GATT, and its successor, the WTO, are some of the worst things ever to happen to poor, suffering humanity – and that is saying a lot. They are, in my opinion, downright evil, and evil on a global scale. At this point, some of you are probably thinking Hal is finally going off his rocker – but others are probably glad someone is finally telling the truth.
Let me get right down to the point: these new trade agreements, as they are called, can override any law in any country. Let me repeat that, the WTO can override any law in any country it thinks is bad for international business.
Let me give you an example. California discovered that a gasoline additive, made in Canada was carcinogenic, very much so. So it banned the additive because it was poisoning their ground water. Canada retaliated, and complained to the WTO that the US (which contains California) was restraining trade. The WTO agreed. The fact that people were dying in California was irrelevant. Trade was all-important, even if the trade was in poisons.
I was living in California when this happened, but it never got into the news. This is a common occurrence in our times: news that puts the business community, as a whole, in a bad light never sees the light of day. Instead, every filling station in California quietly replaced its gas tanks with new, expensive models, so carcinogenic additives could be used. No one admitted this was happening because of a WTO ruling.
The WTO is not democratic in the least. Its judgments are made in secret courts by non-elected technicians. This is not good situation, in my humble opinion, and I will go into more details later. Meanwhile, fasten your seat belts; we are going to be in for a rough ride.
We live in a highly-polarized time. Most people think the world is in good hands - except for the forces of evil, of course. But I think the world is in bad hands. And it is being controlled by a form of evil all too familiar to us: unregulated greed.
The basics are simple. We need markets and we need trade. We discovered this something like a million years ago. But some people also discovered that controlling these markets, and trade, would made them rich. Two classes of people developed: the exploiters and the exploited; the railroad owners and the farmers.
This was unfortunate, one would have hoped people would have developed their cooperative aspects instead of their greedy aspects, but this isn’t what happened. Instead the exploited classes managed to develop some control over the exploiters, over the robber barons.
They were able to do this because they had political power, they had votes, and they had democracy. The robber barons took note of this situation, and decided to do something about it - they decided to destroy democracy.
Personally, I think this was an evil development, but many people feel differently. They feel the strong and perfect should rule the world, not the week and imperfect, like most of us are.
But let me get back to my main subject, which was GATT.
The Uruguay round of GATT (General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade) was the largest and most important negotiation in history. It lasted from 1986 to 1994, with 125 countries taking part. It changed our world.
So how come you never heard of it? Because the organizations involved in these talks (mainly the international business community) didn’t want you to hear about them – and since they control the media you didn’t hear about them.
Why all the secrecy? Because they did not want people to see how corrupt these negotiations were, and how a new global power structure was being formed - a global pro-business bureaucracy that would make the world safe for them, and dangerous for the rest of us.
One of the worst of these trends was the trade in a new kind of goodies called Intellectual Property Rights. More about this later, you will be amazed at what this includes.
Why did the governments of the world give up their power? This is a fascinating story, and I will go into that later also. Stay tuned.
Recent Comments