includes also pre-WTC views on Globalization
Message: 5
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 15:00:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robert Weissman <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [corp-focus] The Wartime Opportunists
The Wartime Opportunists
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Make way for the wartime opportunists.
Corporate interests and their proxies are looking to exploit the September
11 tragedy to advance a self-serving agenda that has nothing to do with
national security and everything to do with corporate profits and
dangerous ideologies.
Fast track and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. A corporate tax cut.
Oil drilling in Alaska. Star Wars. These are some of the preposterous
"solutions" and responses to the terror attack offered by corporate
mouthpieces.
No one has been more shameless in linking their agenda to the terror
attack than U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Writing in the
Washington Post last week, Zoellick proclaimed that granting fast-track
trade negotiating authority to the president -- to assist with the ramming
through Congress of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, designed to expand
NAFTA to all of the Americas, among other nefarious ends -- was the best
way to respond to the September 11 tragedy.
"Earlier enemies learned that America is the arsenal of democracy,"
Zoellick wrote, "Today's enemies will learn that America is the economic
engine for freedom, opportunity and development. To that end, U.S.
leadership in promoting the international economic and trading system is
vital. Trade is about more than economic efficiency. It promotes the
values at the heart of this protracted struggle."
No explanation from Zoellick about how adopting a procedural rule designed
to limit Congressional debate on controversial trade agreements advances
the democratic and rule-of-law values he says the United States must now
project.
The administration has identified fast track as one of the handful of
legislative priorities it hopes to see Congress enact this year.
Getting fast track passed isn't big business's only priority for the
shrinking legislative calendar. The Fortune 500 has been whimpering since
George Bush was elected president and top administration officials told
the business community to silence their demand for corporate tax cuts
until after passage of the inequality-increasing personal income tax cut.
Even before the September 11 attack, business interests and the anti-tax
ideologues were increasingly making noise that corporate tax cuts were the
solution to the coming recession.
Now they are beginning to argue that capital gains tax cuts and corporate
tax breaks are America's patriotic duty.
In releasing a study purporting to explain how a capital gains cut would
spur economic growth, the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) touted a capital
gains tax cut -- a tax break that exclusively benefits the wealthy -- as
an anti-terrorism initiative. "By reducing the rate at which capital gains
are taxed, President Bush and Congress could help revitalize the sagging
economy and bring new revenues to Washington -- decidedly aiding our war
against terrorism," said NTU director of congressional relations Eric
Schlecht.
Not wishing to be outdone, Senator Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, didn't wait
long to explain how the terror attack makes it imperative to open up the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). "There is no doubt that at this
time of national emergency, an expedited energy-security bill must be
considered," the Alaska senator announced last week. "Opening ANWR will be
a central element in finally reducing this country's dangerous
overdependence on unstable foreign sources of energy," he said.
Neither Murkowski nor the oil companies pushing for opening ANWR have ever
been able to offer a coherent explanation of how using up U.S. oil
reserves heightens energy security. Security rests in maintaining the
reserves. Real energy security and independence can only come from
renewables (particularly solar and wind) -- where the supply is plentiful
and infinitely renewing. Only a failure of public and private investment
leaves the country (and the world) unable to harvest renewable energy
efficiently.
And, of course, the purveyors of Star Wars couldn't let the opportunity
pass them by. The Center for Security Policy --the center of a web of
defense industry-backed think tanks and organizations pushing for a
National Missile Defense program -- urged President Bush in advance of his
address to Congress to announce that "this Administration will use every
tool at its disposal to ensure that the resources and latitude needed to
develop and deploy missile defenses are made available."
A missile defense system -- even if it overcame the technical obstacles
which have so far proved insurmountable, after billions spent -- would
have done nothing to stop the September 11 attack. Nor would it do
anything to stop any other conceivable terrorist attack on the United
States, none of which involve might missile delivery systems.
Opportunism and cynical manipulation of tragedy are nothing new in
Washington. But the proposals to exploit the September 11 tragedy for
narrow corporate aims mark a new low.
The United States is emerging from a national mourning period. Now is the
time to proceed with caution and care, as the nation seeks to address
legitimate security concerns (e.g., airport security) and tend to victims
of the attack. It is no time to rush through proposals on matters
essentially unrelated to the attack, especially damaging and foolhardy
proposals that have been unable to win popular or Congressional support
when the public has had a chance to consider them dispassionately, and on
the merits.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
-Message: 1
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 11:04:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robert Weissman <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [corp-focus] Corporate Globalization and the Poor
Corporate Globalization and the Poor
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
George Bush has thrown down the gauntlet, issuing a public challenge to
the anti-corporate globalization movement. When hundreds of thousands last
month demonstrated against the G-8 meeting of rich country leaders in
Genoa, Italy, George Bush decried the activists, saying it was the
advocates of corporate globalization who genuinely are seeking to advance
the interests of the world's poor.
It's not enough to mock Bush's pretension of being a defender of the poor
by pointing out that, through his giant tax cut, the president has
overseen one of the history's great transfers of wealth to the rich in
U.S. history. Critics must respond to his claims.
Unfortunately, that turns out to be a remarkably easy challenge to meet.
The last 20 years of corporate globalization, even measured by the
preferred indicators of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank, have been a disaster for the world's poor.
Over the last two decades, Latin America has experienced stagnant growth,
and African countries have seen incomes plummet. The only developing
countries that have done well in the last two decades are those Asian
countries that ignored the standard prescriptions of the IMF and World
Bank.
The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
has published compelling data comparing growth rates from 1980 to 2000
(during the period of ascending IMF/World Bank power, when countries
throughout the developing world adhered to the IMF/Bank structural
adjustment policy package of slashing government spending, privatizating
government-owned enterprises, liberalizing trade, orienting economies to
exports and opening up countries to exploitative foreign investment) with
the previous 20 year period (when many poor countries focused more on
developing their own productive capacity and meeting local needs).
The results: "89 countries -- 77 percent, or more than three-fourths --
saw their per capita rate of growth fall by at least five percentage
points from the period (1960-1980) to the period (1980-2000). Only 14
countries -- 13 percent -- saw their per capita rate of growth rise by
that much from (1960-1980) to (1980-2000)."
CEPR found that the growth slowdown has been so severe that "18 countries
-- including several in Africa -- would have more than twice as much
income per person as they have today, if they had maintained the rate of
growth in the last two decades that they had in the previous two decades.
The average Mexican would have nearly twice as much income today, and the
average Brazilian much more than twice as much, if not for the slowdown of
economic growth over the last two decades."
A follow-up CEPR study used a similar methodology to look at social
indicators. CEPR found that progress in reducing infant mortality,
reducing child mortality, increasing literacy and increasing access to
education has all slowed during the period of corporate globalization,
especially in developing countries.
The CEPR global comparisons across time show the bottomline, combined
effect of the specific policy components of corporate-friendly policies
imposed by the IMF and World Bank and enforced by free trade agreements.
These include the following:
* Trade Liberalization -- The elimination of tariff protections for
agriculture and industries in developing countries often leads to mass
layoffs and displacement of the rural poor. In Mexico, for example,
opening to U.S. agriculture imports has forced millions of poor farmers,
who find themselves unable to compete with Cargill and Archer Daniels
Midland, off the land.
* Privatization -- IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies
typically call for the sell off of government-owned enterprises to private
owners, often foreign investors. Privatization is regularly associated
with layoffs and pay cuts for workers in the privatized enterprises.
* Cuts in government spending -- Reductions in government spending
frequently reduce the ability of the government to provide services to the
poor, exacerbating the social pain from rural displacement and industrial
layoffs.
* Imposition of user fees -- Many IMF and World Bank loans and programs
call for the imposition of "user fees" -- charges for the use of
government-provided services like schools, health clinics and clean
drinking water. For very poor people, even modest charges may result in
the denial of access to services.
* Export promotion -- Under structural adjustment programs,
countries undertake a variety of measures to promote exports, at the
expense of production for domestic needs. In the rural sector, the export
orientation is often associated with the displacement of poor people who
grow food for their own consumption, as their land is taken over by large
plantations growing crops for foreign markets.
* Higher interest rates -- Attractive to foreign investors, higher
interest rates exert a recessionary effect on national economies, leading
to higher rates of joblessness. Small businesses, often operated by women,
find it more difficult to gain access to affordable credit, and often are
unable to survive.
Advancing the interests of the poor has nothing to do with the corporate
globalization agenda. This agenda is driven first by profit-seeking, and
second by ideology.
But the corporate globalizers are nothing if not ambitious. They are
seeking now to push fast-track negotiating authority through the U.S.
Congress, to force all of Latin America into a NAFTA-style trade and
investment agreement, launch a new World Trade Organization negotiating
round, and intensify the IMF and World Bank's ability to impose structural
adjustment through a sham debt relief process.
To lessen preventable human suffering, it is imperative that the
protesters continue to build the movement against corporate globalization,
with everything from street protests to citizen lobbying of Congress.
Another world is indeed possible, as the protesters are asserting. But for
now the immediate challenge is to stop the corporate globalizers from
making the existing one worse.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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