importance of WTO

Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1999 18:54:16 -0400
To: sust-mar@chebucto.ns.ca
From: jslakov@TartanNET.ns.ca (Jan Slakov)
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Dear Sust-Mar People,                 nov. 26

At first blush, trade liberalization may not seem to have much to do with
our efforts to protect our natural heritage. But deep down, I think we all
know that "free trade" is one of, and perhaps *the* biggest force propelling
the destruction of the Earth's ability to sustain life. Free trade is just
one plank of an agenda I call corporate globalization, an agenda that sees
huge corporations buy natural resources at cheap rates from countries
desperate for income, then hire desperate people to manufacture consumer
items in dangerous conditions and then ship these things usually over huge
distances to sell them to the few "consumers" left in the world. Since some
exploited people naturally try to resist this arrangement, usually by
nonviolent means first, military/police power is often brought down against
activists, especially in countries of the "Third World". As Noam Chomsky and
others have amply demonstrated, Western governments have aided and abetted
this type of repression, which is targetted at people like you and me:
activists trying to make their part of the world a better place to live. In
other words, corporate globalization is more than an economic system; it is
basically a process that exploits the Earth and its peoples, by force when
necessary. I believe our biggest challenge as activists is to halt this
process and replace it with a sustainable system.

Anyhow, part of what we need to do is understand how resisting free trade is
crucial to saving the Earth. With that in mind, I would like to share with
you a message from David Orton, which I got yesterday.

all the best, Jan
***************************************************************

Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 21:48:45
To: leftbio@flora.org
From: David Orton <greenweb@fox.nstn.ca>
Subject: WTO Meeting: Proposed Controlling and Absorbing Dissent

Hello left bios: 
For quite a while now much of our electronic mail has concerned the World
Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle. Gradually the significance of
this meeting has been sinking in to me. I have just read the most scary yet
realistic analysis of what this meeting is actually about. The analysis is
by Michel Chossudovsky, who is a professor of economics at the University
of Ottawa and is called "Seattle and Beyond: Disarming The New World
Order".  This prof is the author of a number of books including _The
Globalization of Poverty_. The article is very long (39 K), but very well
worth the effort to read.  I understood for the first time how increasing
poverty in Canada and the dismantling of the social safety net, the farm
crisis in the West, etc. is tied to the growing pauperization of most
people in other countries. (The author see this as a world economic crisis,
much more socially and environmentally significant than that of the Great
Depression.) This new Global Great Depression is flowing out of the
globalizing corporate economic  policies, backed up by military
intervention where required, of a small club of so-called developed
nations, led by the United States. Chossudovsky argues that NGOs (Non
Governmental Organizations) going to Seattle must reject the WTO as an
international institution and its fundamental legitimacy, and go beyond
what he calls "free-market criticism.". He notes how deals have already
been made with some infiltrated NGOs to bring them on board the WTO and
diffuse opposition to globalization and free trade.

We can send this text by Chossudovsky to anyone who asks.

David

Note from Jan: I too have the Chossudovsky text and can send it to you if
you like. I also wrote a pamphlet last year on What Corporate Globalization
means for Canadians (eg. in terms of forests, oceans and other sectors). It
is three photocopied pages long, with 3 cartoons... I wrote it with people
who live here in Weymouth and environs in mind; in other words, I tried very
hard to make a complicated subject understandable to people whose main
source of information would be the mass media. I would be happy to send
copies to any of you who would like one.... If there seems to be lots of
interest in either of these texts, I will edit them down so they could be
shared with everyone on the Sust-Mar list.



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