Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
The WTO is an international organization of 134 member countries that is a forum for negotiating international trade agreements and the monitoring and regulating body for enforcing agreements. The WTO was created in 1995 by the passage of the provisions of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Prior to the Uruguay Round, GATT focused on promoting world trade by pressuring countries to reduce tariffs.
The WTO has the same legal status as the United Nations and has the authority to prevent, overule and dilute the environmental, social, consumer and labor laws of any nation. The WTO set up panels consisting of nonelected trade specialists who act as judges over economic issues who are beyond the reach of national independence and democratic control so that community interests are ignored in favor of finance capital. These panelists are confirmed by no elective body and have financial interests in the very issues they evaluate. They meet in secret, there is no public record of their proceedings and are they are not subject to any appeal process. Their sole purpose is to create a world in which the only producers and regulators are corporations. Ralph Nader noted that the WTO, “Would greatly reduce citizen involvement in matters of commerce,” destroying the effectiveness of US regulatory laws.
The WTO’s agenda prioritizes the privatization of education, health, welfare, social housing, and transport emphasizing the view that commercial opportunities exist along the entire spectrum of health and social care facilities, including hospitals, outpatient facilities, clinics, nursing homes, assisted living arrangements, and services provided in the home. As but one instance of its overall agenda, the WTO seeks to create a new privatization bonanza in the health sector with including the pharmaceutical industry, the long-term care sector, and HMOs. Multinational and transnational corporations are lining up to capture the gross domestic product that governments currently spend on public services such as education and health. The long tradition of European welfare states based on solidarity through community risk-pooling and publicly accountable services is being dismantled.
The idea is simple. Instead of only imposing on third world countries low wages and high pollution due to their weak or bought-off governments, why not weaken all governments and agencies that might defend workers, consumers, or the environment, not only in the third world, but everywhere? Why not remove any efforts to limit trade due to its labor implications, ecology implications, social or cultural implications, or development implications, leaving as the only criteria whether there are immediate, short term profits to be made? If national or local laws impede trade regarding an environmental or health law, or a labor law, the WTO adjudicates, and its entirely predictable pro-corporate verdict is binding. The WTO trumps governments and populations on behalf of corporate profits.
Ten Key Reasons To Oppose The WTO?
1. The WTO prioritizes trade and commercial considerations over all other values. WTO rules generally require domestic laws, rules, and regulations designed to further worker, consumer, environmental, health, safety, human rights, animal protection, or other non-profit centered interests to be undertaken in the least trade restrictive fashion possible almost never is trade subordinated to these noncommercial concerns.
2. The WTO undermines democracy by shrinking the choices available to democratically controlled governments, with violations potentially punished with harsh penalties.
3. The WTO actively promotes global trade even at the expense of efforts to promote local economic development and policies that move communities, countries, and regions in the direction of greater self- reliance.
4. The WTO forces Third World countries to open their markets to rich multinationals and to abandon efforts to protect infant domestic industries. In agriculture, the opening to foreign imports will catalyze a massive social dislocation of many millions of rural people on a scale that only war approximates.
5. The WTO blocks countries from acting in response to potential risk impeding governments from moving to resolve harms to human health or the environment, much less imposing preventive precautions.
6. The WTO establishes international health, environmental, and other standards at a low level through a process called harmonization. Countries or even states and cities can only exceed these low norms by winning special permission, rarely granted. The WTO thereby promotes a race to the bottom and imposes powerful constraints to keep people there.
7. WTO tribunals rule on the legality of nations laws, but carry out their work behind closed doors. The very few therefore impact the life situations of the many, without even a pretense at participation, cooperation, and democracy.
8. The WTO limits governments ability to use their purchasing dollars for human rights, environmental, worker rights, and other non- commercial purposes. The WTO requires that governments make purchases based only on quality and cost considerations. Not only must corporations operate with an open eye regarding profits and a blind eye to everything else, so must governments and thus whole populations.
9. WTO rules do not allow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced irrespective of whether they were made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxins or with no regard for species protection.
10. WTO rules permit and, in some cases, require patents or similar exclusive protections for life forms. In other words, the WTO does whatever it can to promote the interests of huge multinationals there are no principles at work, only power and greed.
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