| If you were to ask, say, Phillip Knight, CEO of Nike Shoes, if he is for human rights, he would probably respond, �of course.� Who is not for human rights? So therefore it�s a mute point, right? Ask Phillip Knight why he�s running child sweat shops in Indonesia, Vietnam and El Salvador and he might not be so forth coming in his answer. These multi-national corporations have, in a way, given up allegiance to any country. Many of these transnationals started out here at home. When NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) and GATT (Uruguayan Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) were passed, the United Stated saw many blue collar jobs leave this country to go to southern hemisphere sweatshops to maximize profit and to keep these corporations, �more competitive.� In all of this, the human cost is never explored. GATT, As Dr. Parenti explains: �advances the massive corporate acquisition of publicly owned property and the holdings of local owners and worker collectives. Deprived of tariff protections, many small family farms in North America and Europe will go under, and the self-sufficient village agricultural economies of much of Asia and Africa will be destroyed. As Kim Moody notes, �Third world peasant producers will be driven from the land by the millions, as is already happening in Mexico [under NAFTA].� We are told that to remain competitive under GATT, we in North America will have to increase our productivity while reducing our labor and production costs. We will have to spend less on social services and introduce more wage concessions, more restructuring, deregulation, and privatization. Only then might we cope with the impersonal forces sweeping us along. In fact, there is nothing impersonal about these forces. GATT was consciously planned by business and governmental elites over a period of years, by interests that have explicitly pursued a deregulated world economy and have opposed all democratic checks upon business practices.� This is a dilemma for everyone who is not a part of this process of globalization; this is what is happening to the people of Chiapas. There appears to be no end to the lengths that corporations will go to achieve their end, namely capital. Jean Rousseau said in his Social Contract: With man in society, things are very different: first, the necessary must be taken care of, then the superfluous. Then come the delights, then the accumulation of immense riches, then of subjects, then of slaves; never is there a moment of respite. What is most remarkable is that the less the needs are natural and pressing, the more the passions increase and what is worse, the power to satisfy them.� What does this process, from company to transnational corporation, require? It requires massive amounts of capital. So, in pursuit of this end you become a capitalist, one who pursues capital. One who seeks: �all or most of the means of production and distribution, as land, factories, railroads, etc...�, and one who seeks to have all resources, �privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: It has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth, and in it�s later phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased governmental control, etc.� Now, of you compare that with the definition of democracy, you may begin to see the incompatibility: �Democracy- 1. Government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives; rule by the ruled�3. Majority rule 4. The principle of equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment, or the practice of this principle. 5. The common people, esp. as the wielders of power.� The problem is that barriers to entry for the common people, people like us, are so great that the doors to free trade on a global level are effectively closed. These corporations are above the law of democracy, and bend it�s definitions daily to suite their own ends. The financial organizations that support this system don�t rely on any national law, but, rather, make up their own rules of engagement behind closed doors. Our founding father, Thomas Jefferson, foretold of our Federal Reserve, a private entity, his words are also quite relevant to the World Bank and the International Monetary fund today: �If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. -� The International Monetary Fund says that, �Globalization leads to economic growth and higher incomes. No country has benefited for any length of time from closed-door policies, and the countries that have achieved most prosperity have embraced globalization, together with the policies that make it work.� What they fail to tell you is what happens to countries when they attempt to be self-sufficient. �Closed Door�, means that these countries won�t let big capital in. Author, Dr. Michael Parenti, illustrates this: �No country that pursues an independent course of development shall be allowed to prevail as a dangerous example to other nations.� The, �Invasion of Grenada served notice to all other Caribbean countries that this was the fate that awaited any nation that sought to get out from under it�s client-state status. So the invaders put an end to the New Jewel Movement�s Revolutionary programs for land reform, health care, education, and cooperatives. Today, with its unemployment at new heights and its poverty at new depths, Grenada is once again firmly bound to the free trade market world. Everyone else in the region has indeed taken note.� Organizations like the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization exist to further the needs of the corporations and the countries that they run. Although most industrialized countries haven�t borrowed from the IMF in several decades, they are still the key decision makers in the fund. Voting power is determined by how much money each country pays. The disproportional amount of power held by wealthy countries translates into decisions that benefit wealthy bankers, investors and corporations of the West, at the expense of sustainable development in the countries that receive aid. |