NOTES FROM NADER Trading
Away Democracy
In approving the far-reaching, powerful World Trade Organization and other
international trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S.
Congress, like legislatures and governments of other nations, has ceded much of its
capacity to independently advance health and safety standards that protect citizens and
has accepted harsh legal limitations on what domestic policies it may pursue.
Approval of these agreements has institutionalized a global economic and political
structure that makes every government increasingly hostage to an unaccountable system
designed to increase corporate profit, often with complete disregard for social and
ecological consequences.
This new governing system is poised to generate enormous generic control over the
minute details of the lives of the majority of the of the worlds people.
The new system is not based on the health and economic well-being of workers and
consumers, but rather on the enhancement of the power and wealth of the worlds
largest corporations and financial institutions.
Who Makes the Decision?
Under this new system, many decisions affecting peoples daily lives are
being shifted away from our local and national governments and instead are being made by a
group of unelected trade bureaucrats sitting behind closed doors in Geneva, Switzerland.
These bureaucrats, for example, are now empowered to dictate whether people in California
can prevent the destruction of their last virgin forests or determine if carcinogenic
pesticides can be banned from their food, or whether the European countries have the right
to ban the use of untested biotech materials in their food.
Moreover, once the WTOs secret tribunals issue their edicts, no independent
appeals are possible. Worldwide conformity is required.
Government of, by, and for Corporations
At stake is the very basis of democracy and accountable decision-making that is
the necessary undergirding of any citizen struggle for just distribution of wealth and
adequate health, safety, and environmental protections.
The erosion of democratic accountability, and the local, state, and national
sovereignty that is its embodiment, has taken place over the past several decades. The
globalization of commerce and finance has been shaped by multinational companies that, in
the absence of global rules, simply conducted their business to suit their needs.
Establishment of the WTO marks a landmark formalization and strengthening of this
heretofore ad hoc system.
Best described as corporate economic globalization, this new economic system is
characterized by the establishment of supranational limitations on the legal and practical
ability of any nation to subjugate commercial activity to more important human values
through democratically enacted laws.
Globalizations tactic is to eliminate democratic decision-making and
accountability over matters as intimate as the safety of food, pharmaceuticals, and motor
vehicles, or the way in which a country may use or conserve its land, water, minerals, and
other resources.
As such, WTO-led globalization is a slow motion coup detat, a low intensity
war waged to redefine free society-democracy as a big business-controlled, "free
market," in which our active power as citizens is beneath the growing power of the
corporate government.
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