Disneyland, Doha, and the WTO in Hong Kong

The corporate co-chairs of ABCDoha include Cargill (the agribusiness conglomerate that dominates the global trade in grains and agricultural commodities such as cocoa), Caterpillar, Eastman Kodak, Goldman & Sachs, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Time-Warner, and Wal-Mart. At the press conference launch of ABCDoha, the CEO of Cargill called for “tough decisions on market access,” while the CEO of Wal-Mart reminded the U.S. government that his corporation has a “vital interest in the expansion of the international flow of goods, agricultural products, retail services and financial capital.” 

Similar statements in defense of multilateralism and the need for a unilateral U.S. corporate offensive were made by the member-organizations of ABCDoha’s steering committee, which includes the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Council for International Business, and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Described by the president of NAM as “a powerful new force in support of a successful Doha Round for agricultural, manufacturing and services interests,” ABCDoha will apparently act as a powerful force in saving the global economy’s fragile multilateralism, while channeling the benefits of expanded global trade to U.S. business interests. 

F or decades U.S.-based corporations, backed by the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Council for International Business, and NAM, have aggressively opposed the application of any multilateral or national instruments that could hold them accountable for violations of international law, particularly with regard to human rights violations. While the corporate interests driving ABCDoha actively promote new universal values and norms for a globalized economy, they vigorously oppose the universal application of long-standing international human rights conventions. 

This is epitomized by the corporate offensive against the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) or Alien Tort Statute (ATS), an obscure U.S. law passed in 1789 that has recently been used by victims of international human rights abuses to sue U.S.-based corporations in U.S. courts. Farmers, workers, fisher-folk, and local communities in more than a dozen countries have filed cases against corporations such as Texaco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Gap Inc., Unocal, Royal Dutch/Shell, Rio Tinto, Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Union Carbide, and Freeport McMoran. The cases range from the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal, India in 1984, in which 20,000 people died and 140,000 were injured, to the use of forced labor in Burma in the construction of an oil pipeline used by Unocal and the torture and toxic pollution by Freeport mining company in Indonesia. 

Among these cases was a class action lawsuit filed by the Vietnam Association for Agent Orange Victims against a dozen U.S. chemical manufacturers, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, which was thrown out by a U.S. federal court on March 10, 2005. Like many other cases filed under the ATS involving atrocities against humanity, war crimes, torture, slavery, and genocide, the Victims of Agent Orange sought— more than anything—to expose the truth about the involvement of these corporations in perpetrating these crimes. What is remarkable about the corporate response is the attempt to prevent these cases going to trial, challenging not the claims made by victims of these atrocities, but their right to use U.S. courts to make their claims. There was rarely any attempt to deny that the atrocities occurred. Corporations have declared that they shouldn’t be held accountable and that any laws—international or national—that may be used to enforce accountability for these crimes should be ignored, amended, or revoked. It was for this reason that energy was concentrated in securing a Supreme Court ruling limiting the interpretation of the ATS so that it could no longer be used to “victimize” U.S. corporations. Indeed, “support groups” were soon created to help corporate “victims,” such as Unocal and Dow Chemical, apparently “traumatized” by the reminder of their crimes. Fear and absurdity returns with a vengeance. 

So members of ABCDoha essentially argued that legal liability for violations of international human rights is a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. But the fear of judicial imperialism doesn’t stop there. A separate brief, submitted to the Supreme Court by NAM, argues that the problem lies in the threat posed by the dangerous application of universally recognized worker and trade union rights: “The dangers that lurk if courts do not focus on assent by the United States are especially dramatic in the area of labor standards, where the International Labour Organization has adopted 185 conventions over the years, many of which could be invoked by plaintiffs as norms of customary international law against corporate defendants. Yet the United States has ratified only 14 of those conventions.” 

Finally, corporate fears of victimization reach even greater heights in the “nightmare scenario” depicted in “Awakening Monster,” a policy paper on the Alien Tort Statute published by the Institute for International Economics. In this roller coaster ride through their corporate house of horrors, we see 100,000 class action lawsuits filed by plaintiffs in China against major U.S.-based corporations for “abetting China’s denial of political rights, for observing China’s restrictions on trade unions, and for impairing the Chinese environment.” There’s no question about the complicity of these corporations in committing such violations or how much they profited from them. That’s not the point. The point is that if these cases were to succeed, they could amount to damage claims of up to $20 billion. Added to this is the risk that the Alien Tort Statute could fall into the hands of “antiglobalization forces,” which would ultimately be “more destructive to the liberalization agenda than protests mounted in Seattle, Prague or Washington, DC.” 

There are, of course, International Criminal Courts and guidelines on transnational corporations like the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises. But none of these have the enforceability—based on a genuinely democratic mode of social and political power—needed to effectively regulate transnational capital. This kind of social regulation would run counter to the logic of the WTO regime. That’s precisely why it’s absurd to attempt to add social clauses to WTO rules, attaching international human rights as a footnote to the corporate agenda. Proposals like the social clause are premised on the assumption that rights have been inadvertently neglected or somehow left off the agenda. Yet in the real world we see an orchestrated effort by transnational corporations to prevent the imposition of any kind of mandatory, enforceable, and effective multilateral instrument on human rights. That’s one reason why voluntary instruments like the UN Global Compact are welcomed by business interests—they allow corporations to receive public approval for voluntarily acknowledging human rights already enshrined in UN conventions and treaties. Gone is the obligation to recognize human rights as fundamental and universal. Instead, human rights are voluntary and selective (corporations are free to choose which rights to recognize). This is used benevolently to declare: “We’ve decided to recognize human rights,” tantamount to recognizing people as human. 

So where does that leave us? Twenty years after the nightmare of the Bhopal tragedy and forty years after the tragedy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, we’re witnessing new tragedies in the making. Meanwhile, communities are compelled to live under the shadow of fear and absurdity, constantly promised that they’ll be lifted out of poverty through more global trade while systematically denied their rights. In the fantasy world of the WTO and the magical Doha Round all of that is swept away. 

At least in Disneyland fiction and fantasy end when you leave.