From Iron Wall to Wall of Shame

The era of the national security state may have ended in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. But at the same time another wall was being erected, shielding an emerging corporate security state from forces that favor democracy.

This April in Quebec City that wall materialized: a 10-foot chain-link fence set in concrete, topped by barbed wire, and guarded by 6,000 heavily armed riot police. The wall’s purpose was to create a security zone. It kept an estimated 60,000 protesters (unofficial police figure) from disrupting the negotiations of a secret free-trade agreement. Spanning an area from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, this agreement is designed to erode democratically enacted laws and replace them with a uniform hemispheric constitution by, of, and for the corporations.

The past World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Renato Ruggiero is famous for his bold declaration: “We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.” He was not exaggerating. Global trade has come a long way since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was established in 1947 to regulate tariffs and quotas for trade in manufactured goods.

Since the Uruguay round concluded in 1994 with the establishment of the WTO trade negotiations have increasingly focused on so-called nontariff barriers” to trade. These barriers can include any government measure which potentially limits access of foreign companies to its domestic market. That means that global trade talks reach further and further into our communities, homes and personal lives.

In a recent pioneering study of the impact of trade and investment agreements on California laws, Georgetown Law Professor Robert Stumberg identifies 11 categories of state law – including food quality and safety, competition, consumer protection, economic development, environmental health, land use control, and labor and human rights – and, within these categories, more than 100 laws that appear not to comply with trade or investment rules under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the WTO agreements. These laws are all on the endangered laws list.

Stumberg concludes that “trade and investment agreements are designed to limit the sovereignty of American states,” ending the federalist tradition of cities and states serving as “laboratories of democracy.”

A particularly invasive aspect of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations, most recently taking place in Quebec City, is the talks on public services. Services such as health care, childcare, elder-care, education, museums, libraries, water, sewers, environmental protection, mail delivery, transportation, publishing and broadcasting could be put on the auction block and sold to the highest bidder. If the barrier to privatization of such essential services is national laws and regulations that protect access and uphold the principle of entitlement, those laws must be treated like border tariffs: gutted and eliminated.

More problematic for governments is the FTAA “investor-state” provision that would allow corporations to demand cash compensation from governments if their profit-making potential has been injured by laws “tantamount to expropriation.” NAFTA’s Chapter 11 is the model. It allows corporations to litigate on their own without having to ask national governments to act on their behalf in international trade tribunals.

For example, the Canadian-based corporation Methanex is currently suing the U.S. government for $970 million, claiming that California’s plan to phase out the gasoline additive MTBE, a suspected carcinogen that has contaminated the water supply of at least 300 California cities, threatens “future profits.” California’s decision to phase out MTBE was the result of a democratic process in which the public participated through public hearings and written submissions to the legislature.

By contrast, the Methanex claim is being arbitrated in a trade tribunal which is closed to the public and accepts no amici curie argument from government officials or non-governmental organizations. California’s interests are “represented” by the federal government lawyers who negotiated NAFTA in the first place.

Still more insidious, many proposed laws and regulations may never see the light of day for fear they may be challenged in NAFTA or WTO tribunals, a process called the “chilling effect.” Developing countries are more vulnerable to such threats than affluent nations, which have more resources to carry out and withstand challenges.

Yet, the leaders behind the wall (prompted by their corporate advisors) come out to tell us to be patient, that this economic system works, and that it will usher in a new era of democracy in the Americas. We must wait. But who could tell that to the 850 million people who go hungry every day, the one billion people who lack access to clean drinking water, or the one third of the population in the least developed countries who die before the age of 40? Who could tell that to Bangor’s brothers and sisters in Carasque, El Salvador, who cultivate eroded mountain-slopes, but now have to compete against giant agro-business on a “level playing field.”

Foreign agro-business gain market access; the Carasquenos become disposable. These people can no longer afford to wait for the system to work. They will struggle today, because their lives depend on it. They understand that democracy is of their own making.

Unfortunately, our leaders who hide behind a wall of shame will neither see nor hear them. After Quebec, more of the world realizes that dismantling the wall which protects the corporate security state is the first step to fair trade and real democracy.

This commentary was written by Elaine Cinceva, Bjorn Skorpen Claeson, Debbie Leighton, Joyce Mallery and Karen Volckhausen, members of Peace through Interamerican Community Action (PICA), who protested the FTAA in Quebec City in April.