> 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 is one of the sharper statements on the whole subject i've yet seen, but i do want to question what looks like a bit of reductivism--'nothing less than,' 'version of this same,' and so on there are some very new dynamics at work here, and it's a mistake to ignore them. what interests me is the specific manner in which orgs such as the WTO--there are *many*--appear 'as if from thin air.' shedding light on the *details* of their origins and operations can go a long way to weakening them, i think. that means asking the basic old questions: who, what, when, where, why, and, above all, the investigative axiom 'follow the money.'
the much more trivial (but for that reason comprehensible) example i've been spending a *lot* of time looking into is ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Num- bers. its name is deceptively trivial-sounding; the Numbers means the allocation and administration of IP (Internet Pro- tocol) number blocks, which over the next several years will 'converge' with what we now think of as telephony numbers, as the older public switched telephone networks are slowly nudged toward 'stupid' IP networks. the Names part of its name refers to domain names. that might sound a little like controlling vanity license plates, but it's much more than that: it's the point at which the the global harmonization of 'intellectual property' law potentially coincides with the ability to manipulate name-addresses on an ad hoc basis.
ICANN is very much a close cousin of these other multilateral institutions, in that its 'legitimacy' derives from acknowl- edgment by nations and its power will be exerted through the executive and judicial apparatuses of those selfsame states, but the organization itself purports to operate in an 'inter- national' space, complete with all the same bland excuses about being merely 'technical,' a 'mediator,' 'governed by consensus,' necessitated by the rise of 'globalism,' etc. in fact, it's governed by a small group of people whose power inheres (as always) in the coincidence of their ambitions with certain structural forces--for example, the desire of many businesses to lock their current power and profits into a sinecure guaranteed by regulatory claptrap. i suspect that the 'story' of orgs like the WTO would be far more comprehen- sible if people began to attach names, faces, careers, and so on to the orgs. they're really not that big.
basically, these orgs are the institutional realization of legal bombast. and legal bombast emanates not from impersonal juridical structures but from a handful of lawyers and firms.
we need a cooperative effort to document the people who bear specific responsibility for these events.
cheers, t