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So GATT trundled on for years, a hideaway where corporate executives, lawyers, their chums among official experts and tame politicians could engage in a series of infernal negotiating ‘rounds’ designed to reduce tariffs, promote unrestrained trade, increase the profitability of big business and bore everyone else to death. The US Government announced that it would not seek Congressional approval for the Charter of the ITO, which was duly pronounced dead at birth. GATT would confine itself to cutting border tariffs on the trade in physical goods, and have nothing whatever to do with the UN. Its function would be to ensure that no-one else would ever get their hands on the treasure of international trade. So they conspired together to found their own club, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the Cold War intensified, they styled the UN – with its Communist members and impoverished majority – unreliable. A matter of months beforehand, 23 of the richest and most powerful countries decided they didn’t like the look of it after all. The unrestrained imperial ambition of ‘free-market’ capitalism had brought the world to its knees in a blood-bath during the better part of two generations.įifty founding members of the UN proposed a Charter for the ITO, to be ratified by a conference in Havana in 1947.
This was to regulate the mafioso practices of international finance and commerce, the ruinous collapse of commodity prices, the beggar-thy-neighbour protection rackets of big business and the inertia of governments. Among its functions was to be the oversight of an International Trade Organization (ITO). This provoked in the mid-1940s a brief outbreak of relative sanity and the birth of the United Nations. The origins of this cancer can be traced back to the chaos of the Great War of 1914, the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War Two. It glorifies all forms of ‘growth’ in feigned ignorance of any cancerous mutations, including its own. Those who disagree must be deluded, deviant, disobedient, diverse, or perhaps just democratic. It makes rules that must, by definition, eventually apply to all peoples, regardless of their outlook. It pursues the ‘liberalization’ of everything because it can think of no other reason for its own existence.
The WTO, as if possessed of some obscure religious belief, advocates the universal application of an ideology so narrow, so utterly orthodox, so partial, so devoid of rational justification, so totally deranged, that it imagines nothing else. One has to keep asking: where in the name of creation can all this conceivably lead?
Never before have ‘world markets’ been accorded quite such a defining role in human affairs. Never before have we faced such a clear and present danger of self-inflicted environmental calamity. Never before in human history have quite such grotesque inequalities of power, material wealth and human dignity cut quite so deeply, or quite so fast, into the fabric of the earth. It now presides over a looming catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. And whenever you hear this phrase employed by way of explanation for anything, chances are the World Trade Organization (WTO) is mixed up in it somewhere. Sooner or later – if not sooner and sooner – it comes down to the imperative to ‘compete on world markets’.
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We notice it every time our employers, our teachers, our neighbours, our landlords, our nearest TV pundits or political celebrities assert a ‘realism’ that dictates this, that or the other course of action. Day by day a very peculiar kind of exchange intrudes more deeply into all our lives.
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