Globalization: The Fat Lady Ain't Sung

Robert Naiman

Champagne corks are popping in Washington, as the corporate lobby celebrates its victory over democracy - bribing Congress into granting "Permanent Normal Trading Relations" to China. Corporations, not China, are the true beneficiaries - they have won "permanent" authority to relocate production to China, take advantage of repression of workers, and export to the United States. Business lobbyists are cleansing their palates of their distaste over the 1997 defeat of "fast track authority" to negotiate "free trade agreements", and the outpourings of protest in Seattle and Washington against the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

For all their campaign dollars, the corporate hold on our government's policy is tenuous, and their celebration will be short-lived. The policies of the terrible trio of corporate globalization, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank - the long arm, to put it crudely, of the United States Treasury Department and the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, acting at the behest of the Fortune 500 and Wall Street banks - cannot survive public scrutiny.

The tenuous grip of corporations on government policy was best shown not by the protests in Seattle or Washington, impressive as they were, but how AIDS activists used the debate over the Africa trade bill to hamstring the Administration's policy of blocking developing countries' access to AIDS drugs at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry. While the Seattle protests helped block the launch of a "Millenium Round" of trade and investment deregulation negotiations in the WTO, and the Washington protests brought unprecedented public and media scrutiny to the destructive policies of the IMF and the World Bank, only the AIDS activists can truly claim not only to have blocked something bad in trade policy debates, but to have won something good: the right of developing countries to make AIDS drugs available to their people free from harassment by the office of the United States Trade Representative.

We can't know where the next fissure will be that will allow real reforms to get through, but such fissures will appear. What reforms of the global economic system might we foist on the next President and Congress?

It's time to rein in the speculators. We've allowed our domestic and international economic policies to be dominated by what John Maynard Keynes called the "rentiers" - those who make money without producing anything, the big bondholders and the speculators. We need to pressure the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low to guarantee full employment. After all, if folks were willing to shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization to stop U.S. corporations from exporting jobs, why allow the Fed to raise interest rates to throw people out of work?

We need to tax the big casino - Wall Street. A small tax on financial transactions like stock trades won't hurt productive investment but will discourage financial speculation that makes markets volatile. A small "Tobin" tax on international currency transactions will discourage speculation in currencies and international financial assets, which has contributed to international economic volatility. Both taxes would also allow us to shift the burden of taxation away from those of us who earn our living from paychecks towards the big financial players who can afford it most.

We should follow the lead of the students who've demanded that U.S. corporations "open the books" on their production overseas. All U.S. corporations must pay living wages in their overseas production facilities and open these plants to inspection by independent human rights monitors. We should enforce the decisions of the International Labor Organization against forced labor in Burma by banning imports from Burma. City councils and state governments should be encouraged to pass more "selective purchasing policies" against corporations that exploit their workers.

We should also follow the students in making sure that World Bank President James Wolfensohn and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers face protests wherever they go, until the World Bank and the IMF stop collecting debt payments from poor countries and end their destructive "structural adjustment" policies. Churches, universities, and union pension funds should stop purchasing World Bank bonds until these demands are met.

To make real progress, we'll have to break the two-party monopoly on our political life, and the Presidential candidacy of Ralph Nader provides an opportunity for this. In the meantime, we'll have to advance through the political equivalent of guerilla warfare. AIDS activists made Burroughs-Wellcome cry uncle. General Electric, Motorola, and Wallmart should expect no less.

 

Robert Naiman Senior Policy Analyst Center for Economic and Policy Research 1015 18th Street, NW, Suite 200 Washington, DC 20036 202-293-5380 x212 Fax: (202) 822-1199 naiman@cepr.net www.cepr.net