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 world’s 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 world’s largest corporations and financial institutions.

Who Makes the Decision?

Under this new system, many decisions affecting people’s 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 WTO’s 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.

Globalization’s 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 d’etat, 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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