[1250] in peace2
WOW! (leaked document re WTO)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Saurabh Asthana)
Tue Nov 20 11:26:41 2001
Message-Id: <200111201609.fAKG9fo08628@chaos11.bwh.harvard.edu>
To: peace-list@mit.edu
Reply-to: rednblack@alum.mit.edu
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 11:09:41 -0500
From: Saurabh Asthana <angrymob@chaos11.bwh.harvard.edu>
This is truly excellent. Do not miss this. The actual documents are:
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/wto/background/2001/lotis.html
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/wto/background/2001/gatsdocs.html.
Saurabh
------
"Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."
-- George W. Bush
The WTO\'s Hidden Agenda
Friday, November 9, 2001
By Greg Palast
Special to CorpWatch
LONDON -- Three confidential documents from
inside the World Trade Organization Secretariat
and a group of captains of London finance, who
call themselves the \"British Invisibles,\" reveal the
extraordinary secret entanglement of industry
with government in designing European and
American proposals for radical pro-business
changes in WTO rules.
One set of documents, minutes of the private
meetings of the Liberalization of Trade in
Services (LOTIS) committee, obtained by BBC
television\'s Newsnight program and CorpWatch,
record 14 secret meetings, from April 1999 and
February 2001, between Britain\'s chief services
trade negotiators, the Bank of England and the
movers and shakers of the Euro-American
business world. Those attending the closed
LOTIS include Peter Sutherland, International
Chairman of US-based investment bank Goldman
Sachs and formerly the Director General of the
World Trade Organization.
LOTIS is chaired by The Right Honorable Lord
Brittan of Spennithorne Q.C., who, as Leon
Brittan headed the European Union. He currently
serves as Vice-Chairman of international banking
house UBS Warburg Dillon Read.
Other LOTIS members include the European
chiefs of US service industry giants Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter, Prudential Corporation and
PriceWaterhouseCoopers. LOTIS is an outgrowth
of the self-styled, \"British Invisibles,\" more
formally known as the Financial Services
International London group. They were joined at
various times by specially-invited members of the
European Commission\'s trade negotiating team.
The minutes indicate that the government
officials shared confidential negotiating
documents with the corporate leaders as well as
inside information on the negotiating positions of
the European community, the US and developing
nations. At the meeting held on February 22nd of
this year, Britain\'s chief negotiator on the
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)
made reference to the European Commission\'s
paper on industry regulation which had been
privately circulated to LOTIS members for their
comment.
GATS is a far reaching agreement that would
affect every public service from healthcare and
education to energy, water and transportation. It
would challenge national environmental, labor
and consumer laws as barriers to trade making
these and other critical services totally
unregulated, say critics.
Barry Coates, director of the WTO watchdog
organization the World Development Movement,
said he was surprised to learn that the LOTIS
industry members received documents which the
British government had refused to give his
organization, even papers \"which they told us
did not exist.\"
Coates, in Qatar today to monitor the WTO
confab, was somewhat amused that the minutes
indicate that LOTIS members, whose companies
represent over $100 billion in assets, seemed
fixated on countering the arguments and actions
of Coates\' low-budget organization. Two of the
LOTIS meetings concentrated on hiring consulting
firms and academics to provide the government
agencies with answers to the World
Development Movement\'s arguments which
question GATS and the wider globalization
agenda. The minutes noted that \"the pro-GATS
case was vulnerable when the NGOs asked for
proof of where the economic benefits of
liberalization lay.\"
Reuters executive Henry Manisty offered his
news service to the LOTIS propaganda effort.
Manisty told the LOTIS group he \"wondered how
business views could best be communicated to
the public.\" Reuters, he said, \"would be most
willing to give them publicity.\"
\"For a long time conspiracy theorists thought
there had been secret meetings between
governments and corporations,\" said Coates.
\"Looking at these minutes, it was worse than we
thought. [The WTO GATS proposals] are a
stitch-up between corporate lobbyists and
government.\"
A Question of Necessity?
Besides having advance or exclusive access to
otherwise confidential governmental negotiating
documents, the minutes indicate that the
industry chiefs, as members of the European
Services Forum, held exclusive meetings with the
\"Article 133\" group, which sets the European
Commission\'s trade policies. The Article 133
group\'s deliberations are supposedly
confidential.
At least one such gathering with the Article 133
committee, held on October 30th has been
independently confirmed by investigators from
the Dutch think tank Corporate Europe
Observatory.
Two other sets of documents suggest that LOTIS
and other corporate lobbyists appeared to have
been astonishingly successful in getting Western
governments to adopt their plans to radically
expand the reach of the GATS treaty. A
confidential memo dated March 19th obtained
from inside the WTO\'s Secretariat, written four
weeks after the LOTIS meeting on the matter,
indicates that European negotiators had
accepted industry-favored amendments to GATS
Article VI.4, known as the \"necessity test.\"
The necessity test requires nations to prove that
their regulations -- from pollution control to child
labor laws -- are not hidden impediments to
trade. Industry wants the WTO to employ a
necessity test similar to the one in the North
America Free Trade Agreement which has worked
to reverse local environmental rules. For
example, Mexico has been forced to pay $17
million to an American corporation, Metalclad, for
delaying the operation of the company\'s toxic
waste dump and processing plant. Local Mexican
officials had attempted to block the plant\'s
operation on the grounds that it was built
without a construction permit, and would not
have received one, as the plant handling toxins
was placed above the area\'s drinking water
supply.
According to the secret March 19 memo from the
Working Party on Domestic Regulation, issued to
WTO members by the organization\'s Secretariat,
European negotiators reached a private
consensus to change the worldwide GATS
agreement to include a much stronger form of
the necessity test than found even in NAFTA. The
Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico
only requires that a nation\'s regulations be
\"least trade restrictive.\"
Under the GATS, as proposed in the memo,
national laws and regulations would be struck
down if they are \"more burdensome than
necessary\" to business. The difference between
the NAFTA language and the proposal for GATS is
subtle, but the effect would be enormous. The
language in the WTO memo effectively removes
trade from the equation. Rather, a nation would
have to adopt rules which are, in the memo\'s
words, the most \"efficient\" -- that is to say those
which carry the lowest cost to business.
NAFTA on Steroids
The changes, as proposed, would slash
regulatory controls over local businesses as well
as foreign operators seeking entry to a market.
For example, the State of California banned the
gasoline additive MBTE because pollutes ground
water. The Canadian maker of the additive has
sued the United States under NAFTA on the
grounds that banning the chemical was not the
\"least trade restrictive\" choice for stopping
ground water contamination. California could
have, the Canadians argue, chosen to dig up and
repair thousands of gas station holding tanks
and established a giant new inspection system.
While the cost of the alternative, running into
billions of dollars, could effectively force California
to back away from protecting its ground water, it
would permit Canada to continue to export the
contaminant.
California is fighting Canada\'s interpretation of
the necessity test before a NAFTA disputes
panel. But under the language proposed for
WTO, the state would have no defense. Lori
Wallach of Global Trade Watch, Washington DC,
calls the proposed language GATS language
changes, \"NAFTA on steroids.\"
The WTO Secretariat\'s proposals follow lines
suggested in another confidential document from
the European Community\'s Working Group dated
February 24 and entitled \"Domestic Regulation:
Necessity and Transparency,\" issued just after
LOTIS meeting on the matter with European
trade negotiators.
Spokespersons for Britain\'s Department of Trade
and Industry, a leader in the EC Working Group,
responded to our discovery of the documents by
stating that the GATS changes, as proposed,
would still allow nations their \"sovereign right to
regulate services\" to meet \"national policy
objectives.\"
However, according to the confidential March 19
memo, in the course of secret multilateral
negotiations trade ministers have agreed that,
before a WTO tribunal, a defense of,
\"safeguarding the public interest... was
rejected.\"
In place of a \"public interest\" defense, the WTO
Secretariat suggests in the memo that the trade
body adopt an \"efficiency principle.\" This has the
advantage, states the official Working Group
paper, of allowing Presidents and Prime Ministers
hostile to environmental protection regulations to
eliminate them -- not through votes of a nation\'s
congress or parliament, but through an edict of
WTO which a nation would be powerless to
reverse. \"It may be politically more acceptable,\"
says the memo, \"to countries to accept
international obligations which give primacy to
economic efficiency.\"
If, for example, the Bush Administration would
rather not reduce the arsenic contamination of
water from mining operations, despite
congressional legislation and decisions by
regulatory panels, it could eliminate the
anti-pollution laws by acceding to orders of a
WTO disputes panel that found regulation \"more
burdensome than necessary.\" Unlike US
congressional, regulatory and court proceedings,
WTO disputes panel deliberations and submitted
evidence are closed to the public and the records
sealed.
A World Trade Organization spokesman
acknowledged the authenticity of the March 19th
note. However, he said the internal discussion
document could not be read to suggest that WTO
have the, \"power to strike down national laws or
regulations.\"
Barry Coates of the World Development
Movement disagrees, \"At its heart, it is a direct
attack on the democratic process.\"
###
Greg Palast can be seen today, Friday November
9th, reporting on the WTO Doha conference, on
Britain\'s premier news program, Newsnight.
You can view this program on demand.
The program will remain at this location until Mon
Nov 12, 2001 5:30 PM EST after which time it will
be linked from http://www.gregpalast.com
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist who
writes a column called \"Inside Corporate
America\" for the Observer, Britain\'s most
respected Sunday newspaper. View all of Greg\'s
columns at http://www.gregpalast.com
