IMF/WB and the WTO ruling

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Sat Feb 26 08:16:21 PST 2000


John,

Out here in Seattle we did go around the block a few times debating the FSC's issue during the summer. We also felt very odd finding [despite ourselves] points of overlap with the right's take on the issue of global governance institutions.

It is definitely the position of a lot of people in town that the FSC issue by the WTO is something to "cheer" about, in a cautious way, for the twofold reason that 1)It exposes yet another way Corps. have been manipulating the state to avoid paying their way and 2)it heightens intercapitalist rivalry and mutual contempt, exacerbating the destructuve tensions in the very notion of oligopolistic competition. The issue of tax subsidies was the surface phenomena of the larger problem of the way corporations bribe "foreign" govt.'s to get contracts; with some Euro states allowing the writing off of bribes to rent seeking govt. officials as simply part of business. To some extent the formation of the FSC's legislation was a result of this, as was the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I for one don't think it a mere coincidence that the Eourpean Parliament was holding formal hearings on US spying and industrial espionage as the decision came down. Economic diplomacy/espionage has always been a subtle part of the state's part in the formation of comparative advantage. Formally, the WTO came out against state action in the fomration of CA in the realm of tax policy, that's all.

It is hilarious that the Cato Institute and other right think tanks and individuals were given charge to make recommendations to "fix" the BW vampires. Soon, they too will realize how much of what the state does to alleviate moral hazard is an unavoidable, pathological attempt at a remedy that smacks of the socialism of risk foisted upon the state by Capital and that there only so many ways one can herd cats before they realize that either/and the Everest of debt must be wiped clean/the cats [at least some of them, and the institutional rules internal to their operations] must be taken out and "shot". Capital can't compute its way out of debt forever, no matter how many new financial instruments for commodifying risks they come up with; the constraints of computational consistency must kick in sometime and if there's not enough reserves to create a sustainable liquidity regime, well...LTCM was merely the first sympton of the encroachment of computational constraints.

Contrary to what you've read elsewhere, we did make sincere attempts to get beyond race/class "boundaries" in doing community outreach all summer leading up to N30. Did we succeed to the extent we would have like to? No, but to see it simply as a problem of outreach is to put other's in the role of passive recipient's rather than as communities every bit as capable of self-organizing once they've got the info. Clearly, neither Capital nor the state obstructed those who wanted to shut the bastards down in any way whatsoever, and neither did "we". If we had had 5million $$ bucks to draw citizens from all across the planet to tell them to go to hell, we would have; hell we would have had REAL turtles [from Galapagos, no less].

Ian



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