>From the forward on WTO and unions:
Company documents had been leaked to us showing that GE Aircraft Engines is not only in a two-year, all-out push to ship work overseas, but is demanding that all their vendors do the same. At a meeting in Monterrey, Mexico, earlier this year, GE told assembled vendors (over 70 companies) that they would move to Mexico or get cut off from all GE business. "This is not an informative meeting", they told the smaller companies. "We expect you to move, and to move soon."
In a presentation called "Why Mexico?", GE told Ametek and the other vendors: average manufacturing worker makes $6 a day, unions are "friendly", and environmental regulations are not a problem. It was a cold-blooded plan to destroy our own livelihoods and prey off people at starvation wages.
------------
The relocation of US and first world industrial, manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors into the developing world for the purpose of exploiting the opportunities of lower costs in human and natural resources is the only trade going on--trading first world costs of goods sold for third world costs of goods sold--and capitalizing on or pocketing the difference--at the expense of labor and resources everywhere. It is nothing less than an updated form of imperialism and colonialism accomplishing a conquest through business settlements, very much styled on the last five hundred years of similar colonial and imperial exploits by EU powers in Asia, Africa, and America--what the hell was the Dutch East India company but just an old handmade version of this same electronic bullshit from the WTO?
This battle over interpretation of what exactly the words 'free', 'trade' and 'global' mean reminds me very much of the early Vietnam war years of '61-'63 when the struggle in the US was predominantly with perception and media over the meaning of words, versus the concrete actions of war. The US government absolutely destroyed its credibility with its own people in that battle--certainly forever, for me, and possibly forever period, for anyone who wanted to look twice before swallowing.
This trade and globalization business is the same kind of war of propaganda all over again. Just as we were once supposed to identify with the geo-political needs of the US government to project US power into Asia, and swallow the domino theory, so now we are supposed to identify with the power and capital needs of the US government and multinationals in their quest to penetrate ever deeper into other people's economies.
More important in my mind is the question, why? Why is it so necessary that governments and capital interest conspire in this joint venture? We are told that we depend on this so-called trade, which I preferred to call imperialism to keep our economy booming--which of course it isn't, if you look below six figure incomes.
I don't know enough economics to know if this is true or not, but assume it is. Then, as a consequence, the situation can be interpreted as a form of class war wherein, first world bourgeois interest, self-identified with or reified or transfigured as capital investment and government policies must pursue a continuous and expanding exploitation relation over ever larger and cheaper pools of labor and resources in order to maintain itself. Indeed the cost of living a US-EU middle class life style is high and rising, since it now costs the earth and all its other people's labor combined.
Nothing remains outside this golden circle but the mire of destitution. Yet we are supposed to believe that this very process of exploitation which has plunged the world's masses into the mire for at least two centuries, will now become simultaneously its savior? The only thing developing in these conditions are further permutations on capital. So, I consider the promises held out to the developing world to be nothing more than trickle down imperialism--like the sort of promise held out to the US working-middle classes almost twenty years ago. Those promises never materialized, and then as S&L, real estate, and merger fiascos of the Eighties followed, those billions thrown away in one capital scam after another left nothing in their wake. In my mind, those billions represented all the labor and resources that could have gone into re-building the cities, industrial infrastructure and reconstructing the collapsing public sector of education, health and welfare. Because of that history, there is no argument that would persuade me that the same process will not now be visited upon the rest of the world through our new fangled globalization, or as I like to call it, trickle down imperialism.
So, whether everybody in Seattle streets thought along those lines or not, they were close enough. When Carrol asks is there anything beyond Seattle, the only answer is yes, of course. The reason is that this issue, or this world of inter-related issues isn't going to disappear. The way I see it, at the moment, the battle is over perception and media with demos and protests of whatever sort used as counter-propaganda. What we could really use is a systematic expose of US corporate investments and their concrete expressions aboard, like that of GE in Mexico. That kind of thing unmasks the smily face of trade, to reveal the grinning skull of imperialism underneath.
Chuck Grimes