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At 11:51 2/02/98 -0500, DONNA MAHER wrote:
>Richard wrote:
>>I hear a lot about MAI, although I don't know enough about it ...
>
>>1. What can I/we do about it?
>
>Learn about it. Think about how it may affect your life. Do whatever you
can
>to make your opinions heard.
>
Here's a bit of background, as to why we _should_ learn about the
TransNational Corporations(TNC)'s grab for global control.
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Tom Athanasiou's: "Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich & Poor"
pub. 1996; Little, Brown; Boston etc.
pp.: 171-173; part of Ch. 4: New World Orders
{ David MacClement's preface: NAFTA and the WTO are about Trade,
(specifically about reducing national barriers to "free trade", the
barriers usually produced by laws enacted for local benefit), while the MAI
is still under formulation and is about doing the same thing for
investment, i.e. allowing TransNational Corporations to invest in and take
over anything they wish, and no local limitations or conditions designed to
favour local people or the environment being allowed.}
We cannot know where the trade debate will take us, though we can easily
understand what is at stake. Harmonization ... "a one-way ratchet down."
...
NAFTA says that the United States will not have to lower its food safety
standards if it can be proven that those laws are necessary in the first
place, a test that precious few laws would pass. { The ruling on such
questions is done by (p.176): "... a dispute-resolution panel, staffed by
un-elected trade officials ..."}
This is just the beginning of the threat. There is a fundamental conflict
between the logic of social and environmental protection and the demands of
deregulated international trade. The roster of U.S. laws that face
challenges as restraints on trade includes the Marine Mammals Protection
Act, the Endangered Species Act, ... All are easily interpreted, under
GATT/WTO rules, as non-tariff trade barriers.
...
There are myriad issues here, but the most difficult of them is "national
sovereignity". GATT/WTO, as an instrument of economic globalization,
ultimately implies a deregulation of trade so complete that it would
circumscribe the ability of even strong governments to control health and
environmental standards within their own borders. ... By the early 1990s,
GATT had already been used to challenge European rules against
hormone-tainted beef, to force Austria to abandon plans to introduce a 70%
tax on tropical timber, and to overturn Thai smoking restrictions, in
favour of U.S. tobacco companies. In this last and particularly notorious
case, GATT ruled that no country could use trade restrictions to enforce
public health laws unless it could demonstrate that they were the least
trade-restrictive means to that end.
Conflicts over sovereignity are crucial to the politics of the new world,
which is why The Economist derides concern for sovereignity as "economic
isolationism". The real issue, however, is not isolationism but democracy,
not nationalism but a globalization that is swamping nation-states and
putting nothing in their place but global corporations and unregulated
international markets.
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** http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/
David MacClement <davd@geocities.com>
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/6783/
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