The "Free Trade Area of the Americas" (FTAA) is the largest
major campaign for the occupation of the planet by the global
corporate system. Like its predecessors, it will not respond to
resistance, or move beyond dictation of more of the same. This
is because its program is structured to be life-blind. Only
the rights of non-living corporations are recognized
Only further extension of these coporate rights is in fact
implemented - whatever the latest propaganda about "consulting
civil society", or the crocodile tears about "losing efforts" in
Paris and Seattle. All the new public relations packaging means
is that the propaganda about "inevitable change" and "global
prosperity" has failed, and so it is time to calm the people by
agreeing with their concerns, and carry on instituting and
enforcing the program just as before.
The world, however, has woken up to the global corporate coup
d'etat, and people are taking to the streets, now in Quebec City
in April 2001. Yes the corporate media will continue to block out
the life-and-death issues at stake, focus on the salable
spectacle of a large public confrontation, blame and trivialize the
thousands of opponents who are assaulted for putting
themselves on the line, and return to selling other images and
distractions once the violence entertainment is over.
Meanwhile the deepest and most systemic threat to civil and
planetary life the world has ever faced will persist and increase.
Behind the unfolding disasters of regional economies and
planetary ecosystems melting down, the threat is driven by an
underlying meta-program, in terms of which every decision,
every policy, every regulation and implementation is demanded
and instituted by servant governments. The meta-principles
constituting this mind-set are robotic, much like the mind-set of a
fanatic cult. But because they are presupposed by the
corporate party and its media and political servants as the given
order of the new world, they are never exposed as a deranged
program of mind. Only fragments and partial themes are
discerned, not the underlying structure as a dictatorial whole.
The invisible prison of this agenda for world rule always
conforms to the following meta-principles.
(1) The ultimate subject and sovereign ruler of the world is the
transnational corporation, operating by collective prescription
and enforcement through the World Trade Organization in
concert with its prototype the NAFTA, its European collaborator,
the EU, and such derivative regional instruments as the APEC,
the MAI, the FTAA, and so on. Together these constitute the
hierarchical formation of the planet's new rule by
extra-parliamentary and transnational fiat.
(2) Individual transnational corporations are the moving parts of
this global corporate system. They are non-living aggregates of
dominant private stock-holders who, as individual persons, are
made legally immune by "acts of incorporation" from any liability
for corporate harms done to societies, to other individuals, and
to the environment, as well from accumulated corporate debts
or offences against national and international law. This is the
legal armour around the agents of the global corporate system
which affords them with unaccountable impunity for whatever
damage or crime they impose on individuals, societies or
environments around the world.
(3) Transnational corporations acting in concert through the
WTO and its related supranational constructs prescribe to and
are represented by financed national government parties which
act in these matters solely on behalf of transnational corporate
access to foreign markets and resources with no barriers. This
private corporate rule over governments everywhere is evident
from the general facts that no binding regulation yet protects any
right but that of transnational corporate investors, and not one
article of any already signed international covenant or treaty
protecting human rights, labour or the environment is binding on
any part of any one of these unprecedentedly enforced
"agreements". Indeed, the Kyoto Treaty on climate-altering
gases, the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals and
emissions, the Basel Convention on transboundary pollutants as
well as the entire body of established international solemn
agreements and covenants on human and labour rights have
been consistently overridden by transnational corporate
practices or the explicit judgements of WTO trade panels.
(4) All such treaties and agreements obliging compliance with
transnational corporate rights are proposed, negotiated and
finalized behind closed doors and wide perimeters of armed
force, with police pepper spray, shackles, harassment or
surveillance for those who publicly protest. All these
agreements, moreover, rule out any other public participation in
or appeal against their decrees by anyone except corporate or
state representatives, and adjudicate all disputes in secret
before unelected authorities and tribunals, with no public or
elected observers of these proceedings permitted, and with no
record of their proceedings published for public view. Yet public
across the world are obliged to pay all the costs of negotiating,
instituting and enforcing these absolutist prescriptions to the
world's nations, and are forced also to pay all the fines and
trade penalities imposed on their own elected governments for
legislating democratic or environmentally protective policies
which are deemed to conflict with this unaccountable
transnational regulatory regime. This Orwellian arrangement is
known as "investor-state dispute resolution".
(5) All executive authorities within individual corporate bodies
are all the while bound by the "fiduciary duty" to maximize
monetized returns to their corporate stockholders (including in
particular themselves) as the overriding obligation of decisions
and actions, thereby compelling them by corporate charter
prescription to minimize all expenditures on protecting human
and non-human life by worker pay, social benefits or
environmental regulation. In this way, it becomes a violation of
legally binding corporate morality for its operations to take
account of the life interests of employees, surrounding
communities and environments, or even the future life of the
world ahead of shareholders' continuous maximization of money
profit.
(6) The system's universal principle of "rationality" is, in
consequence, to externalize all costs onto other individuals,
societies and environments so that no form of human existence
or responsibility such as "citizen" or "person" or "respecter of
life" is recognized by the corporate calculus or its state
servants. Only self-maximizing "profitable enterprises" and their
"consumers" exist to the mindset. This form of life is then
everywhere prescribed as "inevitable" for all peoples, and is
proclaimed by its agents to offer societies across the world "no
alternative".
(7) "Consumers", in turn, are not co-extensive with human
beings or even the majority of human beings. This is because
only humans with sufficient money-demand to purchase
corporate products are recognized by this global system as
possessing any right to access any good - from food and water
to housing, health-care and whatever else can be privatized for
profit. What can be "privatized", or in reality, corporatized for
profit, is accordingly assumed to include ever more of the
conditions of planetary existence without any limit. Genetic
structures, the body's most basic means of life, the elements of
nature, and publicly funded knowledge are all now being rapidly
disassembled, restructured and appropriated by transnational
corporations for their maximum private control and profit.
(8) Any alternative mode for production or distribution of any
priceable good - socially owned or controlled, publicly subsidized
or assisted domestically, self-sufficient or co-operative, or
declared without genetic modification or corporate additive is
made illegal under transnational trade regulations. If any society
or government is resistant, its economy is denounced through
state finance and trade offices and global mass media as
"non-competitive", "protectionist", "monopolist" or "communist",
and attacked on the ground by every means available to the
global corporate system, including transnational trade embargo
and armed invasion in abrogation of international criminal law.
This is the true and grave meaning of "global market freedom" in
the corporate system.
(9) Consumers and investors with sufficient money-demand to
exchange within the global market are, in fact, the only bearers
of freedoms recognized by this system, and are axiomatically
assumed to have no upper limit to their commodity consumption
or their demand acquisition, even if an increasing majority of
their fellow citizens or humanity have few or no means of
existence. This is the "non-satiety" principle of neo-classical
economics. It is also the unstated meaning of "equality of
opportunity" in global market doctrine and practice - the equality
of money demand for those who have it, and no-one else.
(10) There is within the global corporate system no requirement
of any kind, theoretical or practical, to recognize any life need of
any individual (e.g. nourishing food) or society (e.g. non-toxic
air) as rightful, or as a priority, or as an issue of choice within
this system, however massive and extreme the gap between
life-deprivation and over-consumption grows. As a few hundred
"investors" exponentially increase their money demand to more
than the total income of the majority of the world's population
with their "investments" irreversibly stripping the world's
ecosystems at the same time, no policy is even mooted by the
U.N. to regulate this planetary disaster. The U.N.
Secretary-General, on the contrary, has instituted in 2001 a
U.N. "Global Compact" to require all U.N. agencies to enter into
"corporate partnership" with the world's richest transnational
corporations.
(11) Whatever pollution, degradation, overloading, exhaustion
or destruction of local or planetary ecosystems occurs, and
however irreversily devastating in consequences to human and
biodiverse life these damages from corporate extractions,
effluents, and commodities are, there is not one binding article
in any transnational trade treaty or agreement (excepting
intra-Eurooean) which protects or seeks to protect any human
or environmental life condition or good. All "scarcities" thus
arising are assumed, with no scientific evidence to substantiate
the assumption, to be correctable by market price mechanisms
alone. This is why the U.S. Congress refuses to comply with the
Kyoto Treaty until it makes all pollution abatement measures
conform to a system of salable pollution credits - which have
never reduced pollution, but which accord instituted corporate
rights to pollute which can be sold as new and free equity, and
which can be profited from at another, new level of the global
market.
(12) However many millions or billions of society's or the world's
human population are misemployed, underemployed or
starvation-waged with not enough to live on, and however
life-destructive and chronically debilitating their hours and
conditions of work are -- a majority of the world altogether --
there is no principle, norm or standard in neo-classical market
theory or global market practice which recognizes of can
recognize any of these depredations of human life as an issue
or a problem. On the contrary, this life-blind paradigm can only
compute these strippings of most of the world's people as a new
"flexibility of labour supply" and a multiple "opportunity to reduce
the costs of labour" by exercise and transnational corporate
rights to produce in the lowest-cost zones of the world and sell
in the highest-scale markets with no "barriers to trade".
(13) Any public or government intervention in the presupposition
and implementation of any and all of principles (1) to (12) in any
way is attacked as "an interference in the free market". Any
prior cultural, historical, or democratic achievement or institution
limiting the systematically life-destructive effects of their
unrestricted oiperation is deplored as "a distortion" or
"impediment to market competition", and targeted for elimination
by transnational trade and investment instrument. This is a
cumulative and always advancing line of demand by endless
transnational regulatory "agreements", and it moves across
national borders and domains of life like a sustained military
campaign in its relentless uniformity of prescriptions to target
populations, and its blanket denials of the destructive effects
which follow, wherever its occupying forces usurp evolved ways
of life.
(14) No autonomy of domestic market in any good or service,
strategic use of any natural resource or necessity, protected
public utility or social sector, product-safety, quality of licensing
standard, local procurement practice or grant is consistent with
the demand principles of this transnational market regime. All
have been and continuously are, therefore, slated for challenge
and irreversible elimination by trade prescription or scheduled
regulatory assimilation. This is a pattern everywhere documentable,
but concealed by corporately financed
politicians, the corporate media, and former corporate
employees who negotiate the agreements. What remains
constant through the cumulative momentum and volume of trade
and investment decrees is that every article of tens of
thousands is constructed to guarantee that dominantly
transnational corporations can exploit and increasingly control
domestic economies and public sectors across the world with
no curtailing limit permissible by law.
(15) Local, national and global management of the
money-demand drivewheels of this system is over 95%
controlled by for-profit corporate financial and banking
institutions which have covertly appropriated control over almost
all government bond issues and investor and consumer lines of
credit from government currency creations, national bank loans
and state statutory reserves. With no gold or other non-paper
standard remaining to control it, corporate bank and financial
leveraging has become effectively limitless, with central bank
interest-rate raises in the new regime applied only to decrease
workers' rising wages and social-sector spending. This is the
always hidden underside of the system's propelling domestic
and transnational force, why covert financial deregulation of
money-demand supply is the secret to its every advance, and
why no deep limit can be drawn against world occupation by
corporate financial chicanery until the creation of money
demand is constitutionally re-appropriated by public authority as
its essential basis of sovereignty and investment in the
common.
(16) Together these underlying principles of the global market
system constitute its fixed and largely unseen meta-structure of
perception, understanding and judgement in accordance with
which all its policy formation and enforced regulation of
societies and economies across the world proceed. There is no
principle of "the free market", "investment", "competition",
"comparative advantage", "efficiency", "fiscal responsibility",
"labour flexibility", "inflation control", "growth", "sustainability",
"social welfare", "national prosperity", "justice", "civil society
participation", "poverty reduction", or other old or new slogan
promulgated by global market institutions and advocates that
does not conform to all of (1) through (15) in doctrine and
effect. Whenever it is claimed otherwise, ask for the evidence
from any "free trade agreement" on the planet. The response
will always be silence, diversion to another topic, and, if the
question is pursued publicly, surveillance by the police.
However, well-placed its hirelings, this mind-locked creed is
corporately self-driven and self-referential, and threatens to
usurp every level of social and ecological life condition still
existing. Given its invasionary past and history, we should not
be surprised. Like every Pharoah of the past, it will topple - the
more totalitarian, the more complete the collapse. But remember
who advocates for this regime now, for they are agents of the
corporate occupation of all of the world's societies and
ecosystems by decreed financial and market mechanisms
never electorally agreed to by any people on earth.
John McMurtry PhD, is a Professor at the University of
Guelph, and the author of Unequal Freedoms: The Global
Market as an Ethical System (Toronto and Westport Ct:
Garamond and Kumarian Press), 1988
and The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London and Tokyo:
Pluto and Springer-Verlage, 1988 and 2001).
He is completing his forthcoming book, Value Wars, which will
be published by Pluto Press.
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