Having verified that the effects of all the free-trade agreements signed in the Americas are incompatible with human rights, we, as participants in the Forum on Human Rights, declare the following:
We reject the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Agreement and any other agreement based on the neoliberal model in the Americas.
We shall work to prevent the approval of any agreement or measure developed under this model, including Plan Colombia.
Citizens must be entitled to take part in formulating, implementing, and evaluating social and economic policies in the Americas. The core goals of such policies must be aimed at a model of development based on democracy; use of and respect for human rights; an absence of corruption; protection of the environment; the promotion of peace, economic sovereignty, and social well-being; an end to inequities; the free circulation of people throughout the Americas; and the elimination of all forms of exclusion of individuals, peoples, or countries, such as in the case of Cuba.
The economy, and particularly trade and investment, must not be ends in themselves but rather tools to ensure the fulfillment of the model of development described in the preceding paragraph. The world's economy and that of the Americas must be regulated in accordance with the fundamental and non-negotiable principle of the primacy of human rights.
THE PRIMACY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
1. In virtue of international law and, in particular, the Charter of the United Nations, Charter of the Organization of American States, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, and American Convention on Human Rights, the primary obligation of States is to respect, protect, and promote the use and fulfillment of all universal and indivisible human rights. All other social and economic players must also respect human rights. This obligation also applies to multilateral institutions and national and transnational corporations.
2. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because of its superior rank in the international legal order, given that it stipulates the rights recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, holds precedence over all treaties, including trade agreements. Bilateral or multilateral agreements on trade or investment must therefore explicitly comply with the principle of the primacy of human rights. The States that are parties to these agreements must unconditionally respect the international and regional instruments establishing civil and political rights as well as economic, social, and cultural rights.
3. States must guarantee equal rights for all people under their jurisdiction, without distinction based on sex, ethnicity, nationality, age, language, religious beliefs, political convictions, sexual orientation, economic or social conditions, disabilities, or any other arbitrary grounds. States must combat the exclusion of any group or person, racism, xenophobia, and impunity in cases of human-rights violations. In particular, they shall ensure the effectiveness of policies that provide for the rights of women, workers, children, the elderly, migrants and their families, the displaced, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and those of African descent, among others. States must recognize the rights of indigenous peoples and approve instruments that guarantee the full use of said rights.
4. States must takes measures to ensure complete fulfillment of the right of all people to free determination, food, health care, access to water, land, and other resources under conditions of equity, to decent housing and an adequate standard of living, to education, culture, work, and labour rights, including recognition of women's unpaid labour, to social security and other rights inherent to the dignity of human beings, such as the right to security and physical and psychological integrity.
DEMOCRACY AND TRANSPARENCY
5. Negotiations on any trade and integration agreement must meet the requirements of democracy and transparency. Negotiations or agreements that do not respect these rules must not continue.
Citizens and civil-society organizations representing them must have full access to information on intergovernmental negotiations and to the means and opportunities required to express their opinion on the content and possible ratification of such agreements. Governments must provide them with the resources needed to ensure that there will be participation on the part of citizens.
National parliaments must conduct proper public consultations on such agreements and take the consultation results into consideration before expressing an opinion on the agreements.
STRENGTHENING THE REGIONAL HUMAN-RIGHTS SYSTEM
6. The bodies of the inter-American system for the protection of human rights must ensure that any trade agreement is subject to the principle of the primacy of human rights.
7. The executive nature of the decisions made by the Inter- American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights must be reaffirmed. States must adopt the national legal measures required to ensure implementation of all decisions emanating from the bodies of the inter-American system for the protection of human rights.
8. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights must be empowered to conduct studies regarding the repercussions of regional economic integration on human rights. Such studies shall be public. States must ask the Inter-American Court of Human Rights concerning for an advisory opinion on the compatibility between any proposed trade or integration agreement and the principle of primacy of human rights.
9. Cases of human-rights violations caused by the signing or implementation of any trade or integration treaty must be heard and settled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in accordance with the powers already provided for in the American Convention on Human Rights.
10. Any conflict-resolution mechanism in a trade or integration agreement must explicitly enforce both international and regional standards as well as the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the process of resolving conflicts.
11. In its annual report to the General Assembly of the OAS, the Inter-American Commission must include a standing chapter on measures nd action to ensure compliance of all trade and integration agreements with inter-American and universal instruments for the protection of human rights. In preparing this chapter, the Inter-American Commission shall take into account the contributions of civil society.
12. The American States must make a commitment to an immediate and significant increase in the funding and resources of the inter-American system for the protection of human rights.
WORK PROSPECTS AND ACTION PLAN
The participants in the Forum on Human Rights of the Second Peoples' Summit of the Americas are committed to the following:
1. Fostering and strengthening processes of popular education-particularly within the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA)-concerning the impacts of the implementation of neoliberal policies and measures, such as free-trade treaties, so as to promote local action from a global perspective. This will help to reinforce the Hemispheric Social Alliance and enrich its strategy. These educational processes will also help to avoid endorsement of said policies and measures due to a lack of information or expertise.
2. Creating visibility regarding human-rights violations caused by the implementation of neoliberal measures such as free-trade agreements; to identifying those responsible for such violations; as well as to having sanctions imposed, damages redressed, and measures taken to ensure that said violations will not be repeated.
3. Creating an ad hoc committee for the purpose of coordinating and conducting the following:
a) A campaign to encourage human-rights organizations to join the Hemispheric Social Alliance so as to strengthen its membership throughout the Americas and the perspective of the primacy of human rights;
b) A campaign against free-trade treaties now in effect, given their negative impact on human rights;
c) A campaign to achieve the following on the part of the States of the Americas:
- Ratification of a list of regional and international instruments, specific to each country, for the protection of human rights, including the Statute of the International Criminal Court;
- Approval of a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples with provisions in no way inferior to those of International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples or to those of the draft declaration on indigenous peoples currently being discussed by the United Nations.
4. Working immediately to create a committee of independent experts at the service of socialorganizations. This committee shall be responsible for developing a report for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concerning the repercussions of the free-trade treaties now in effect and of those currently being negotiated on the egalitarian and non-discriminatory benefit of human rights in their entirety.
5. Developing an independent and transparent system for monitoring the impact of the activities of multinational corporations on human rights.
6. Continuing work on strengthening international systems for the protection of human rights, especially the inter-American system, by making use of it and monitoring compliance with its decisions. Cooperation on the part of States shall be promoted so as to ensure that said system has the capacity to respond.
7. Promoting and supporting the creation of a State-funded mechanism that can facilitate access by victims to the inter-American system for the protection of human rights.
8. Strengthening protection and guarantees for the work of human-rights defenders and leaders of social organizations.
9. Promoting and strengthening the defence of natural resources, especially water, from a human-rights perspective.
10. Conducting more in-depth discussions, in the framework of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), on the proposal for a social charter of the Americas, which would be a means to ensure support from all the countries of the Americas for the implementation of all human rights, including the right to development, as well as to ensure participation by civil society and the subordination of trade and integration treaties to the standards of the system for the protection of human rights.
Quebec City April 18, 2001
*****
Armies Of Compassion
From: ARTISTpres@a...
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001
Armies Of Compassion: GW Bushs' Compassionate
Fascism
by Robert Lederman
"As President, I will lead the federal government to take bold steps to rally America¹s armies of compassion." GW Bush January 30, 2001 from his introduction to the agenda for his faith-based initiative, "Rally the Armies of Compassion."
On the surface it sounds like a good idea. Let faith-based religious organizations compete with government programs for funds to service the homeless, the hungry, drug addicts, welfare recipients, children and prisoners.
The notion of a Federally-funded "army" making war on social evils is not new. We've had the war against drugs and the war against poverty, programs which have consumed trillions of dollars in a failed attempt to eradicate poverty and drug use. Their main success? The creation of a huge Federal beauracracy.
Making religious groups compete with government agencies for Federal funds also sounds good - until you really think about it. Since many of these groups use non-salaried volunteers or psychologically-coerced recruits as employees, they will have no trouble delivering services less expensively than a government program which provides relatively qualified employees with a salary and health benefits.
As President of an artists' rights group which rejects funding and government interference of any kind I've observed the creativity and freedom of millions of American artists compromised through a similar system of competition for government money.
Art and religion have much in common. You can make art without First Amendment freedom - Nazi Germany, the USSR and Communist China had vast art programs involving millions of exceptional artists. You can also have religion without religious freedom. All history will remember about such religious or artistic efforts is how spiritually dead they were.
Millions of contemporary American artists now divide their time between applying for government grants and making art. Their ideas are conditioned by the grant requirements.
Rather than helping America's artists, the NEA created a vast beauracracy of art lawyers, program administrators, curators and museum directors who serve as the gateway to government money. These administrators are the high priests of the art world. American museums, art galleries, television stations and theatrical companies must modify and self-censor their works every day thanks to this dependency on Federal funds.
It's ironic to see the conservatives who led the fight against the NEA leading the fight to enslave religious institutions in this same money trap. Art and religion are the conscience of humankind, the voice which stands up to tyranny at great risk when all others have been silenced and compromised.
America is a religious nation with thousands of sects and denominations that are substantially free of government control or regulation. Do we want our religious institutions to modify their messages as American artists have been forced to do? Do we want official religion the way we now have official art?
It's worth noting how official art came about in the US. Most Americans have a dismissive attitude towards so-called modern art imagining that its abstract imagery is due to artistic preferences. In fact, it has far more to do with the CIA and America's ruling elite - in particular the Rockefeller family. [1]
In the nineteen thirties and forties American artists were heavily involved in protests against poverty, racism and corporate control. They used figurative art, murals and realism not only to express their feeling about these social problems but to rally the public to do something about them.
Then the State Department, the CIA and the Rockefellers stepped in and began promoting abstract art, beginning with the Rockefellers' Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Ever wonder why America's wealthiest families spend billions on giant paintings and sculptures that represent nothing and why the government erects huge museums to display these non-wonders? In the fifties and sixties the government created public school programs to brainwash American children about art. Millions of these children then grew up to become artists specializing in abstraction and non-figurative art.
The CIA and these same ruling families are also behind President Bush's Army of Compassion which hopes to make religious organizations as dependent on government funding as arts institutions now are. Announced as a compassionate effort to promote charitable activity, the real intent is exactly the opposite - to control, compromise and co-opt it.
The men Bush has put in charge of his faith-based initiative, John J. Dilulio Jr. and Stephen Goldsmith, are senior fellows of the CIA's Manhattan Institute, a right wing think tank co-funded by the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank, pharmaceutical companies and right wing foundations with ties to the military-industrial complex. Goldsmith is President Bushs' chief domestic policy advisor. [2]
The Manhattan Institute was founded by Reagan's CIA director, William Casey. Like much that is connected to Bush whose family spent a decade financing Hitler, the Manhattan Institute has a Nazi connection. Casey spent the years following WWII bringing top Nazis to the US. Chase Bank helped Hitler liquidate the gold reserves of conquered European nations, voluntarily turned over Jewish bank accounts to the Nazis and continued to do business with Hitler after the US entered WWII. The Rockefeller family were half-owners of IG Farben, the chemical cartel that built and operated Auschwitz and forty other slave labor/death camps in Nazi Germany. President Bush claims that next to the bible the single most influential books contributing to his policy ideas were written at the Manhattan Institute.
America's religious institutions share a common belief in God but that's as far as their commonality goes. Of the hundreds of Christian denominations in America many consider each other impostors, charlatans or worse, agents of the anti-Christ.
Some Christian denominations -and the President himself - consider Jews to be people who cannot enter heaven. White supremacist churches which idolize Hitler teach that Blacks, Jews and gays must be expelled from the US or exterminated. The Nation of Islam, Scientology, Jews for Jesus, Alamo Ministries and a thousand other non-traditional groups will be competing for and entitled to these same Federal funds and will inevitably, and rightly, sue if they are denied them in favor of more traditional groups. Rather than being outsiders in this faith-based plan, some of these non-traditional groups (a number of which are known to have a direct CIA connection) are central to it.
After acquiring a taste for government funding will legitimate religious leaders who come to depend on it for their rapidly-expanding social programs dare to criticize the government and risk losing that money? On the other hand can we seriously expect religious groups to be impartially doling out food, education, housing, drug treatment, psychological help and job counseling to their clients without proselytizing?
It won't be just the Federal government that gets its' hands on religion through this initiative. Corporations will obtain huge new tax write-offs as a result of donating goods and services. In this way, Religious groups can also be made dependent on corporations which will demand and get the same kind of visibility they now have on public television.
Remember when public television was commercial free? You can see almost as many ads there now as on the commercial networks and a similarly compromised content.
Will a Monsanto logo hang next to the crucifix in the new federally-funded drug programs, and welfare centers? Will corporations obtain low-paid employees through these programs, thereby further diminishing the role of unions? Will drug companies recruit their experimental subjects from the inner city recipients of their faith-based charity or use food programs they sponsor inside a church in order to test genetically-modified foods?
Soon we will see hundreds of ads about how Dow, Monsanto or Exxon helped homeless folks in the inner city by financing a faith-based program. Now they will be able to deduct as much 15% of the corporation's entire taxable income by being involved in these programs. [3]
We are told any misuse of funds by these faith-based groups will be prevented by requiring accountability. Anyone who has ever applied for a government grant knows how coercive and controlling this accountability will be.
Do religious institutions want government peeking into every aspect of their activities? If civil rights laws are to be upheld how will churches and other religious groups who oppose homosexuality, abortion, contraceptives or like US Attorney General John Ashcrofts' church - dancing - manage to keep their beliefs intact while qualifying for funding?
Religious groups which go along with the program will grow dramatically as a result of being able to offer social services. Those which stubbornly hold onto their beliefs will diminish.
Bushs' faith-based initiative may be the single most sinister effort ever undertaken in the US concerning religion. History shows that when religion and government work together the result is always bad for religion and for the people of a nation.
In Nazi Germany religious leaders were intimately involved in creating public acceptance for Hitler's agenda. Like Reverend Martin Niemoeller, who became an outspoken opponent of Nazism after initially supporting it, Germany's religious leaders discovered too late that Hitler's religious initiatives were something very different from what was promised.
America was founded by people who sought religious freedom and economic opportunity. Now Bush wants to turn religion itself into an economic opportunity.
This entire program is unnecessary. American individuals and corporations are already free to donate as much as they like to religious groups which can use the money to feed the hungry and house the homeless while freely promoting whatever ideology they choose.
While non-religious groups have taken the lead in opposing Bushs'' Army of Compassion, it is religious leaders and their congregations who have the most to lose. Today they can practice any religious belief that doesn't violate basic criminal law. For God's sake, let's hope they wake up in time to keep it that way.
[1] CIA art connection
(a)http://www.britannica.com/bcom/bwire/article/0,8780,8066, 00.html
From Encyclopedia Britannica .com "During the height of the Cold War,
the Central Intelligence Agency did a remarkable thing: It bankrolled the
American avant-garde...The championing of American abstract expressionism
represented one of the most dramatic campaigns, exemplified in the paintings
of Jackson Pollock."
(b) "Moma has even been outed as a front for the CIA in the 50s, when
its international touring shows of American art were supposedly little
more than Cold War propaganda exercises." UK Guardianunlimited 8/29/2000
(c) The Nation June 12, 2000 When the CIA Was the NEA http://past.thenation.com/cgi-bin/framizer.cgi?url=http://past.th
enation.com/issue/000612/0612rogin.shtml
[2] Manhattan Institute/Chase Bank Bush, CIA and Nazis
(a) NY Times January 29, 2001 New Bush Office Seeks Closer Ties to
Church Groups
(b) NY Times Monday, May 12, 1997 Manhattan Institute Has Nudged New
York Rightward "...the institute was founded as a free-market education
and research organization by William Casey, who then went off to head the
Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan Administration."
(c) NY Times June 12, 2000 Bush Culls Campaign Theme >From Conservative
Thinkers ³Gov. George W. Bush has said his political views have been
shaped by the work of Myron Magnet of the Manhattan Institute.²
(d) for many articles on this subject see
http://Baltech.org/lederman/spray/
(e) Daily News 12/7/98 Chase Banked On Nazis - Report ³The New
York-based bank controlled by the Rockefeller family closed Jewish accounts
even before the Germans ordered them to do so and did business with the
Nazis while they were sending Jews to the gas chambers, Newsweek magazine
reports in this week's edition. And while the U.S. was at war with the
Nazis, Chase also apparently helped German banks do business with their
overseas branches, the magazine reported...The relationship between Chase
and the Nazis apparently was so cozy that Carlos Niedermann, the Chase
branch chief in Paris, wrote his supervisor in Manhattan that the bank
enjoyed "very special esteem" with top German officials and "a rapid expansion
of deposits." Niedermann's letter was written in May 1942 ‹ five months
after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. also went to war with
Germany...And subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors have been accused
of forcing thousands of Jews, Poles and others to work as slave laborers."
(f) "The Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich,"-Sarasota Herald-Tribune
11/11/2000 -Former US Justice Dept. Nazi War Crimes prosecutor John Loftus-who
is today the director of the Florida Holocaust Museum. http://www.newscoast.com/headlinesstory2.cfm?ID=35115
[3] Details of Bush faith-based plan
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20010130-5.html
"Corporations would be permitted to deduct charitable donations until
their value exceeds 15 percent of the company¹s taxable income, instead
of the 10 percent limit under current law."
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists¹ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
ARTISTpres@a... (718) 743-3722
http://www.robertlederman.com
Bush/Nazi connection, West Nile Virus, pesticides, Giuliani, Manhattan
Institute, Eugenics info
http://Baltech.org/lederman/spray/
street artist website
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!!!
(without editing, altering or removing footnotes, please)
A New Methodology of Deceit? -
December 1999
Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform
We have long warned against mistaking number-crunching for precision or even relevance. What is basic in mathematics is relationships, and if the relationship between two statistics has not been grasped, refining them to umpteen decimal points will be of no help.
Counterproductive number-crunching on a flawed base has been taken so far by economists that the resulting statistics simply are having to be amended. Invariably this is being done under pressure less of economists than of some other professional group.
The first instance of this was the introduction of enough "accrual accountancy" (also known as "capital budgeting") by the US federal government to give the Clinton government the statistic for national savings that it needed to keep interest rates low. Politicians in power pushed this measure through so surreptitiously that it has still not been picked up by the media. In this way the Clinton government managed to produce a somewhat more truthful statistic without arousing the ideological dogs of the right.
The problem arose from the established practice in most governments to treat government investments in buildings and equipment as a current expense. Written off in the year of acquisition as is done with floor wax, their value is entered on the books at a token $1.00. There is nothing more to offset the debt incurred to make the acquisition.
The decade of the sixties was notable for the unprecedented volume of public infrastructures created to accommodate an exploding population in a rapidly urbanising, high-tech world. Writing off this public investment in a single year added needlessly to the layer of taxation in price and was accordingly a major factor in the beginning of upward price ramp that was identified with "inflation," i.e. "too many dollars chasing too few goods." Instead of disaggregating the price surge into its market and non-market components, it was attacked with high interest rates, "the one blunt tool" to which central banks had stripped down their tool kits. This in turn, deflated the economy, pushed up the costs of servicing the government debt, and gave rise to growing deficits. These in turn were advanced as good reason for devastating social programs and educational budgets.
Until January, 1996 Washington did not distinguish between current and capital spending. Why was it carried through just then only insofar as it affected the government savings statistic? Undoubtedly to help Mr. Clinton win his re-election. And why was it slipped in so quietly that even financial analysts overlooked it? Because the Clinton team needed an improved statistic or two, not an ideological pitched battle. Once the Department of Commerce had revised the government savings figure the Federal Reserve Bulletin (table A-40) had no choice but to take over that figure for their purposes. No other was available.
In just three years (1992-4) revision of previous figures for the investment of the federal government resulted in a $618.5 billion lower net debt figure. Carried forward to 1995 and backwards to 1959, the change would exceed a trillion dollars. That, moreover, does not take account of federal government investment in human capital—education, health, welfare, that probably exceeds its physical investment, especially if grants to other levels of governments for such purposes are considered. No matter what jurisdiction the resulting capital asset ends up in, it contributes to expand the tax base and accordingly is relevant to the fiscal condition of the federal government.
The second case of the phenomenon we are concerned with is the adoption of capital budgeting by the Canadian Government as reported in The National Post of 20/07/99 by Kathryn May. To the best of our knowledge no other mention of it has been made by our media. Over a two-year period accrual accountancy is to be introduced by the federal government and as a result assets of an estimated $50 billion will suddenly appear on its books. That is another way of saying that $50 billion of assets were systematically left unreported in its ledgers over the years. In actual fact we believe that the estimate is at least 50% lower than it should be, even if the adjustment is confined to physical investments without bringing in the outlay for human capital.
The driving force here were the accountants represented by the Auditor General Denis Desautels and some of their trade publications. In its issue of 14/05 last The Bottom Line, a journal for accountants, gave us the background: "After qualifying his opinion of the federal government's accounts for the past two years, a more conciliatory Auditor General has hinted that he has buried the hatches with the Finance Department and will likely approve the books for the 1998-9 fiscal year." One of the issues involved was "accrual accountancy," and the nature of the compromise reached appeared clearly in the National Post article. This quoted Desautels, "the capitalisation of assets was critical to departments; ‘management discipline' and their ‘accountability to Parliament.' For example, the manager of a government laboratory never had to consider the cost of the space the lab occupied or the equipment it used when determining the price-tag of its programs. Mr. Desautels argues these figures become more critical with the government's push to recover more of the costs from user fees."
However, not a word about slashing of social programs over the years to reduce the deficit which was systematically overstated. The Auditor General compromised his self-respect as an accountant by agreeing to coming up with a spin that distorted the real nature of the accountancy problem that should have been addressed decades ago.
Even so the introduction of capital budgeting has not been mentioned in all the debates on the uses to which the government surplus is to be put. In the figures forecast by the Finance Minister for that surplus over the coming five years, there is no mention of how much of the forecasts will arise from capital investment. That is a crucial omission since such government savings should never have been omitted. And what was omitted ought to be restored to the social groups whose revenue was plowed under by the panic whipped up with those inaccurate statistics.
The games that have been played around this bookkeeping dodge were endless. In our earlier issues1 we recounted the sudden disappearance from the Canada Year Book around 1994 of a passage that had appeared without a word altered for close on to 30 years that we were able to ascertain explaining how government physical investments were written off in a single year and entered at an asset value of $1.00. This was the equivalent of recording the mortgage on your house in your statement of net worth, but failing to mention the value of the house that it was written to finance.
In a recent flying visit to the UK I learned that a memo has been circulated in the Bank of England suggesting the introduction of capital budgeting in Britain. One must ask where these world wide initiatives are so closely are organised. It would appear that official statistics are no longer a public utility, with information readily available on how they are put together and what they signify. Instead they appear to have undergone privatisation, subject to being hushed up, misinterpreted. So long as there is a dearth of unmanipulated information, democracy will be a wilting bloom on a prickly bough.
Could the semi-furtive introduction of capital accountancy across the world have to do with the cleaning up of governments' balance sheets in preparation for the next bailout of our financial institutions?
1 Meltdown, edited by W. Krehm, COMER Publications 1999, p 261.
William Krehm, Publisher-Editor, Economic Reform, mailto:wkrehm@sympatico.ca
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Copyright (C) 2000 COMER. May be reproduced with proper acknowledgement.
"Economic Reform" is the monthly journal of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), a Canada-based publishing think-tank. Annual subscription, 12 issues, is $30.
COMER Publications Suite 107 245 Carlaw Avenue Toronto ON M4M 2S6 Telephone (416) 466-2642 Fax 466-5827
=======================
By What Authority:
Unmasking and Challenging the Global Corporations'
Assault on Democracy through the World Trade Organization
By Tony Clarke
Joint Publication of the Polaris Institute and
International Forum on Globalization
November 1999
Excerpt 1:
More and more the WTO is under pressure to expand its agenda because
more and more it is seen as the focal point for the many challenges and
concerns of globalization.
Judicial Powers: Under the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism, member countries, acting on behalf of their own corporate clients, can challenge the laws, policies and programs of another country as violations of WTO rules. Panels of unelected experts have the power to adjudicate claims of alleged violation of WTO rules and hand out punishments through various kinds of economic sanctions. There are no conflict of interest rules. What’s more, they operate in secret, with all documents, hearings and briefs kept confidential.
Legislative Powers: In turn, these WTO tribunals have the authority to, in effect, strike down domestic laws, policies and programs of member states judged to be in violation of WTO rules and/or establish new laws, policies or programs in conformity with the WTO rules. The panelists have little or no concern for the domestic laws of other countries, let alone respect for the social obligations of x governments towards their citizens. As a result, virtually every environmental and health law that has been adjudicated by these WTO tribunals has been declared illegal and ruled "out of order." While the WTO cannot directly command a nation state to change its laws, the threat of economic sanctions creates, if nothing else, a ‘chill effect’ compelling governments to comply with the WTO rulings.
Executive Powers: Although official WTO decisions are made by votes or consensus in the 134 member General Council, it appears that real decision making powers is now increasingly being exercised through what has become known as the QUAD, namely, the USA, the European Union, Japan and Canada. The QUAD convenes separately several times a year between General Council meetings, repeatedly making key decisions on what the WTO will do on major agenda priorities. These QUAD meetings take place behind closed doors without the participation of other member countries. Although the QUAD is not formally recognized as the WTO executive, it is by its composition able to informally exercise executive powers.
This WTO governance structure, in turn, is interlocked with, and fortified by, a battery of big business coalitions composed of the most powerful global corporations. For example, the International Chamber of Commerce [until recently chaired by the CEO of the Nestlé corporation] functions as the general watchdog for big business with direct access to the highest decision makers in the WTO. But perhaps the most effective exercise of corporate power over WTO decision making comes through the political machinery of global corporations in each of the QUAD countries. After all, based on the 1998 rankings, 443 of the Global Fortune 500 corporations are still home-based in either the U.S.[185], Europe [158] or Japan [100]. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that global corporations are best able to manipulate the legal and political structures they have in their own countries to effect WTO decision making.
* In the U.S., the President’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy Negotiations, for example, is primarily composed of representatives of major U.S. transnationals including AT&T, IBM, and Eastman Kodak. The powerful U.S. Business Round Table, which represents the country’s 200 largest corporations, has direct influence at the highest levels of Washington decision making on international trade, finance and investment matters. While U.S. big business has had a long track record of manipulating the courts and judiciary to serve their interests, lax laws on political donations continues to guarantee "the best Congress that money can buy."
* In Japan, direct links between the big Japanese corporations and the government are well institutionalized through the Keidanren, the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations. The Keidanren is organized in terms of public policy committees chaired by the CEO’s of major Japanese corporations. The Committee on Trade and Investment, for example, is chaired by the CEO of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation while the Committee on Environment and Safety is chaired by the CEO of the Nissan Motor Corporation. The Keidanren regularly presents its policy platform to the Diet and highest levels of the Japanese government.
* In Europe, the Commissioner for the European Union [EU] on WTO policies and administration maintains direct links with the European Round Table of Industrialists [ERT]. The ERT is composed of the 50 largest European based corporations including Nestlé, Unilever, Bayer and Philips. While big business linkages may not be as structured in the EU as they are in the U.S. and Japan, the ERT still exercises a powerful influence over policy making at the European Commission. Major events like the Geneva Business Dialogue also play a key role.
* In Canada, the fourth member of the QUAD, corporate-government links have also been well institutionalized through the Business Council on National Issues [BCNI]. Modeled after the U.S. Business Round Table, the BCNI represents the 150 largest corporations in Canada. Like the Keidanren in Japan, the BCNI also has major public policy committees chaired by CEOs which have their own direct links with the Canadian government’s policy making apparatus for the WTO.
These are just 10 corporate assaults on democracy emerging in the WTO’s millennium round agenda at Seattle — just 10 ways of identifying the corporate power that lies behind the WTO as a new institution of global governance. Many of the Global Fortune 500 corporations identified in the charts above have the capacity to directly exert their political influence in most of the WTO’s 134 member states through the lobbying machinery of their subsidiaries in those countries. These global giants can buy politicians and mold public opinion through the media, education and entertainment in almost any country of the world. What’s more, in addition to the Global 500 and their subsidiaries, there are hundreds more medium sized corporations operating in each of our countries which also have a vested interest in the WTO negotiations on these and other issues.
While many campaign activists will be going to Seattle with the message "Stop, Assess, Repair" the rules and measures adopted by the WTO over the past five years, it is also important to be prepared for what comes after Seattle. In all likelihood, there will be a Millennium Round of negotiations taking place over the next three years. The question then becomes what campaign strategies will be pursued during the negotiation period. Will our follow-up campaigns repeat the mistakes of the past by focusing attention exclusively on governments or will we seize the moment to break new ground by also targeting the dominant corporate players and their collusion with government elites as the driving forces behind the WTO negotiations? Regardless of what our entry point issues are in relation to the WTO agenda — food, water, health, education, culture, forests, bio-diversity — agriculture, labour, environment, services, local development — the underlying themes of corporate power, democratic rights, and the systematic erosion of peoples’ sovereign authority to govern themselves, are common to all.
To be sure, there are no magic solutions. Nobody knows for certain what kinds of strategies, tactics, and leverage are most effective for tackling, let alone dismantling, global corporations today. What’s more, the histories, structures and traditions of corporate-government power alliances differ from country to country, and region to region. Nevertheless, we can learn a great deal from the struggles in countries like India and Nigeria where peoples’ movements relentlessly confront the illegitimacy of corporate-state collusion and oppression. As a prelude to the WTO talks in Seattle, for example, social movements in India have been mobilizing public resistance to the global corporations engaged in bio-piracy. We can also gain insights from the successes of recent international campaigns, such as the anti-MAI movement, on how networks of community activists can be organized and sustained on a global basis. In short, there are opportunities for developing some new approaches for campaign strategies around the WTO negotiations following Seattle.
It is, therefore, imperative that social movement activists begin developing campaign strategies that focus on the corporate power plays behind the WTO negotiations. Although campaign styles, strategies and tactics are bound to differ North and South, from country to country and issue to issue, it is possible to identify some common elements. For example, the strategic priority of these campaigns could be — to publicly expose and challenge the collusion that exists between specific global corporations and government elites around particular WTO agenda items. The campaign objectives could be — to demonstrate how this corporate-government collusion makes the WTO and the particular set of negotiations taking place as being illegitimate. The central campaign message could be — to demand — By What Authority — which needs to be posed at every stage of the process.
In order to develop campaigns along these lines, however, it might be useful to follow a four stage process:
Stage One: This is the moment for strategic preparation. To begin developing a campaign strategy, it is important to take some preliminary steps, including:
Analyze the particular issue(s) your group is most concerned about in the WTO negotiations; the kind of corporate-government collusion that is taking place in these negotiations; and the major corporate players that should be targeted.
Expose publicly the way your target corporation is trampling on peoples’ democratic rights through the WTO negotiations; the denial of peoples’ sovereign authority on these issue; and the corresponding illegitimacy of the WTO.
Mobilize public pressure on government officials to abandon their support for your corporate target in the WTO negotiations; to declare their local states or provinces and municipalities as WTO free zones; and develop a defense plan.
Participate in global movements and campaigns demanding new institutional mechanisms for exercising democratic control over transnational corporations through international trade, finance, and investment agreements.
The publication contains an analysis of vested corporate interests in ten issues that are expected to be on the agenda in Seattle, along with charts illustrating the major corporate players.
To order this publication, contact the International Forum on Globalization:
1555 Pacific Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94109
Tel: (415) 771-3394
Fax: (415) 771-1121 Email: ifg@ifg.org
=============================
Ovide Mecredi’s speech to participants of
the Save Canada Conference
Ottawa, Ontario, August 21, 1999.
It’s late and you have all worked very hard I’m sure, to express not only your opinions, but also your commitment to your country.
So it is not my intent here to keep you very long - but I was asked to show some experiences that we have had as Indigenous People in this country: about the loss of sovereignty and the impact of that on a people’s capacity to defend themselves; or for that matter to organize for their wellness and their development against the forces of assimilation and Canadian threats to First Nation’s independence in the last Century, and the American Dream.
I am a Cree - hence my views of Canada and the United States of America are different from that of citizens of these two foreign nation states that took root on Native soil.
However, I believe that our experiences with imperialism, colonialism and federalism can be instructive to those Canadians who fear the loss of their independence, loss of their land, water and economies and the loss of their territorial sovereignty, or the control of their way of life.
The americanization of Canada is a very powerful stream, a stream of assimilation that cannot be ignored by Canadians or Indigenous Peoples, within this country. There must be a national program of resistance to the global assimilation of corporate values, that puts profit ahead of people, or the capacity of a country to remain a true democracy. From our experiences with Canada and its own laws and policies aimed at dismantling our indigenous nation, we know that more action is needed than just mere reactionary resistance against the common perceived threat to our future, if we are to survive as distinct peoples with the capacity to shape and control our own future as a people.
We the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas understand all too well that our survival and future is linked to the maintenance of our separate and distinct identity, and to the free exercise of our inherent self determination within our territories.
Our past struggles with Canada, some of which have now become a part of Canadian consciousness, like residential schools were battles against the forces of assimilation and the efforts by the Christian churches or the Canadian Government to transform our peoples into Canadians.
Today the immediate threat for our treaty and Aboriginal Rights is the growing consolidation of corporate power and wealth that has a tacit support and promotion of the wealthy nation states, including those that belong to that exclusive corporate mind or club called the G7 Summit.
In some way I find your concerns for your future as an independent country similar to our peoples vision to blossom as a distinct people rather than becoming forever lost in that seemingly endless stream of assimilation. Does this mean that Canadians will better understand and maybe even support the aspirations and dreams of the first people for their own presence under the sun?
Maybe not, but I ask this question: how does it feel to be forced into something that you have very little power to prevent? By the way, time is not a friend, for the lapse of time that had been used by Canada to dis-empower the Aboriginal People and to assert exclusive jurisdiction over land, and its abundant resources: water, air, commerce and trade, economy and government. In short, full sovereignty to the exclusion of the First People.
It seems ironic that after trying so hard for so many centuries to dispossess the First Peoples of their rights and future, we are seeing a modern and young Canada handing over it’s sovereignty and wealth to the Americans under the Free Trade Agreements, thereby making Canada the newest colony for corporate interests.
Do you want to digress into a state of a colony as your legacy for the new millenium?
I think that it is a very good thing for all of us who share this county that the indigenous nations have not given up their fight for their land, their resources and their independence. Since your governments and politicians have turned their back to the Canadian people and have abandoned the vision of your own ancestors for a free and democratic society, who is left to fight against the confluence of Canadian and American streams of assimilation?
We are still here. We are still standing; we have not forgotten. We will never surrender our destiny, nor our sovereignty.
In the century or more to come will Canadians be able to make that same claim? I do not wish to upset anybody nor do I want to surrender your dreams for a fair and democratic society, but you must know that not all of Canada is worth saving. For instance the colonial relationship that characterizes our relations with you in this country is not something we as Aboriginal Peoples can rally around to help save Canada from American domination. We must also remember that the experience of indigenous tribes in the United States begs for fundamental reforms in relation with the First Peoples of that country, as well.
For us it is not a choice between two colonizers or three colonizers. The choice is freedom. The choice is to build new societies that are not founded in oppression or totalitarianism. The choice is clear - the end of dominance of one society over another society of free people. That choice leaves me to say that I really hope that our shared option for our common future and destiny in North America.
I believe national measures in Canada and in the United States, must be undertaken to save Indigenous Peoples from further exploitation and to end any further destruction of their land, resources, and any further diminishment of their sovereignty, their culture or their way of life.
How can Canadians learn from our terrible journey - from a free people to that of dependency in less than one century? Let me put it in pure and simple language.
First, when you lose your land and its resources, your people will lose their ability and capacity to maintain their livelihood or their way of life.
Secondly, when you lose your economy and the ability to control your economic future, you are reduced to a pauper, forever dependent upon the charity of those who control the economy and hold the reigns of power.
Thirdly, when you lose your authority or jurisdiction over your land and territory you are no longer free to exercise the right of self-determination.
Fourthly, when you lose the sovereignty of your people and their lands and territories, the new masters of your destiny will never give it up voluntarily.
Fifthly, it is better to have freedom and to be self reliant as a distinct people than to be dependent upon another society for your needs, your well being, your progress or your destiny.
Sixth, you will find over the course of time that while the people may never forget their heritage and vision, the struggle to remain a distinct people with the right of self determination equal to all nations will take its toll on the lives and limited resources of your people.
And finally, to surrender your birthright as a nation of people, is to die.
We can also give you lessons on the art of resistance, and how to build a movement for the restoration of your rights and freedom: both as a collectivity or society and as individual citizens of your nation.
This advice, by the way, will cost you a few more trinkets and beads:
Your freedom for my freedom Your sovereignty for my sovereignty Your society for my society Your land for my land. Your water for my water. Your culture and heritage for my culture and heritage. Your people’s future for my people’s future.
Is that too much ‘free trade’ for both you and me?
What is the point here? The point here, my relatives, is that no one should have to lose anything in order for someone else to make advances or gains.
For now that is all I will say. May your journey to save the country
result in positive gains and advances for the Indigenous People of Canada.
Good night.
========================