rkm had written:
>>The long-term source of coporate-WS instability relates more to Marxian
>>contradictions - growth can't go on forever - than it does to the inability
>>of modern political mechanisms to keep people under control.
5/19/97, J. Timmons Roberts wrote:
>UNLIKE Moore, however, I think the main remaining contradiction is
>Socio-ECOLOGICAL, not social alone. That is, as Peter Grimes accounted at
>the recent PEWS conference, topsoil loss, global warming, and the
>accumulation crisis will combine to shake the system.
Bingo! Right you are: finite Earth, finite biolayer, finite ozone, finite
markets... it's finite all the way down. Sustainability isn't an
environmentalist slogan - it's a tough-love law of nature.
>On
>the optimistic side, the hope is that GLOBAL standards of production will
>emerge so that transnationals cannot flee indefinitely to "pollution haven"
>peripheries. On the pessimistic side is the very real possibility that some
>of these global standards and agreements will be manipulated by industry to
>become essentially vacuous.
Sorry to play Grinch and burst another bubble of optimism, but the official
global standards and procedures for the next millenium are now being
drafted by the WTO, and they are ecologically disastrous. I've got many
bulletins documenting this arhived... example snip at bottom.
>However a recent trip to Holland encouraged me
>that some form of capitalism can incorporate much ecological and
>participatory planning. These new rules are tighter, and capitalists simple
>(must) adapt.
That capitalism can thrive under reasonable constraints has been proven
many times over... Holland (by your observation), Scandanavia, postwar UK
(to some extent), etc. Such constraints can include strong social
programs, nationally-owned infrastructures, flight-of-capital restrictions,
environmental protections, tough wage and labor laws, and stiff corporate
taxation. As one business leader reassured FDR about the New Deal - "You
pass whatever laws you want, we'll find a way to make money anyway."
If such constraints are imposed politically, corporations compete alike
under the regime, investor expectations are scaled down accordingly - and
the game is simply played for slightly lower stakes. The increased
stability of the system is even welcomed by business leaders who aren't of
the plunge and boom mentality.
But if the capital elite has the ability to manipulate the political rules,
then such manipulation becomes a lucrative growth opportunity for corporate
endeavor: loosening the constraints can produce more profit per dollar
invested (via bribery, corruption, and media promotion) than the most
brilliant new marketing idea. Ten percent off the corporate rates, for
example, represents LOTS of bucks to the bottom line, and a privatized rail
system opens a whole new industry for lucrative investment.
Europe, more than America, has been the redoubt of socially-constrained
capitalism, and that is why - in my view - the EU is being pushed so
strongly by the corporate community. Corporations perfected their skills
at manipulating the political system in America - the EU is an attempt to
export America's large-scale democracy model to Europe: a new, large,
multi-cultural society is more amenable to divide-and-conquer corporate
tactics than is a smaller, culturally coherent society with deeply-rooted
socioeconomic traditions.
Besides, the EU institutions are being set up with a built-in
corporate bias from the outset - witness the neoliberal social
prescriptions built into the (arbitrary) "requirements" for the ECU.
Holland-style regulations are lame duck in Europe - the handwriting is on
the wall. While the EU levels the social playing field in Europe - taking
credit for a presumed green conciousness in the process - the WTO is laying
down the long range rules to which EU will eventually subscribe. The
two-stage scheme is to seduce Europeans into a romanticized "Europe", and
then engulf the EU in the globalist regime: thus perisheth democracy.
Don't kill the messenger,
rkm
________________________________________________________________
Subject: MAI:The next brick in the globalist wall
Preamble Center for Public Policy:
WORSE THAN NAFTA
By Scott Nova and Michelle Sforza-Roderick
In popular mythology, economic globalization is a natural
phenomenon, like continental drift: impossible to resist or control. In
reality, globalization is being shaped and advanced by carefully planned
legal and institutional changes embodied in a series of international
agreements. Pacts like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promote
the unregulated flow of money and goods across borders and strip elected
governments of their regulatory authority, shifting power to unaccountable
institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Virtually unreported, the latest and potentially most dangerous of
these agreements is now under negotiation at the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The purpose of the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), as the proposed pact is
known, is to grant transnational investors the unrestricted "right" to buy,
sell and move businesses, and other assets, wherever they want, whenever
they want. To achieve this goal, the MAI would ban a wide range of
regulatory laws now in force around the globe and preempt future efforts to
hold transnational corporations and investors accountable to the public.
The agreement's backers (the United States and the European Union) intend
to seek assent from the 29 industrial countries that comprise the OECD and
then push the new accord on the developing world.
Negotiations are already at an advanced stage. Yet few Americans
have even heard of the agreement. Trade officials are treating MAI
information like nuclear secrets; the mainstream media is oblivious.
Whether the MAI is adopted, and, if so, just how far its deregulatory
tentacles will extend, depends on whether opponents can force the proposal
from its present obscurity into the light of public debate.
As proposed, the MAI would force countries to treat foreign
investors as favorably as domestic companies; laws violating this principle
would be prohibited. Under these conditions, transnational corporations
would find it easier and more profitable to move investments, including
production facilities, to low-wage countries. At the same time, these
countries would be denied the tools necessary to wrest benefits from such
investment like laws mandating the employment of local managers.
Efforts to promote local development by earmarking subsidies for home-
grown businesses and limiting foreign ownership of local resources would
also be barred. If adopted, the MAI will mean foreclosure of Third World
development strategies, increased job flight from industrial nations, and
new pressures on countries, rich and poor, to compete for increasingly
mobile investment capital by lowering environmental and labor standards.
~--<snip>--~
Frances Fukuyama may be satisfied that the current winning streak of
market ideology heralds the "end of history." The corporations, however,
want to put it in writing.
Scott Nova is the director and Michelle Sforza-Roderick is a research
associate at the Preamble Center for Public Policy, Washington, D.C.
________________________________________________________________