This article appeared in UCSC's first (at least for a long time) annual Disorientation Guide for 2003-4.
WTO/FTAA/IMF/WB
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund were created along with the Global Agreement of Trade and Tariffs (GATT), at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Ostensibly to reconstruct the economy after WWII, these structures were aimed at rebuilding a world system most suitable for global capital.
The World Bank Group consists of 5 agencies that finance development projects such as roads, dams and power plants in its 177 member countries. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) supplies loans to stave off short-term balance-of-payments difficulties. However, the price for this financial aid is the mandatory implementation of draconian structural adjustment programs (SAPs).
In a nutshell, SAPs are based on deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization. The functions of publicly owned utilities and industries are ceded to private companies; government budgets for social programs like health care and education are slashed in order to comply with debt payments; and agriculture shifts away from a sustainable, autonomous food supply toward mass production of cash crops for export to industrialized countries (who in turn sell their own packaged products and subsidized crop surplus back to the poorer countries).
In 1995 the WTO replaced the GATT. The Uruguay Round of trade talks, which the WTO proclaimed the most sweeping trade program in history, began in 1986. It has been plagued with dissent from its inception. Key components of the program are the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)-- which would commodify electricity, mail, sewage, water, transportation, health care, and other needs-- and Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs), which includes the patenting and ownership of life forms both natural and genetically engineered. Since the recent break-down in negotiations in Cancun, the US/EU-driven stance on investments and agriculture is in jeopardy. If it cannot be salvaged, it is likely that rather than depending on the WTO's sweeping jurisdiction, the US will seek to further its trade interests through bilateral and regional agreements such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)-- which is based on many of the same principles.
Expanding on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which linked Canada, the United States and Mexico, the FTAA will encompass all the countries in North and South America except for embargoed Cuba. In effect, this will enable the extension of monopoly by US-based corporations throughout this sphere of influence. Under the trade protections of NAFTA's Chapter 11, corporations are already able to sue member states for attempting to impose regulations on environmental protection, public health, labor and consumer safety standards, citing them as illegal barriers to profit.
WEAPONS CONTRACTORS
Defense spending is estimated around $400 billion for 2003, up from $329 billion when Bush took office; as well as $38 billion for homeland security. The top 5 arms manufacturers-- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, TRW and Northrop Grumman-- are among the greatest beneficiaries of recent increases in defense spending. Together the "Big 5" have contributed many millions of dollars to political campaigns in exchange for over 60% of defense contracts over several decades. Since the declaration of the War on Terror, Boeing has boosted production of its Joint Direct Attack Munitions smart bombs, and Raytheon of Tomahawk missiles. Alliant Techsystems, which manufactures depleted uranium shells, land mines, nuclear missile propulsion systems (notably the Trident II), and the army's "next generation combat rifle" capable of firing either bullets or grenades and "seeing" around walls, received a $92 million contract for ammo alone. Among the many personal ties to the arms industry within the Bush administration, Dick Cheney is a former board member of TRW, Lynn Cheney of Lockheed Martin.
CORPORATIONS:
OIL
Oil is perhaps the single biggest factor driving the political economy, and in determining colonial military strategy. The major oil companies have been implicated around the world for human rights abuses and environmental devastation, sometimes in collaboration with repressive local governments, sometimes with the aid of US military forces, US-owned private security, or US-trained and -equipped paramilitaries. A few examples: ExxonMobil is on trial for permitting or colluding in torture and murder by Indonesian troops in East Timor and Aceh, where separatists apparently posed a threat to its pipelines. Shell Oil has contributed to deadly civil unrest in Nigeria. Occidental Petroleum threatens rain forest and indigenous communities with its Cao Limn pipeline through Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. Although Oxy was thwarted by a campaign to defend the U'wa people's ancestral land, it is now in line for a $98 million "War on Terrorism" contract equipping Colombian troops to protect the pipeline. Halliburton, the oil-industry construction company formerly headed by vice president Dick Cheney, and itssubsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, were awarded plum contracts in occupied Iraq (such as they have also received in other US military hotspots, from Vietnam to the Balkans). So far Halliburton claims a profit of $324 million for its work in Iraq.
BIOTECH
Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont, and Bayer are breaking unheard-of barriers in genetic engineering. For example, theyÕve produced strawberries with a gene for antifreeze from the blood of fish; farmed salmon with a growth hormone that virtually doubles their size; and corn, soy and cotton which alone can survive Monsanto's lethal (and in some cases mandatory) Round-up Ready. The EU is very suspicious of the unproven safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and threatens a boycott on US agricultural imports if they refuse to label GM foods. US-based biotech companies say this would unfairly damage their sales. Mexican campesinos, Ethiopian cotton growers, and small farmers from India and South Korea, all have protested the flooding of their markets by heavily subsidized GMO produce from the US, which threatens not only their livelihoods, but their way of life and the genetic diversity of traditional crops.
PHARMACEUTICALS
As a contentious political issue in current global trade negotiations, access to affordable medicines is perhaps second only to the debate on GMOS. The highest rate of HIV-infections and AIDS-related deaths are now in Africa and South Asia. Almost 26 million Africans are now infected with AIDS, and in some parts of the continent as many as 40% may carry HIV. The top ten pharmaceuticals companies GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Johnson&Johnson control 60% of the global medications market. These corporations have tried to prevent pharmaceutical companies in Brazil and India from producing generic drugs that are affordable to patients in the developing world, claiming patent rights on their brand name products under TRIPs. WTO member nations recently moved to allow production of affordable drugs for third world countries under emergency conditions only.
MEDIA
Democracy depends upon access to free and diverse information. Lest anyone doubt that conflict of interest might create media bias: consider that NBC is owned by General Electric, which also owns Westinghouse, which collaborated with Boeing and Northrop Grumman to produce the B-2 bomber and the F-18 fighter plane.
Viacom (owner of CBS), Disney (owner of ABC), Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (owner of Fox), General Electric (NBC) and AOL Time Warner control 75% of prime time television production. Clear Channel owns 1225 radio stations in 300 cities across the country, and controls audience shares in 100 out of 112 major markets. A recent Federal Communications Commission(FCC) ruling relaxed restrictions on market ownership by the largest media corporations, allowing one company to control up to 45% of the national television market, and to control print as well as television markets in a given area. This ruling is currently being contested.
SERVICES
Increasingly, basic human rights and resources essential to survival are being privatized, which means that not only medicine and schooling but water and energy will only be available for sale at prices set by for-profit corporations. Enron's disastrous manipulation of the California energy market is a classic illustration of this process. Another example: in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a Bechtel subsidiary moved to privatize the water supply in 1999. The price on water spiked 200%. Due to intense public outcry, the contract was revoked. Bechtel is now suing the country in a World Bank court for $25 million in lost profits.
MANUFACTURING
Since NAFTA was established in 1994, over 765,000 unionized manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United States. 90% of 400 plant closings in the US occurred as illegal responses to union organizing. Instead, these jobs have moved into maquiladoras along the Mexican border, or sweatshops in East Asia. Other favored locations for sweatshops include regions of recent unrest which are newly integrating into the global economy, such as China, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cambodia. Nike's factories in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, like the Gap's in Mexico, Honduras, Phillippines, Russia, Macao, and the US island colony of Saipan, frequently use indentured labor. Wages range from as low as 1/3 to as high as 70% of what workers need to survive. Conditions are harsh during 12-16 hours days, and labor organizing is prevented.
FIRST WORLD CONSUMERS
Corporate control depends on the cooperation of the first world consumer to close the economic circle of profit. Governments of the rich nations depend on the consent of the first world consumer to support their policies. Although the U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world's population, we consume close to 30% percent of the world's resources. We are at the top of the food chain. The system needs us.
"THE MILITARY AND THE MONETARY... GET TOGETHER WHENEVER IT'S NECESSARY..."(Gil Scott Heron)
Throughout the history of colonialism, domination is based on a symbiosis of economic exploitation and military power. Force is used when necessary to extract wealth, monopolize trade, enforce compliance with the economic program, and protect strategic resources-- most notably, oil. But force is only necessary when consent is denied, or when economic manipulation fails. What I've described above is the institutional skeleton of the neo-liberal paradigm which prevailed in the 1980s-90s. In the last few years, however, we're witnessing a shift toward the neo-conservative model. Another way of saying this is that the method of domination is bypassing the subtler modes of economic hegemony and moving toward more direct military force. Many of the elite corporations most implicated in WTO policies are the same ones who have benefited most from the US invasion of Iraq (e.g. Bechtel, Halliburton, ChevronTexaco...). Opposing war and opposing corporate globalization are the complementary means of opposing the mechanisms of empire.
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