia must become or has become, in some degree, an advocate for business. ..."...governments reactively and continually place business interests before public interests."

"Globalization is not about trade. It is about power and control. It is the reshaping of the by world into one without borders ruled a dictatorship of the world's most powerful central banks, commercial banks and multinational companies.

…with capital mobile and labour relatively immobile, all of the advantages labour has gained in the last two hundred years of organizing, including wages above subsistence, social security, unemployment insurance, child labour laws, health insurance, paid vacations, the right to organize and strike - will disappear. All of these advantages enjoyed due to hard bargaining by American Labor, will be wiped out if we have to compete with Mexican labour in the maquiladores, with free trade zones in the rest of the Third World, with the limitless labour supplies of China and India, all at the subsistence level. Capital has learned to move in the last few decades, and the results are already seen in a 10% lower standard of living in the USA. This is only the beginning of the "advantages" of free trade, which will indeed convert us into a "global village". And who are the winners in our drive to free trade? The owners of capital.

"...some 500 billion dollars worth of Russian assets...have been confiscated through the privatisation programs and forced bankruptcies and transferred into the hands of Western capitalists...an entire economic and social system is being dismantled."

"The appropriation of global wealth through this manipulation of market forces is routinely supported by the IMF's lethal macro-economic interventions which act almost concurrently in ruthlessly disrupting national economies all over the world."

"In 1997 more than 100 billion dollars of Asia's hard currency reserves had been confiscated and transferred into private financial hands...real earnings and employment plummeted virtually overnight leading to mass poverty."

"The so-called "free trade" treaties are not about trade, but about opening up the world’s economies, resources, and labour pools to unregulated exploitation by the multinationals."

Access to those sessions, known as 'green rooms', was limited to members invited or endorsed by Barshefsky and Moore. The meetings were held at undisclosed locations and delegates from poor countries complained that it remained unclear which members had been consulted on what.

US trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky presided over a totally undemocratic process. She announced on the second day her 'right' as chairman of the conference to use procedures of her own choosing to get a Declaration out of the meeting, a statement that infuriated the developing country delegations.

Barshefsky and the WTO Director-General Mike Moore set up several 'green room' meetings, some running simultaneously, on key issues of disagreement. Only 10 or 20 countries (the major powers plus a few selected developing countries) were invited to a typical such meeting.

The plan of the organisers was to get the major powers (mainly the US and the EU) to agree among themselves, then apply pressure in the green rooms on a few influential developing countries to go along, and then pull together a Declaration to launch a new round which all members would be coerced to accept in a special meeting on the last day.

The vast majority of developing countries were shut out of the whole green-room process. They were not even informed which meetings were going on or what was being discussed.

Ministers and senior officials of most developing countries were left hanging around in the corridors or the canteen, trying to catch snippets of news or negotiating texts.

Their anger at the insult of being at the receiving end of such shabby treatment boiled over on the third day of the conference. The African Ministers issued a strong statement that there was 'no transparency' in the meeting, that African countries were generally excluded on issues vital to their future.

What has been going on in Seattle is a scandal. Developing countries that form more than two thirds of the members of the WTO are being coerced and stampeded by the major powers, especially by the host country the US, to agree to a Declaration which they were given very little opportunity to draft or to consider.

Most of the important negotiations have taken place in "green room" meetings where only a few countries are invited. Most of he developing-country members of the WTO have not been able to participate. Even if a country is invited to meeting on a particular issue, it may not be a participant in other issues. Many developing countries were not invited to any meeting on any issue at all.

As a result most Ministers have been insulted by their not being able to take part in decisions that seriously affect their countries and people. Worse, they have had little chance to even know what is being discussed, by whom or where.

The basic procedure for establishing the new rules is that the rich countries work out between themselves what suits them, then invite the Third World nations to join in. Poor countries can’t trade freely with rich countries if they don’t.

Eventually, Guyana was invited ' to a Green Room meeting, but 'it turned out to be a joke,' said Rohee. ( 'After we made our voice heard, I received an invitation to a Green Room meeting on agriculture. To my

amusement, when I turned up at the meeting, the chairman of the meeting, presented this 'non-paper' to us. We were informed no changes could be made. I created a stink. I asked what is the status of this document, and why are we called here. When I was told we were only invited here to be informed, I felt it wasn't a serious meeting at all. It was only a joke. The chairman and a senior WTO Secretariat official were trying to bamboozle us to accept their draft on agriculture. I told the official, you are from the Secretariat, you should shut up, I am a Minister, it is for me to discuss this issue. All the Ministers in the room packed up our files and walked out.

'We found out that this so-called Green Room meeting, which was held on the second floor, was only a diversion. Since we had asked to take part in a Green Room meeting, they gave one to us.

They were only paying lip service to transparency and inclusiveness. The reality was opposite. If there had been a draft Declaration placed before us (on the last day) there would have been a total revolt. The African, Caribbean and Latin American countries had issued statements protesting the process.

In reality, however, in the past five years the WTO has contributed tothe concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich few; increasing poverty for the majority of the world's population and unsustainable patterns of production and consumption.

Barlow says of the current GATS meetings, "…our governments are meeting behind closed doors once again to carve up our rights for the benefit of their corporate friends."

Prime minister Howard sent 8 representatives to oversee Australia’s interests at the Seattle WTO talks; all were from corporations.

"Agreements are supposedly reached by consensus but in reality the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan reach agreements which are then presented to smaller and developing countries."

Delegations are not representative. "The Australian Seattle delegation included eight business representatives and no other community organisations."

"WTO complaint processes, conducted behind closed doors, have consistently defined environmental regulation and food labelling regulation as barriers to trade."

In the last year the Australian government moved to change the law protecting the Australian salmon industry from imported salmon (which might contain diseases), without any attempt to resist.

"In the United States the original idea of NAFTA was to ram it through in secret...The NAFTA agreement was signed in August of 1992 right in the middle of the presidential campaign. All eyes were focused on the election. It was barely even reported."

"There is a US law which says the labour movement has to be consulted on trade agreements. This was ignored; they were not even told about the agreement until a month after it was signed, then were given one day to submit their response!

In the United States public opinion polls showed the general public against NAFTA even after incessant propaganda, but the mass media supported and it was passed.

In country after country social democratic parties have accepted neo-liberalism, despite the contrary preferences of great majorities of their voting constituencies.

"The WTO was put in place following the signing of a 'technical agreement' negotiated behind closed doors by bureaucrats. Even the heads of country level delegations to Marrakesh in 1994 were not informed regarding the statutes of the World Trade Organisation which were drafted in separate closed sessions by technocrats."

"...the process of actual creation of the WTO...is blatantly illegal'...a 'totalitarian' intergovernmental body has been casually installed in Geneva, empowered under international law with the mandate to 'police' country level economic and social policies, derogating the soverign rights of national governments."

"...the articles of the WTO are not only in contradiction with pre-existing national and international laws, they are also at variance with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

M. Chossudowsky, "Seattle and Beyond; Disarming the New World Order." Economic Reform Australia Newsletter, 25th Nov., 1999.

"The public hasn’t the foggiest idea what’s going on. In fact, they can’t know. One reason is that NAFTA is a secret. It’s an executive agreement which is not publicly available."

__From start to finish, all elements of the negotiation, adoption, and implementation of the recent globalized "free trade" agreements were designed to foreclose citizen participation.

Preventing public understanding of trade rules: Meetings of the advisory groups are closed to the public, with representatives required to obtain a security clearance from the government after a background check. All documents are considered confidential...

Once a trade agreement is completed, any person who wants to figure out what the agreement says faces a herculean task. The first difficulty is to obtain a copy of the actual text. When then
President Bush announced that he had come to a final NAFTA deal with Mexico and Canada in August I992, he gave an optimistic spin to the agreement. But the actual text was not made available to the American people at his news conference or any other time. An unofficial text appeared a month later, but the official 752-page text, priced at $4I, was not available until after Bush left office in I993.

The second difficulty is that the agreements are unnecessarily complex. Only those with an expansive knowledge of GATT-ese or NAFTA-ese can comprehend what the texts mean for their jobs, food, or environment. Third, in many countries, the GATT text was simply not available at all. Although the Uruguay Round negotiations were completed in December I993, by October I994 (months after the agreement was to have been approved in most countries) it still had not been translated into Japanese for the Japanese Diet or for the public. Translations of the text became available only a few days before it was approved—unread—by the Diet. Many governments around the world failed to translate the agreement into their languages at all but approved it anyway.

This difficulty in obtaining and understanding the actual agreements was no accident; it reflected a purposeful effort by globalization proponents to conceal the agreements' terms and effects from the public, the news media, and even the parliamentary bodies that approved it.

US government subsidies to business, $75 billion in cash subsidies, plus $60 billion in tax breaks. Hawken estimates that corporations get more subsidies from the government than they pay in tax.

Estes (Tyranny of the Bottom Line) estimates that corporations cost the economy $2,400 billion p.a., due to things like unsafe vehicles.

In the 1950s corporations paid 39% of US tax, and individuals paid 61% of US federal tax. In the year 1990-5 corporations paid 19% and individuals paid 81%.

The corporate share of local taxes fell from 45% in 1957 to 16% in 1987.

Examples of Corporate Deals in NSW:

. $15.5 million in payroll tax concessions etc. To induce Optus to make NSW its centre of operations.

• $5.5 million in subsidies to American Express to set up headquarters in Sydney.

• $5.2 million to Motorola to set up a wireless communication centre in NSW.

. $48 million to pay television operator Australis Media, to set up its production centre in Sydney.

• $0.5 million to Cathay Pacific to set up a data processing centre at Baulkham Hills.

In 1977, for example, the state of Ohio in the US 'induced Honda to build

its auto plant there by promising $22 million in subsidies and tax breaks: by1986 it took a $100 m. package from Kentucky for Toyota to create about the same number of jobs there' (Reich, 1992, p. 296). When in 1985 Mitsubishi announced that it would begin assembling automobiles in America, four states competed for the plant. The 'winner' was Illinois, with a ten-year package of $276 m. in incentives and direct aid costing about $25 000 a year for each new job to be created. 45.

Corporate mergers and acquisitions grew at a rate of almost 50 percent per year in every year but one between 1992 and 1998. Globally, more than two trillion dollars worth of mergers were announced in the first three quarters of 1999.15 the greatest merger wave in capitalist history

Increasingly we are faced with a world economy governed by financial speculation and the attempt to create global monopoly (or oligopoly) power…

S. George, A short History of Neo-liberalism, ERA Email Netowork, 17.7.1999.

"Over 80% of this foreign investment is takeover of domestic firms." 60.

Mergers and Acquisitions at Record Levels, especially in Australia. In the first half of this year global mergers and acquisitions showed a 54% rise in activity, reaching $44 billion. Five of the top six global deals were in telecommunications and technology, but nearly 30% of local deals were in financial services. Australia continues to have one of the highest levels of cross border M & A activity in the world, half of it involving foreign bidders.

The number of mergers has increased at 50% p.a. in the 1990s!

Corporate mergers and acquisitions grew at a rate of almost 50 percent per year in every year but one between 1992 and 1998. Globally, more than two trillion dollars worth of mergers were announced in the first three quarters of 1999.15 the greatest merger wave in capitalist history

Increasingly we are faced with a world economy governed by financial speculation and the attempt to create global monopoly (or oligopoly) power…

80% of all foreign investment goes into mergers and acquisitions. 14.

The campaign in the US to privatise the pension scheme. The Social Security fund constitutes a huge sum of money now under the control of the government that the business world is itching to get its hands on "The prospect of 140 million new investment accounts, from which financial interests can extract fees and commissions, is a potential gravy train that capital simply can’t resist." "The Bush campaign received its largest contributions from the investment (securities) industry, which has made privatization of Social Security its primary political goal."

The privatisation of health services clearly raises costs and reduces the number covered. The US spends 11% of DGDP on health, but the UK with a more public system spends 6%, and the effects are not better in the US. 92.

The privatization of municipal water services has a terrible record that is well documented. Customer rates are doubled or tripled; corporate profits rise as much as 700 per cent; corruption and bribery are rampant; water quality standards drop, sometimes dramatically; overuse is promoted to makemoney; customers who can't pay are cut off. In France, both water giants Vivendi and Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux have been repeatedly cited for corruption. When water was privatized in Great Britain, water meters were installed in homes and company employees shut off service tomany thousands of customers who could not pay their full water bills. When privatization hits the Third World, those who can't pay will die. The Bolivia story has a happy ending (for now). By the hundreds of thousands, Bolivians marched to Cochabamba in a showdown with the government. On April 10, they won. The Bolivian government kicked Bechtel out of the country and revoked its water-privatization legislation. Oscar Olivera, the humble Bolivian shoe maker who led the fight, brought his message to a Washington rally during the recent IMF/World Bank meetings. He said if water is privatized and commodified for profit, it will never reach the people who need it but serve only to make a handful of water corporations very rich. There is no way to overstate the crisis of fresh water facing the world today. No piecemeal solution will prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems. A radical rethinking of our values, priorities and political systems is urgent and still possible. Water belongs to the Earth and all species; no one must be allowed to expropriate it for profit.

…from M. Barlow.

"…the state…once defended social values against adverse market impacts, but is now generally supportive of global capitalism and is left with much of the blame for its ill effects." Xi

In Argentina and Bolivia following privatisation of water supplies, … Charges have increased enormously while the service has worsened.

The two French giants and their subsidiaries have been signing highly remunerative privatisation contracts on the water market for 15 years.
The market is dominated by two big French multinationals, Vivendi-Générale des eaux and Suez-Lyonnaise des eaux. They now control nearly 40% of the world market, eachserving, and billing, more than 110m people, Vivendi in 100 countries, Lyonnaise in 130.

In Tucuman, Argentina, in 1997 the population started a civil disobedience campaign against a Vivendi subsidiary, refusing to pay their bills in protest at deteriorating water quality and doubled charges. Générale des eaux had acquired the province's privatised water and sewerage concessions in 1993. But its immediate increase in the price of those services (averaging 104%) brought protests from the consumers.

(You can't stop them using your resources…) The WTO's Qatar meeting in November saw more privatisation. Under the heading "trade and environment", article 31 of the final agreement calls for "the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services," including water. This makes any attempt to control commercial exports of water illegal.

"Water is now a luxury in Alto Lima," according to a worker sacked by Aguas del Illimani. A luxury he can no longer afford.

Cochabamba in Bolivia is the only town where the local people, together with peasants from the surrounding area, have found the strength and resources to respond and reverse the privatisation of the water supply (7).

17. SOCIAL DAMAGE CAUSED.

See also the section "Nature and effects of globalisation".

"Since multinationals pay little tax, these services are becoming increasingly hard for governments to provide."

Between 1981 and 1992,federal spending for subsidised housing fell by 82%; job training and employment programs were cut by 63%, and the budget for community development and social service block grants was trimmed by 40%. Between 1972 and 1992, welfare and food-stamp benefits for single mothers declined by an average of 27% nationwide…no state in the early 1990s …provided grants and subsidiesequal to 100 percent of the poverty level."

To sum up: the 'Fordist' labour market typical of the post-WW2 welfare

state is giving way to a more 'flexible' and fragmented labour market where average wages, benefits and job security are lower than was typical of the Fordist era. Much of our evidence has been drawn from the US but similar trends can be seen at least in most of the English-speaking countries. If the evidence from the US is an indicator of the logic of globalization at work, it is clear that employers can no longer be relied upon to provide workers with good wages and benefits such as health insurance and pensions. Increasingly workers and their families are being left to fend for themselves, which they are less able to do in a situation of job insecurity and declining wages. 2

"Since multinationals pay little tax, these services are becoming increasingly hard for governments to provide."

Between 1981 and 1992,federal spending for subsidised housing fell by 82%; job training and employment programs were cut by 63%, and the budget for community development and social service block grants was trimmed by 40%. Between 1972 and 1992, welfare and food-stamp benefits for single mothers declined by an average of 27% nationwide…no state in the early 1990s …provided grants and subsidiesequal to 100 percent of the poverty level."

To sum up: the 'Fordist' labour market typical of the post-WW2 welfare

state is giving way to a more 'flexible' and fragmented labour market where average wages, benefits and job security are lower than was typical of the Fordist era. Much of our evidence has been drawn from the US but similar trends can be seen at least in most of the English-speaking countries. If the evidence from the US is an indicator of the logic of globalization at work, it is clear that employers can no longer be relied upon to provide workers with good wages and benefits such as health insurance and pensions. Increasingly workers and their families are being left to fend for themselves, which they are less able to do in a situation of job insecurity and declining wages. 28

I'm talking about massive wholesale moving of that water out of Canada to the highest bidders around the world, which is mostly going to go to the agribusiness corporations, suburban developments and the golf courses."

(Source not recorded.)

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). .. agreements effectively give transnational corporations the unprecedented right to the water of signatory countries.

Already, corporations have started to sue governments in order to gain access to domestic water sources. For example, Sun Belt, a California company, is suing the government of Canada under NAFTA because British Columbia (B.C.) banned water exports several years ago. The company claims that B.C.'s law violates several NAFTA-based investor rights and therefore is claiming $220 million in compensation for lost profits.

With the protection of these international trade agreements, companies are setting their sights on the mass transport of bulk water by diversion and by super-tanker.

The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) has issued a 46 page report, June 1999, titled: Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply, Author: Maude Barlow

How globalisation enables resources to be taken…

… the world is running out of fresh water sources at an alarming rate and that conflict over what remains will be inevitable.

To respond to the crisis,-the World Bank has recently adopted a policy of water privatization and full-cost water pricing. This policy is causing great distress in many Third World countries, which fear that their citizens will not be able to afford for-profit water. Ironically, this policy has also created the first of the "water wars" Mr. Serageldin predicted, the bloody civil unrest that plagued Bolivia in recent weeks.

Two years ago, the World Bank (whose official attends Bolivian government cabinet meetings as a full participant) refused to guarantee a $25-million (U.S.) loan to refinance water services in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third-largest city, unless the government sold the public water system to the private sector and passed the costs on to consumers. Only one bid was considered, and the utility was turned over to a subsidiary of a conglomerate led by Bechtel, the giant engineering company implicated in the infamous Three Gorges Dam in China, which has caused the forced relocation of 1.3 million people.

In January, 1999, before the company had even hung up its shingle, it announced the doubling of water prices. For most Bolivians, this meant that water would now cost more than food; for those on minimum wage or unemployed, water bills suddenly accounted for close to half their monthly budgets. To add insult, the World Bank granted absolute monopolies to private water concessionaires, announced its support for full-cost water pricing, pegged the cost of water to the American dollar and declared that none of its loan could be used to subsidize the poor for water services. All water, even from community wells, required permits to access, and peasants and small farmers even had to buy permits to gather rainwater on their property.

The "discipline imposed under SAPs "… has just one true mandate: to engineer a neoliberal world order so that first world countries can seize third world resources.

Extract from "The World Bank's practices allow the rich to steal from the poor". G. Monbiot, The Guardian, Thurs, April 13, 2000.

"The more global the economy the easier is their (corporations and banks) access to whatever of the world’s wealth remains." 82

The goal is to run down public institutions so they can be taken by corporations:

McMurtry refers to a strategy "…to defund all social sectors across the world which provide non-profit, life serving goods so that they can be commodified by for profit service corporations." This is an "…unseen program of corporate privatisation of the civil commons…"

"…liberalising their economies…means making them more open to corporations." Xi.

Former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor later explained that "the troubles of the tiger economies offered a golden opportunity for the West to reassert its commercial interests. When countries seek help from the IMF, Europe and America should use the IMF as a battering ram to gain advantage."

According to M. Kantor, former US trade official, "The IMF is being used as a battering ram to open up the doors of the Asian economies so that our companies can have market access."

McMurtry refers to "...a plan for systematic takeover of public education and higher research, a bigger prize in net monetary value than past colonial occupations. The ...domestic public sector has replaced the external colony as the target for private capital occupation and growth."

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