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G-8 protesters know something the media don't: Economy is being undemocratically overhauled By
Jim Steitz The Genoa protests are past, yet the media's talking heads and pundits remain clueless about the protesters' message. Lacking an explanation for tens of thousands of young people paying their way to a faraway country to be bombarded with tear gas and water cannons, the media have derided them as Luddites, anarchists, or ingrates with too much free time and a compulsion to obstruct our happy, non-questioning system. This tragically diverts public attention from the agenda of these meetings and the refusal of the G-8 leaders to divulge the overhaul of our legal and economic systems they are engineering. Free trade, as currently defined, means the replacement of democracy with new corporate global governance. The trade regimes crafted in these gatherings, such as the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA) and World Trade Organization (WTO), can override federal, state, and local laws, regulations, and even the U.S. Constitution if they see fit. Originally crafted to prevent seizure of foreign investment, NAFTA has been expanded to invalidate any provision of law deemed to weaken investment potential. A NAFTA claim by the Canadian corporation Methanex is pending against California's ban on MTBE, a gasoline additive and carcinogen that has contaminated thousands of water sources. If NAFTA rules against California, that state must either pay $970 million to Methanex or resume the assault on the DNA of its citizens. The United States corporation Metalclad won a $16.7 million claim against the Mexican province San Luis Potosi for refusing to permit operation of a waste-processing site that posed severe pollution threats. Even United Pacel Service has filed notice of claim against Canada for $100 million, arguing that Canada Post (its postal service) is unfair competition! The WTO has similar powers. In 1998, the WTO ruled against U.S. regulations requiring shrimpers selling to US markets to install turtle-escape hatches on their nets. The regulation was subsequently repealed. In 1996 the WTO ruled against an Environmental Protection Agency standard for gasoline purity from smog-forming compounds. The EPA weakened the regulation to give deference to foreign refiners. These non-appealable cases are heard by appointed tribunals with no citizen participation. Unlike U.S. courts, the tribunals give minimal scientific deference to rulemaking agencies, and do not hesitate to rule against regulations involving complex environmental and economic factors, without the benefit of expert testimony. The evolving WTO and NAFTA case law shows no end in sight. With evisceration of existing environmental and health provisions through murky and convoluted tribunal logic, I could walk into Canada tomorrow to sell water laced with plutonium, and sue Canada in NAFTA court if it interfered. This "race to the bottom" is a recurring theme of environmental and labor dilemmas, and begs for universal standards, just as U.S. courts have approved federal regulation of interstate air and water pollution. With no global equivalent, corporations gravitate to the lowest wages and environmental standards. Even worse, NAFTA rules undercut any export controls that conserve natural resources, obliging developing nations to liquidate their forests and soils. Even wealthy Canada is scrambling to prevent massive water exports to the U.S. Over long time scales, the argument that free trade reduces poverty and promotes development is untenable. The protesters are not against globalization and free trade, but they insist on setting a floor, not a ceiling, on human and environmental dignity. Indeed, economic globalization can facilitate corporate persuasion, through conditions on doing business in the United States. For example, we could require Exxon to meet U.S. environmental standards in its Chad/Cameroon pipeline operation, widely condemned for gross environmental and human rights violations. We could require Boise Cascade to avoid purchasing arrangements like that in Guerrero, Mexico, that led to massive deforestation, watershed degradation, and, indirectly, the torture and wrongful imprisonment of two farmer-activists. Instead, our public policies are subverted to the new commercial order. This dramatically reverses traditional law. In the new order, the corporation, not the state, is sovereign, and citizen oversight is eviscerated. Even international treaties have been found legally inferior to trade rules. The United States verges on renouncing is sovereignty to a new global order that defines laws by what would be most economically favorable, not the desires of its citizens. The term for this system has yet to be coined, but it is not democracy. This is the outrage of the protesters. America's citizenry must join the protesters, though it will be difficult at the secluded mountain mansion in Alberta, where the G-8 has arranged to hold the next summit. Those protesters may be the only thing separating our Constitution from corporate oblivion.
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