by jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (950413.SGI.8.6.12/950213.SGI.AUTOCF)
chriscd@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu; Sun, 24 Aug 1997 02:11:28 -0400 (EDT)
24 Aug 1997 08:02:48 +0200 (GMT+0200)
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 1997 19:35:59 +0000
From: Patrick Bond <pbond@wn.apc.org>
Subject: (Fwd) (Fwd) The UN and the Corporate Agenda
Sender: pbond@wn.apc.org
To: chriscd@jhu.edu
Reply-to: pbond@wn.apc.org
Comrade Chris it was great to even have a few minutes to hash over
issues with you. Thought the attached might amuse you, re balance of
int'l forces and reforming the UN...
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From: "David C. Korten" <pcdf@igc.apc.org>
Subject: The UN and the Corporate Agenda
On June 24, 1997 the CEOs of 10 TNCs met over lunch at the United Nations
with the UN leadership and a number of senior government officials to chart
a formalization of corporate involvement in the affairs of the United
Nations. I attended the lunch. It is rare that any of us from the NGO
community has such an opportunity to sit in on a meeting of the powerholders
in the private chambers. I found it a shattering experience for it revealed
a seamless alliance between the public and private sectors aligned behind
the consolidation of corporate rule over the global economy. It raised
serious questions in my mind as to whether progressive civil society
organizations should in fact be aligned behind the United Nations and its
funding.
The following is a personal report. I'm sending as an attachment a memo I
subsequently wrote to Ambassador Razali Ismail, President of the UN General
Assembly who chaired the meeting.
An insightful cartoon foreseeing a UN in which the global corporations sit
as equals with nations in the UN chambers and a list of luncheon
participants will be posted to the PCDForum web site in the next day or two.
See:
David C. Korten
THE UNITED NATION AND THE CORPORATE AGENDA
by David C. Korten
It was a true power lunch of lobster and an exotic mushroom salad held in a
private dining room at the United Nations on June 24, 1997. Thirty seven
invited participants were co-hosted by Ambassador Razali Ismail, President
of the UN General Assembly, and Mr. Bjorn Stigson, Executive Director of the
World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) to examine steps
toward establishing terms of reference for business sector participation in
the policy setting process of the UN and partnering in the uses of UN
development assistance funds. The players in the meeting were 15 high level
representatives of government, including three heads of state, the Secretary
General of the UN, the Administrator of UNDP, and the UN Under Secretary
General responsible for presiding over the UN Commission on Sustainable
Development, the Secretary General of the International Chamber of
Commerice, 10 CEOs of transnational corporations. The CEOs were mostly
members of the WBCSD, a council of transnational corporations (TNCs)
originally organized by Stephan Schmidheiny and Maurice Strong to represent
the interests of global corporations at the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development in Rio in 1992.
In a limited gesture toward transparency and multi-stakeholder
participation, two "academics" and two NGOs were invited to observe. The
academics were Jonathan Lash of World Resources Institute and myself. Chee
Yoke Ling of the Third World Network and Victoria "Vicki" Tauli-Corpuz of
the Indigenous Peoples' Network, Philippines were the NGO participants.
The meeting's outcome was preordained. It closed with Ambassador Razali,
President of the General Assembly, announcing that a framework for the
involvement of the corporate sector in UN decision making would be worked
out under the auspices of the Commission on Sustainable Development.
Listening to the presentations by the governmental and corporate
representatives left me rather deeply shaken, as it revealed the extent to
which most of the messages the world's NGOs have been attempting to
communicate to the UN and its governmental members at UNCED and the other UN
conferences have fallen on deaf ears. On the positive side, Mr. Thorbejoern
Jagland, the Prime Minister of Norway, called for a tax shift to place the
burden of taxation on environmentally damaging consumption. Both Ms. Clare
Short, Secretary of State for International Development of the United
Kingdom and Mrs. Margaret De Boer, Minister of Environment for the
Netherlands, called for giving high priority to ending poverty.
Ms. Chee Yoke Ling of the Third World Network, the only non-corporate
stakeholder voice given the floor, spoke eloquently of the growing
concentration of wealth being created by the corporate sector and of the
corporate commitment to the unattainable agenda of creating a universal
consumer society. She observed that there are not enough resources in the
world for everyone to live even at the current level of consumption of the
average Malaysian, let alone the level of the United States or Europe. She
further noted that people are becoming increasingly cynical about the
professed corporate commitment to sustainability given that in corporate
dominated forums such as World Trade Organization (WTO) they talk only of
the rights of corporations and nothing of their obligations.
Such moments of enlightenment were the exception. On the less enlightened
side, we were treated to the views of Mr. Samuel Hinds, the President of
Guyana. He was the only speaker to take any note of Chee Yoke Ling's
comments and he dismissed out of hand. Indeed, he accused NGOs of causing
popular unrest by trying to postpone in the name of environmental protection
the development that people so desperately want. Besides, he pointed out, if
he does not cut down his country's forests someone might grow marijuana in
them.
The United States sent Larry Summers, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury as
its representative to the luncheon. The Clinton administration could hardly
have sent a clearer message as to how it views the trade-off between its
commitment to sustainability and its commitment to its corporate clients.
Summers is the former Chief Economist of the World Bank who gained public
fame for advocating the shipping of more toxic wastes to low income
countries because people there die early anyway and they have less income
earning potential so their lives are less valuable. Summers treated the
luncheon guests to a litany of neoliberal platitudes. He praised
privatization, noting that people take better care of their homes when they
own them, implying that environmental resources will be better cared for
when they are all privately owned by the corporate sector. He assured us
that economic growth leads the way to creating both the will and the means
to deal with the environment. In other words, he believes that the more a
person consumes the more careful that person will be of the environment. And
he noted that by attracting private foreign capital to build bridges and
roads on a fee for use basis, the receiving countries will eliminate their
need to use scarce public funds for physical infrastructure. He might well
have noted as a further advantage that the private toll roads and bridges
will be less congested than open public facilities as fees will exclude
their use by the poor.
Mr. Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN, gave the corporate CEOs a warm
welcome with his message that he sees opportunities for the private sector
and the UN cooperating at many levels. He referred to the Rio meeting as an
example of where the private sector participated in setting the standards
rather than the UN or government imposing them. He of course made no mention
that corporate participation in Rio helped assure that few standards were
actually set and that even fewer have been met. He called on the private
sector to come up with alternative energy sources for the poor so they
"don't have to cut down every tree in sight," while making no mention of the
corporations that are strip mining the world's forests. He praised UNDP for
its role in preparing the way for private investment to come into Third
World countries and called on governments to provide incentives to move
business in this direction_in short he is firmly committed to using UN and
other public funds to subsidize the corporate buy-out of Third World economies.
Gus Speth, the Administration of UNDP, said that the best hope for the 3
billion people in the world who live on less than $2 a day is to bring them
into the market by redirecting more private investment flows to low income
countries. UNDP is apparently facilitating this process by giving priority
to using its limited funds to "leverage," read "subsidize," private foreign
investment. He mentioned that peace and justice will require a particular
kind of development, but did not elaborate as to what kind that might be.
Underlying the words of everyone who was allowed to speak, with the sole
exception of NGO spokesperson Chee Yoke Ling, was an embrace of the
neoliberal logic of market deregulation and economic globalization.
According to the prevailing official wisdom, economic globalization and the
economic dominance of corporations are irreversible realities to which we
must simply adapt. Since global corporations have the money and the power,
any viable approach to dealing with poverty and the environment must center
on providing market incentives (read public subsidies) that will make it
profitable for them to invest in job creation and environmentally friendly
technologies. Thus it follows, by the twisted official logic, that
corporations need to be brought in as partners in public decision process to
assure that the resulting policies will be responsive to their needs. If any
speaker other than Chee Yoke Ling saw any problem in giving over ever more
power to global corporations, they revealed no hint of it at this power
luncheon.
The underlying commitment to the use of public resources to advance
unrestrained global corporate expansion brought to mind the central message
of a book that first appeared in 1980 written by Bertram Gross titled
FRIENDLY FASCISM: THE NEW FACE OF POWER IN AMERICA. Gross looked beyond the
familiar racism, hatred and brutal authoritarian rule associated with the
practice of fascism to describe the institutional structure of fascist
regimes. Herein he revealed a nasty little secret. The defining structure of
fascist regimes is a corporate dominated alliance between big business and
big government to support the expansion of corporate empires.
Those of us who have been studying these issues have long known of the
strong alignment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and
the IMF to the corporate agenda. By contrast the United Nations has seemed a
more open, democratic and people friendly institution. What I found so
shattering was the strong evidence that the differences I have been
attributing to the United Nations are largely cosmetic.
It seems that all our official forums function within the culture of
ideological dogmatism that international financier George Soros denounced in
his ATLANTIC MONTHLY article on "The Capitalist Threat." With dissenting
voices quickly silenced, there is no challenge within the halls of power to
flawed logic and assumptions.
So long as official forums remain captive to this closed and deeply flawed
ideological culture, our governmental and corporate institutions will almost
surely lead our world ever deeper into crisis. The burden of providing
alternative leadership that falls on those elements of civil society that
are not captive to the official culture is thus enormous. We must speak
fearlessly with force and clarity in an effort to penetrate the veil of
silence that shields our official and corporate institutions from
confronting the devastating consequences of their ideologically driven
leadership.