monbiot on the trade talks

[friendofbenn]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1042796,00.html

A threat to the rich

Forcing the poor countries to walk out of the Cancun trade talks may rebound on the west



George Monbiot
Tuesday September 16, 2003
The Guardian

Were there a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, it would be awarded this year to Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade negotiator. A week ago, in the Guardian's trade supplement, he argued that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) "helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness into a more Kantian world - perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law".
On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas Hobbes's words, they were "a war of every man against every man", Lamy scuppered the negotiations, and very possibly destroyed the organisation as a result. If so, one result could be a trade regime, in which, as Hobbes observed, "force and fraud are ... the two cardinal virtues". Relations between countries would then revert to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty and brutish behaviour of the powerful ensures that the lives of the poor remain short.

At the talks in Cancun, in Mexico, Lamy made the poor nations an offer that they couldn't possibly accept. He appears to have been seeking to resurrect, by means of an "investment treaty", the infamous Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This was a proposal that would have allowed corporations to force a government to remove any laws that interfered with their ability to make money, and that was crushed by a worldwide revolt in 1998.

In return for granting corporations power over governments, the poor nations would receive precisely nothing. The concessions on farm subsidies that Lamy was offering amounted to little more than a reshuffling of the money paid to European farmers. They would continue to permit the subsidy barons of Europe to dump their artificially cheap produce into the poor world, destroying the livelihoods of the farmers there..............

[fabius]

1. Great Victory for the People against the Corporations!

Hey folks, this IS big! Even if Kucinich doesn't get the nomination, the WTO is toast. Unless it can reconstitute itself as a just and democratic body.

The odious Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) is probably dead. This is the one that allows foreign corporations to come in and tell your local government their regulations are too strict. Of course we still have something like it in NAFTA but that's something we can work on.

Message to Mega-Corporations: EAT IT!!!!

[friendofbenn]

2. how long before corporations substitute first world governments?

or did it already happen? :shrug:

[aneerkoinos]

3. Well

In US and Japan 100%, EU and Canada only 50% so far.