By Atilio Borón on December 12, 2017
In this note we will take care of the first one, given that in these days the summit meeting of that organization is being held in Buenos Aires.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the successor of the General Agreement on Trade and Customs Duties agreed upon at the end of the Second World War. Created on January 1,1995 during the years of the heyday of the infamous Washington Consensus (now repudiated by the US government), it has the mission, as well as the agreement that preceded it, to lay the commercial, financial and legal basis (the right of property, especially intellectual property to preserve the marks and patents of the gigantic oligopolies that dominate the world economy) within the framework of global neoliberalism to organize the application of all types of sanctions and reprisals on countries that violate their rules and regulations. Its role then is to perpetuate the current international division of labor by which rich countries are increasingly growing while the poor are increasingly estranged from the former.
Of course WTO rules have never been subjected to any democratic discussion, and it is the most refined expression of the world order that imperialism and its great transnationals want. It can be said that the WTO is the Ministry of Finance of the Empire that exceeds the laws of individual nations. It is a grouping with extensive mafia ties which is responsible for organizing the blackmail and extortion exerted by imperialism and its main allies and companies onto the weakest countries. For example, only some governments have access to the systematic compilation of trade and tariff data handled by the WTO.
Social organizations, representatives of the vast majority of the world’s population, have no access to their deliberations–or conspiracies?–and even, as has been scandalously demonstrated now at the Buenos Aires summit, the effective participation of organizations interested in promoting a fairer international order are not even allowed in. On the other hand, it is clear that nothing works within the WTO if there is no agreement between the United States and the European Union. The current problem is that Donald Trump’s government has partly separated from the WTO because, in his view, the expansion of global neoliberalism has ended up weakening the American economy, not its large transnational corporations, and the White House is retaking the never-forsaken flag of protectionism. And the European Union, we know, is “free trading” in the areas that suit them and in the field of rhetoric, but furiously protectionist in others, especially in agriculture.
The mafia structure of the WTO is revealed, among many other things, in a clause requiring new members to fully adhere to all pre-existing agreements, which cannot be reviewed. Whoever enters accepts all, and if he does not stays outside to suffer the consequences of the marginalization of world trade.
But this is not the most serious thing. There are two other rules that must be accepted by all members of this white collar mafia, which sponsors tax havens, the monopoly control of the markets and the preeminence of the great Powers.
One, the commitment to ensure the “progressive liberalization” of the various sectors of the economy and the irreversibility of neoliberal reforms. The ideological-political role becomes absolutely evident from this commitment to stabilize the social, economic and environmental holocaust produced by neoliberal policies.
Two, thanks to the pressures of the George W. Bush government at the glory time of the Washington consensus, the WTO began to include in its jurisdiction the “Trade in Services “. Before that only included manufactured goods, minerals and agricultural products. Now this organization has gradually become the regulator in the exchanges of “services ” such as communications, finances, transport, tourism but also health and education. Thereby the WTO has acquired the universal range of goods and burying the notion that these were imperative rights not susceptible to being regulated by the laws of the market.
This means that unless the people come out to defend their rights with force and intelligence in a few years or so absolutely all the economic and social life of the planet will be governed by the laws of the market. And in educational matters, for example, it will be illegal to support public education because it would be considered by the WTO as a discriminatory practice that impedes free competition in the global educational market.
Just as a country that subsidizes an export product is sanctioned, it would do the same with those who subsidize their education or health, with the disastrous consequences that are to be expected. That is why the WTO has earned the characterization as a mafia and criminal organization, which has sown poverty and economic exploitation across the globe.
That is why it is also necessary to design a global strategy to neutralize the WTO’s planetary project. Isolated national or local struggles, as selfless and heroic as they are, will not control this criminal mafia. The organization of all peoples of the world is required in one universal “anti-WTO”, or a new international of peoples, to coordinate the struggles in different countries to defend against the catastrophe that threatens us if the plans of the WTO finally prevail. That is why Chavez spoke of the need to found a Fifth International.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – translation North American Bureau