GATT: A Gun Aimed at the world
Reprinted from NCX, Oct/Nov 1993 KPFA listeners tuning into "The Secret Side of Free Trade" got a jolt when they heard Herb Gunther describe GATT-the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-as more significant than the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. That wasn't an exaggeration. GATT and its counterpart in our hemisphere, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), will speed up destruction of the planet by giving global corporations free rein to devastate the environment and level most of the world-including us-to Third World economic status.
To the GATT designers, only one question is important: How can international finance and global corporations increase their profits? The answer: Transform the globe into one giant marketplace of natural resources with a cheap labor pool and relaxed environmental standards. It is a corporate dream but a planetary nightmare: corporations gliding from country to country seeking the best deal, forcing workers in the First World to compete with their counterparts in the Third World. And while corporations grow fat, the peoples of the world lose control of their own land, their health, their safety, their food supply, and their local self-determination.
GATT originally was a minor agreement adopted after World War II by the U.S. and 17 other nations, but in 1986, the Reagan and Bush administrations began revising it, largely in secret, to form a full-scale economic, ecological, and political assault on the peoples of now 108 member nations.
The first casualty was the loss of democratic processes in this country. Under the Fast Track provision, Congress's authority to make international trade agreements and draft legislation to implement them was transferred to the President; Congress may not even amend the treaty, but must accept or reject it as a whole within ninety session days. GATT negotiations, conducted behind closed doors, create secret treaties with no public debate, regulating almost any law that restrains trade. A country can have no restrictions on quantity or quality of goods going in or out of the country, unless the trade agreements say it can. The intent is to by-pass local, state, and national governments.
Who is at work behind the scenes designing our future? Not elected representatives of the people, not citizens or citizen groups of the affected countries, but corporate representatives. Forget trying to control corporate behavior to protect workers, the environment, and autonomy of nations. The corporations are in charge. Kristan Dawkins and William Carroll Muffett (The Progressive, January 1993) identity the main participants. The general strategist for the U.S. in GATT negotiations was James D. Robinson III, CEO of American Express, one of the biggest global corporations in the world. Official U.S. trade negotiators were counseled by advisory committees packed with more than 1,000 representatives from the business world with special access and security clearance to negotiations, documents, and official advisers. Daniel Amstutz, former Cargill executive (backed by global grain traders and agrochemical corporations), drafted most of the U.S. proposals to eliminate farm price supports and production controls and force international conformity to lower health and safety standards. Food standards are set by standards of the Codex Alimentarius, a Rome-based agency, dominated by chemical companies and big agribusinesses. Sixteen of twenty-eight U.S. delegates to the Codex represent food or agrichemical multinationals. Nestlé is represented by three officials, and Coca Cola, Pepsi, Hershey, Ralston Purina, Kraft, and CPC International are represented by one each. This committee, largely of multinationals, is empowered to define "acceptable" levels of food contaminants for most of the world.
GATT's "harmonization" principle ensures that corporations play on a "level" field, but the field is leveled down, not up. If international standards regulating food safety, toxic residues, inspections, packaging and labeling are higher than the inferior Codex standards, they are leveled to fit. Lori Wallach, director of the trade program at Public Citizen, stated on KPFA that Codex standards allow DDT residues on grains, beef and milk, and 55% of Codex standards on carcinogenic pesticides and additives allow higher amounts than existing U.S. standards.
Greasing the wheels of trade by lowering international standards may bring nations into conflict, so any law can be challenged if it can be interpreted as restraining trade. For example, local, state, or federal laws protecting our health, safeguarding our environment, preventing toxic chemicals from contaminating our food, soil, fisheries, farming, water, forests, etc. can be challenged under GATT if they are higher than GATT standards. Lori Wallach explains that GATT settles disputes with a system called "dispute resolution," where the burden of proof is on the party whose law is being challenged. You're guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent. Three trade bureaucrats, accountable to no one, are empowered to decide in secret, if your local initiative, domestic legislation, or international agreement agrees with GATT rules. If this tribunal decides against you, you must stop the offending action or pay damages to the country that won the case.
What is considered a barrier to free trade? GATT's "Technical Barriers on Trade" cover every kind of standard that the food standards don't cover: transportation, consumer products, environmental laws, investment rules, patents, telecommunications, banking, pharmaceutical copyrights, labeling, product safety, even subsidized health care and environmental education programs. Under existing Free Trade Agreements, Mexico challenged the U.S. Mammal Protection Act--the Tuna-Dolphin law that helped limit the devastation of dolphins in driftnet tuna fishing (Mexico won). Canada challenged the U.S. ban on the importation, manufacture and use of asbestos here (Canada won). Denmark lost a challenge to its recycling bill requiring approved deposit and return beverage bottles. Thailand lost its ban on imported cigarettes and limitations on cigarette advertising. The U.S. calls Canada's national health care system an unfair governmental subsidy to business and criticizes its acid rain pollution laws as unfair restraint of trade. Other threatened or actual challenges under GATT are raw log limits in the U.S., German packaging recycling rules, the EC ban on hormones in beef and a U.K. ban on moist snuff which causes oral cancer.
There is really no place to hide. The new GATT proposal calls for a review of all existing national, state and local laws and regulations to ensure they agree with GATT. In short, GATT would supersede every existing law. Since many of the most important U.S. environmental laws regulate in some way the manufacture, sale or purchase of goods, no major environmental measure is safe. And since dispute-resolution rules recognize only commercial realities, public health, worker safety, biodiversity and ecocide are irrelevant.
Nothing is sacred in this upside down world. Good is bad and bad is good. Under GATT, a country can challenge trade sanctions used to enforce international environmental standards or a ban on imported goods made in unhealthy or environmentally destructive ways. Dawkins and Muffett warn that attempts to regulate imports of tropical timber or rainforest beef can also be banned and NAFTA's territorial limitation on environmental action could threaten the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Act, the Clean Air Act, and a host of other U.S. laws controlling imports. GATT could also prohibit trade restrictions undertaken on behalf of human rights like those employed against South Africa under apartheid or against China following the Tiannamen Square massacre. Wallach fears that we might even lose control of our natural resources. Under NAFTA, for example, Mexico and Canada lose control of their energy and water and certain parts of this country have a water issue too. A nation is not allowed to put its own people and their needs first, so a town or city does not have precedence over a foreign company in bidding for its own natural resource. The best bidder gets it.
We do not have to look far to see the effects of "free trade" and imagine the changed world it would bring. It is already here along the border between the U.S. and Mexico where the U.S. multi-nationals operate 2,000 maquiladoras. The foreign-dominated maquiladora industry, free to pollute with few restrictions, is destroying the environment on both sides of the border. According to Daniel Brook, ("Toxic Trade," Z Magazine, September l992), the New River brings over 100 types of industrial waste across the border through Calexico and into the Imperial Valley, killing fish and birds in the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California. The Nogales Wash brings contaminants from Sonora, Mexico, into Arizona, poisoning the poor in both countries. The Ramir maquiladora, owned and operated by General Motors, is one of the biggest industrial polluters.
Besides polluting the environment, maquiladoras reduce the area to extreme poverty, with inadequate housing, and often no sewer system or public water. Cultural integrity is destroyed as factories hire mainly young women, discarding them when they become sick, vision-impaired or blind from contaminants or injured from unsafe factory conditions.
Susan Meeker-Lowry, in "Maquiladoras: A Preview of Free Trade" (Z Magazine, October, l992) depicts the sickening consequences of U.S. exploitation for profit. Border crime abounds in maquiladora communities, while rape and sexual harassment by male supervisors is common. Conditions inside the maquiladoras are horrendous: "Long hours on tedious production lines in overheated, poorly ventilated plants are the norm. Workplace injuries are common due to fast production lines; adequate information and protection from toxic chemicals is rarely available." Closer to home, proliferation of maquiladoras directly strikes U.S. workers. Meeker-Lowry cites the Economic Policy Institute's prediction of 550,000 jobs lost over a 10-year period as companies relocate south. "A $400 a week job in the U.S. can translate into $33 in a maquiladora factory. All told, employers can save as much as $30,000 a year per worker by relocating in Mexico." General Motors now operates 37 maquiladora plants with over 42,000 workers and plans to build more as it closes additional plants in the U.S. and Canada. Other U.S. corporations along the border who contaminate the environment or fail to provide decent standards of living, health, safety and fair employment, are Zenith, Quimica Fluor (a DuPont subsidiary), Stepan Chemical, Allied-Signal, AT&T, Baxter International, Chrysler, Ford, GE, ITT, Johnson & Johnson, Parker Hannifin and Pepsico.
With this ugly model of "free trade" at our border, creeping our way , we can read our own future. And that future is almost here. NAFTA, the twin of GATT, affecting Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., has been negotiated and signed. This fall, the Senate and the House will vote on it. Can we stop it? We are up against a gigantic foreign lobbying campaign, with an almost unlimited expense account. Documentation of its far-reaching tentacles by Margaret Ebrahim and Charles Lewis is electrifying ("Can Mexico and Big Business USA Buy NAFTA?" The Nation, June 14, l993). The Mexican government has spent $18 million on NAFTA-related activities and will spend around $10 million more in l993. Mexico's Ministry of Commerce and Industrial Development (SECOFI) operates a Washington office and hires law, PR and lobbying firms connected to Washington to influence legislators to vote for NAFTA. Among firms working for Mexico's Washington NAFTA office are the following:
SECOFI has paid almost $5.4 million to Burson Marsteller, who distributed thousands of enticing brochures to government agencies, U.S. legislators, the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. Council of Mexico-U.S. Business Committee, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others. The office of the President of Mexico paid this firm $1.5 million dollars to create T.V. and newspaper ads. Burson Marsteller also produced propaganda speeches and hired the Brock Group and Gold and Liebengood, two lobbying firms, to contact members of Congress and their staff five hundred times in a year and a half. Sherman and Sterling, hired to help pass NAFTA, received more than $5 million. Last November, when 122 new members of Congress were elected, Mexico's NAFTA team targeted each new legislator. Walker Free Associates contacted more than 3000 Midwestern government officials over a two-year period. Public Strategies, run by Joe O'Neill, former aide to Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen-for a fee of $455,771-went after Bentsen's old California and Texas friends in the former Senator's office and in the Senate Finance Committee, selling the glories of NAFTA. Gold and Liebengood, Inc., employing former U.S. government officials from the Senate and the Department of Health and Human Services, received $523,000 for contacting Republican Senators and their staff around 500 times within a year. TKC International, headed by Gabriel Guerra-Mondragon, Clinton's transition adviser on national security issues, received $388,376 for influencing Hispanic members of Congress.
U.S. Corporations are also spending millions of dollars to get NAFTA ratified. Eastman Kodak, American Express and General Electric are the powers behind an umbrella organization, USA*NAFTA, hired by the Wexler group to wage a grass-roots national campaign glamourizing free trade. Has the battle been lost? It doesn't have to be. It is not money and influence so much as secrecy that has brought GATT and NAFTA this far. As that secrecy has been penetrated to expose the horrific consequences of corporate planning and control, opposition is mounting. Environmentalists, workers, farmers, consumers, small businesses, state and local officials, middle-class and poor, conservative and liberal--all but the very rich and powerful-have everything to lose. And because the "free trade" issue affects everyone, it can unify everyone.
What can we do? Make public the secret greedy dealings that will so massively change our world and our lives! Make public the massive spending to get NAFTA and GATT passed! Tell your friends. Call rallies and plan demonstrations before Congress takes that fateful vote.
Remember what is at stake is more significant than the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution.
It is literally our planet and our lives.
UPDATE According to Pat Choate, author of Agents of Influence, in an interview by Jerry Brown, the World Trade Organization's January '96 ruling that the U.S. Clean Air Act is a barrier to free trade is the precedent by which U.S. law henceforth will be overruled. Countries all over the world will be attacking U.S. health, safety, and environmental laws because there is no case that cannot be made against them if it is presented before the WTO as a "barrier to free trade." This is the new way, politically, that multinational corporations can take out U.S. regulations that reduce their profits.
Those who voted for GATT signed away our sovereignty. Unlike the U.N., the U.S. has no veto in the WTO. President Clinton, by executive order, could remove the U.S. from membership, but Choate says he won't do it: the stock market plunge would sever his head. Meanwhile, three million highly trained Fortune 500 employees have lost their jobs; one plant a day in the U.S. is closing or moving because of NAFTA; and three new applications for maquiladora plants are opening every working day in Mexico. The recent National Labor Committee's victory for the rights of maquiladora workers for The Gap at their Mandarin plant, pales in comparison.
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