Смекни!
smekni.com

Keeping The Rabble In Line Essay Research (стр. 4 из 4)

Similarly, “defense” expenditures are not considered subsidies under GATT rules. That’s enormously important for the U.S., which spends more on its military system than the rest of the world combined, as has always used that as a cover for massive public subsidy to high-tech industry. The point is that there is a mixture of protectionism and liberalization geared to the interests of those who are designing the policies, which are the powerful economic forces within the state in question. That’s not a great surprise, after all, but that’s what GATT is all about, and that’s what the negotiations are about.

If the current GATT programs succeed, it’s clear that they’re tending towards a world government ruled by a club of rich men who meet in their organizations, like the G-7 meetings, the meetings of the seven richest industrial countries, which have their own institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, which have a network of arrangements established in GATT and which administer a system of what’s sometimes been called “corporate mercantilism.” Remember that although this is called “liberalization” and “free trade,” there’s a tremendous amount of managed trade internal to it. So huge corporations which are often more powerful than many states carry out controlled, managed trade internally. This means trade across borders, too, because they’re internationalized. They do planning of investments, of production, of commercial interactions, manipulation of prices, and so on, and they naturally manage it for their own interests. Corporate mercantilism is fine. It’s governments that are not allowed to get into the game. The rich western powers don’t have any objection at all to managed trade. They just don’t want it to be done by governments, because governments have a dangerous feature that corporations don’t have: governments may to some extent fall under the influence of popular forces, usually to a limited extent. But to some extent there’s always that fear. There’s no such fear in corporations. They are immune from any form of public control or even surveillance. Therefore they are much more acceptable management agents for this mercantilist system being designed globally in the interests of the rich. GATT plays its role in this.

DB: You mentioned the powerful economic forces. Increasingly those forces transcend frontiers. There has been a massive internationalization of capital and finance over the last few years. What are the implications of that?

First of all, there’s nothing novel about it. Back in the 1930s there were, for example, notorious interconnections between, say, I.G. Farben in Germany and Du Pont. In fact, big U.S. corporations were essentially producing for the German war machine right up until the war and some even claim afterwards in various devious ways. But there was a big change after the Second World War. There was a big upsurge in the creation of multinational firms, even beyond the traditional multinationals, for example, the energy corporations, which always were highly internationalized. But it extended much beyond. The Marshall Plan, for example, gave a big shot in the arm to the internationalization of capital. It would designate some project in Belgium where you could build a steel complex. It would then encourage bids from American corporations, which would naturally win the bidding most of the time. Marshall Plan funds were then used, as intended, to underlie the expansion of U.S. investment through the rich areas, primarily in Europe. That led to an explosion of international corporations. U.S. foreign investment exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. Not long after came European international capital. Britain had always been substantially involved in the internationalization of capital. In recent years Japan has joined the game and done plenty of foreign investing. This has increased through the 1980s.

There are a lot of reasons for this in the recent period. One is the one I mentioned before, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which led to an enormous amount of unregulated internationalized wealth. Another was a revolution in telecommunications, which makes it extremely easy to control international operations in which production is done in one place and the financing comes from somewhere else and you shift the dollars around. That means you can have executive offices in a skyscraper in New York and production facilities in Papua, New Guinea and fake banks in the Cayman Islands which may be nothing more than a fax machine set up to evade regulation. You can transfer funds around. You can control and manage importing and exporting within the corporate empire through management decisions. It can be scattered all over the world, with branch offices in Zurich. That’s had a lot of effect. Everyone knows that the U.S. share in international trade has been declining in the last ten years. But in fact if you look at the share in international trade of U.S.-based corporations, it has not been declining. It may have been either stable or slightly increasing. Everyone knows the U.S. is supposed to have a big trade deficit. On the other hand, if you take into account the operations of overseas producers that are part of U.S.-based corporations, and imports into the United States that are actually transfers from U.S. corporations operating abroad to the same U.S. corporations operating internally, if they import parts for their own production, it probably levels out the trade deficit, maybe even gives the U.S. a trade surplus.

The functioning institutions in the world system are increasingly corporate empires. I say “increasingly” because national states, the rich states, at least, retain substantial importance. They are instruments of integrated corporate systems. And also increasing because it’s an old phenomenon. It goes back to the origins of capitalism. It is true that it has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.

DB: To continue with GATT: The Environmental News Network has said that GATT will “open borders for businesses seeking lower labor costs and less rigorous environmental regulation, thus blackmailing U.S workers to accept deteriorating working conditions and lower wages or lose their jobs.” Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

It’s not even controversial. Of course it will have that effect. It’s already having that effect. Take the free-trade agreement with Canada. It’s actually working both ways. Canada has just objected to U.S. environmental regulations on use of asbestos, claiming that that’s interference with free trade. Canada is an asbestos exporter, and they want the barriers lowered. Perhaps they’ve already won on that, meaning that U.S. environmental regulations on asbestos will have to decline. Sooner or later the U.S. is probably going to object to the Canadian Health Service as an interference with free trade because it means that Canadian-based corporations are freed from the burden of paying parts of health costs that U.S. corporations have to bear because of the grotesquely incompetent and highly bureaucratized health system. Threats from U.S. insurance companies were enough to cause Ontario to drop plans for a provincial auto insurance program that would have reduced costs, but cut out the highly inefficient private corporations — an interference with free trade, they claimed, and won. Canada has lost several hundred thousand jobs. There are various estimates, but none are less than a quarter of a million jobs, to the United States, manufacturing and similar type labor, because Canadian corporations would much prefer to produce in the southeastern United States, where the government enforces what are called “right-to-work laws,” which means state policy coerces labor to ensure that there will be no unionization. As a result, working conditions are far inferior. Wages are less. Naturally, corporations will move to such places. Even the threat to move serves to discipline labor. In general, the effect of the free-trade agreements will be to move to the lowest common denominator with regard to wages, and environmental protection.

DB: So do you think that under the rubric of free trade that the Canadian health care system would be seen as an unfair advantage that Canadians have?

It hasn’t yet happened, but I would expect it. I expect that American corporations sooner or later may decide that it would be a good idea to undermine the Canadian Health Service by an argument of that sort. There are a lot of calculations involved in that. One problem is that production is so internationalized that Canadian corporations are often U.S. corporations.

DB: What did you make of the spectacle of the President of the United States going to Japan with about a score of CEOs of major U.S. corporations and essentially demanding a kind of “international affirmative action,” as Jesse Jackson has called it?

First of all, remember that the propaganda phrase was, “I’m going for jobs, jobs, jobs.” How much Bush cares about jobs you can see by looking at U.S. policy towards American workers. So while he’s talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, the U.S. government is trying to set up the basis for maquiladora industries in Central America to take away American jobs. The phrase means “profits, profits, profits.” That’s what he was there for. It was kind of stupid for the CEOs to come along. It left the United States as an object of ridicule. But whether they were along or not, that’s what the trip was for. Everybody should have known that. The trip was to coerce Japan into accepting managed trade, meaning what’s called here “fair-trade practices,” which means mercantilist arrangements between powerful states to violate free-trade arrangements and ensure that their own powerful economic forces get benefits. There’s nothing novel about that. The Reagan administration combined free-trade bombast with a highly protectionist record. Take control over imports. Various kinds of control over imports amount to duties. They practically doubled, from about twelve percent to about twenty-three percent, during the Reagan years, through what are sometimes called “voluntary arrangements,” meaning “you do what we say or we’ll close off your market.” The latest effort to get Japan to buy American auto parts is just another part of the state-managed trade system that the rich always insist upon while of course beating their breasts about free trade when you can use it as a weapon against someone else.

DB: Is Japan powerful enough to resist?

That’s an interesting question. No one really has answers to these questions. The domestic and international economies are only very dimly understood by anyone. So anything we say will sound a lot more confident than it ought to be. My own suspicion has always been that the strength of the Japanese economy has been overestimated, that it’s much flimsier than is alleged. For objective reasons. Japan is a resource-poor country, highly dependent upon export for survival. In particular it depends very heavily on the U.S. market. It’s expanding into Asian markets, but that doesn’t compare with the U.S. market. The U.S. remains the richest country in the world. Also, it’s dependent, unlike the United States — which has plenty of internal resources and enough military power to control other sources of raw materials — on trade for resources and raw materials as well. Also, the Japanese, when you look at the numbers, look very rich. But if you look at the way people live, they don’t look very rich. People are crammed into tiny apartments. They live a highly coerced and submissive existence. If you develop any reasonable quality of life standards, Japan would not rank very high by many measures, although it ranks quite high in others, like health, for example. So it’s a mixed story. It think there are serious weaknesses in that economy. I’m not all that surprised by the current recession and financial crisis in Japan. They have such resources and capital. They’ll doubtless pull out of this one.

DB: Along with the Arab oil producing states and some portions of Europe, Japan seems to be the only other area where there is excess capital formation for investment.

There is a lot of excess capital, but it’s not clear

33b