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Conspiracy Nation Vol. 07 Num. 91
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 91
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("Quid coniuratio est?")
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LEFTISTS BLAST BANKERS
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Media Blacks Out Precedent-Setting Affair
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By Warren Hough
(*The Spotlight*, 05/27/96)
Liberal and leftist groups from around the world met recently
in Washington to attack free trade, the World Trade
Organization, the international banks and globalism. The
meeting was blacked out by the plutocratic media.
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In a tidal wave of criticism, protests and calls to action
against "international corporate tyranny," a coalition of major
left-leaning reform groups, environmental movements and consumer
alliances has declared war on the "unelected and unaccountable
global elites who are seizing control of one-world governance."
A manifesto issued by participants at the coalition's first mass
rally in Washington extolled populist themes. It denounced
internationalists and especially the Trilateral Commission as the
"developers" of corporate globalization. Globalization, they
insisted, would devastate fragile ecologies in the Third World,
further impoverish its people through exploitation of cheap
labor, and destroy traditional cultures and nationalities.
It warned that the recently established World Trade Organization
(WTO) demonstrated the sort of Rockefeller-sponsored agency
"designed to serve as a global governing body for transnational
corporate interests."
At the three-day convocation which opened on May 11, speakers
from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Friends of
the Earth, the Center for Technology Assessment, the Sierra Club,
Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, the Polaris Institute, and more
than a dozen other generally left-oriented national organizations
delivered incisive indictments of the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve as "amoral
enforcers of the world's worst exploiters."
-+- Coalition Split -+-
Experienced observers of the coalition rally, held under the
aegis of the International Forum on Globalization, were surprised
to note that leading environmental organizations, among them the
Rainforest Action Network, the Migratory Species Project, the
Network for Safe and Secure Food and Environment and the
*Ecologist Magazine* led the attack on the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other globalist "free trade" pacts
log-rolled by the Clinton administration.
"Bill Clinton has been particularly crafty -- and successful --
in dividing and confusing the opposition of these so-called
Greens to NAFTA, the WTO and other so-called 'free trade' deals,"
explained Mark Dowie, a scholar who is writing a book on
environmental protection for the M.I.T. Press.
But when Carl Pope, the youthful executive director of the
600,000 member Sierra Club, rose to deliver one of the keynote
speeches of the symposium, he left no doubt about where his
movement stood now.
"The Sierra Club has spent more money running newspaper ads
criticizing NAFTA than any other topic in its history," Pope
said. In spite of all that, the ill-conceived trade pact was
adopted.
What this means is that "Pat Buchanan deserves a more serious
look," Pope declared. "In this year's campaign he ended up
challenging globalization, confronting the World Trade
Organization, lamenting the increasing inequality of incomes in
our society, and challenging the role of Wall Street financiers
in shaping our futures."
In response, the "international capitalist-connected wing of the
Republican Party led by George Will read him out of the party and
rallied the conservative, the socially conservative, wing of the
Republican party around Bob Dole, and that was the end of Pat
Buchanan's presidential challenge," Pope related.
What we should note, Pope said, is that Buchanan's campaign began
with "locally rooted cultural themes that led him inevitably to
challenge globalization" as an ideology and as a strategy.
The strategy suggests that despite the Clinton administration's
enthusiasm for "free trade and despite the adoption of NAFTA, the
global economy is not really inevitable."
Many of the global economy's most powerful promoters, and "some
of its top advocates and beneficiaries understand this," argued
Pope. "They know that the global economy is far from inevitable,
and they are quite nervous, quite anxious, perhaps even petrified
that the world may wake up and realize this."
But if globalization is not the predestined wave of the future,
Pope asked, "Why does it seem so irresistible, so overwhelming,
and why is the public dialogue that surrounds it so one-sided" --
that is, slanted in favor of free trade?
The reason -- at least one key reason -- Pope explained, is that
"we have allowed the advocates of free trade -- the economists
and their allies and those who profit from it -- to capture,
redefine and appropriate our language."
By taking over terms such as "conservative" ("'Conservatives are
for free trade,' we read all the time") and "liberal" (as in
"trade liberalization," a term that suggests globalization means
more freedom) or even "common market," a concept implying that
international commerce will create new communities for people,
the globalists have subverted all meaningful debate over free
trade and one-world elites, Pope argued.
-+- Fight For The Mind -+-
One of the most important things that Americans must do now is to
recapture the real sense of such concepts, especially the
genuinely positive meaning of the words "protectionism" and
"conservatism" urged Pope.
Evidence that not just the meaning but the politics of
protectionism and populism are gaining favor among "progressive"
organizations long dominated by leftist notions of "international
cooperation" emerged from talks and debates held during the two
days of meetings and panel discussions following Pope's address.
"Whether our main concern is the national economy or the global
ecology, we are staring catastrophe in the face," said Jean-Luc
Jouvet of Greenpeace. "I used to attend the [annual] meetings of
the World Bank where we heard dulcet expressions of concern for
the world's poor and its wildlife."
"They were lies," he added. "There is no way any of us can
ignore that reality now."
Ralph Nader, head of the Public Citizen alliance, perhaps the
most eagerly awaited speaker of the conference, cancelled his
appearance with the explanation that bad weather had closed down
Washington's airports.
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch,
represented his group. She delivered a sharp indictment of the
administration's "free trade frenzy" and of its most recent
spawns, NAFTA and WTO.
"NAFTA's effects have not just fallen short of expectations; they
turned out to be the exact opposite of its promise," Wallach
declared. "It would be one thing if it had not hit the bull's
eye or even the target. But we can see now that NAFTA has shot
us in the leg."
To document her indictment, Wallach noted that "instead of
creating 200,000 new jobs, as promised, NAFTA has led to the loss
of 600,000 U.S. jobs so far."
Moreover, American workers who were not fired "saw the sharpest
drop in real hourly wages on record during the first year of
NAFTA," she added.
In Mexico, where NAFTA was promoted as the catalyst of a business
boom, it has generated instead "deteriorating economic
conditions, political instability, growing despair and rising
social tensions," Wallach confirmed.
The WTO, which was created to replace the old General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) at 1993's negotiating session known
as the Uruguay Round, has turned out to be an equally insidious
instrument of globalized plunder, asserted Wallach.
WTO's broad new powers over commerce will "override the domestic
tax, health, food, product safety and anti-pollution laws of the
U.S.," Wallach explained.
This so-called free-trade pact will replace the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund "as the principal enforcer of
global financial interests," she predicted.
As recently as five years ago, "many of the people here were
dreamy internationalists of one sort or another," said Willard
Smith of the Machinists and Aerospace Workers Union, who
represented the AFL-CIO at the conference.
"But what we have seen of NAFTA, the WTO and international
financial speculation has been a rough wake-up call," he added.
"We will not just take a serious second look at Pat Buchanan, as
Carl [Pope] said: I think quite a few of us will vote for him in
the fall."
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You may be unable to find The Spotlight at your local library or
news dealer. To subscribe, phone 1-800-522-6292 (Maryland 1-301-
951-6292). Note that I have no personal connection to The
Spotlight nor am I compensated by them. I also neither
necessarily agree nor disagree with either all or parts of the
views expressed in The Spotlight.
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