The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particular nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Among the measures contrived by international business to achieve dominion over the entire planet is globalization. As presented to the public, globalization is just part of a natural and inevitable expansion of trade and economic development beneficial to all. In early times, there were only village markets; these eventually expanded into regional markets, then national ones, then international ones, and now finally global agreements that cover the entire world.
As presented to the public, globalization supposedly was going to create more jobs and prosperity by abolishing restrictive regulatory laws and by integrating nation-state economies into a more open and active trade system. In fact, these “free trade” arrangements represent a kind of global coup d’état by the giant business interests of the world.
With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and numerous other multilateral international covenants, the transnational corporations have been elevated above the sovereign powers of nation-states.1 These agreements endow anonymous international trade committees such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), established in 1994, with the authority to overrule any nation-state laws that are deemed a burden to the investment opportunities of transnational corporations.
These trade panels consist of “trade specialists” elected by no one and drawn from the corporate world. They meet in secret and often have investment stakes in the very issues they adjudicate, being bound by no conflict-of-interest provisions. Their function is to allow the transnational companies to do whatever they wish without any regulations placed on them by any country. Not one of GATT’s 500 pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against governments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidies, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honor all transnational corporate patent claims on natural resources, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO.
Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.2 The WTO has ruled against laws deemed barriers to free trade. It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby food. It has eliminated the ban that various countries had imposed on asbestos and on fuel and emission standards for motor vehicles. And the WTO has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban some nations imposed on the importation of endangered-species products.
The European Union banned the importation of hormone-ridden US beef, a ruling that had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The WTO decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the US Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries, along with a portion of the US Endangered Species Act that forbade the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.3