Wto, Globalization, And Economic Collapse

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You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst1 T H E B U S I N E S S CASE FOR THE WTO AND GLOBALIZATION Globalization describes the free flow of capital and labor across state (national) borders. This is defined as free trade. The World Trade Organization (WTO) sets the rules for globalization. Today, the guiding business principle is to maximize corporate profits through the promotion of consumerism. Up until recently, the U.S., as the largest market for consumer items, has provided the demand to keep globalization working smoothly. To accomplish this high volume of buying, the U.S. Treasury has had to borrow $1,000 billion from China. Essentially, the U.S. taxpayer has been the borrower and lender of last resort under the current rules of the WTO designed to promote globalized economic development through consumerism. T H E E C O NO M I C RESULTS OF THE WTO’S RULES OF GLOBALIZATION S U P P O RT O F D ISASTER CAPITALISM 2 What is calling to question business-as-usual of WTO’s rules for globalized economic development is ecocide3 – the destruction of basic life-support systems of this earth we inhabit and the immiseration of the much of the world’s population where “most humans exist in conditions of severe abasement... on the edge of poverty:” 4 We are releasing toxins into the earth’s atmosphere that act as poisons of the earth’s lifesupport systems.5 Through the chemicals we discharge into the air, we have torn a hole in the earth’s ozone layer that protects us from the ultraviolet radiation from the sun and caused global warming;6 At an accelerating rate we are destroying natural, existing habitats – the forests, grasslands, wetlands, and deserts or converting them to man-made habitats (cities, villages, farmlands, pastures, roads, golf courses);7 Through unsustainable land use practices we are causing soil erosion at rates 10-40X the rates of soil formation, salinization of once productive cropland, loss of soil fertility, and soil acidification and alkalization;8

Italio Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) in William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 53. 1

2

Disaster capitalism refers to making a huge fortune from natural and planned disasters exacerbated by poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions. Disaster capitalism’s raison d'être may be the promotion and generation of market inefficiencies – pricing signals that distort real prices for goods and services and their real cost to the environment, public health, and social justice. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007). Ecocide - inattention to environmental costs that can singly or when combined cause collapse of natural and man-made systems that humans depend upon to sustain life and economy. 3

Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. 4

Air pollution, rather than being a local problem is slowly being understood by science as a global problem; what happens in Beijing will affect Boston. 5

Today, the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is ~376ppm, the highest level in the past 420,000 years and already climate change is the primary factor in an estimated 150,000 deaths per year (World Health Organization data) 6

LYLE A. BRECHT

7

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), 487.

8

Diamond, 489-90.

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We are rapidly decreasing a significant fraction of wild species and populations of the world’s flora and fauna and loosing their genetic information through habitat destruction, the introduction of toxins into the environment, and unsustainable land management practices.9 Once a species is extinct, we cannot bring them back; The world’s freshwater resources are rapidly shrinking as world’s population increases and more crops need to be irrigated;10 Today, 20% of the world’s population living in thirty of the wealthiest countries consume 85% of the total annual output of the world’s production of goods and services.11 A developed country citizen consumes 30X more resources than a developing country citizen and produces 30X more waste than do developing country citizens.12 While two billion of today’s population currently depend on the world’s fisheries for protein, the majority of the world’s fisheries are seriously degraded or have collapsed;13 All these environmental stresses are creating the conditions for outbreaks of new disease organisms and pandemics throughout the world.14 W H E N T H E NO RTH GETS A COLD, THE SOUTH GETS PNEUMONIA One of the drawbacks of globalization as promulgated by WTO rules is the apparently relatively unequal sharing of benefits and costs between the industrialized North and the developing South. The North gets most of the benefits when things are going well with the global economy, and the South bears most of the costs when the global economy is under duress.15 A LT E R NAT I V E S TO GLOBALIZED DISASTER CAPITALISM & THE WTO WTO can change the rules of globalization to move towards a sustainable global economy: (1) moving from a leveraged, consumer-driven debt economy to a de-leveraged productiondriven infrastructure investment economy; (2) moving from markets governed by principles of disaster capitalism to markets governed by sustainable capitalism and the recognition of markets for ecosystem services; and (3) the de-carbonization of the global economy to avoid catastrophic climate change that could destabilize global economies, produce resource wars, and potentially collapse global food production. Globalization should promote economy that leads away from ecocide, defers potential resource wars and reduces the specter of nuclear proliferation and the prospects for nuclear terrorism. As presently constituted the WTO rules for globalization of the world’s economies are woefully obsolete and dangerous, as suggested by the $50,000 billion fall in the value of financial assets worldwide during 2008-2009. E. O. Wilson, “The Current State of Biodiversity” in E. O. Wilson, editor, Biodiversity (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), 10, 11, 13, and 15. 9

Marq de Villiers, Water: The Fate of our Most Precious Resource (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 24-5. 10

J. F. Rischard, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them (New York, Basic Books, 2002), 8. 11

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Diamond, 495.

13

Diamond, 488.

“Security Threats to the United States,” Thomas Fingar, Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, Statement Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC (February 16, 2005). 14

Under WTO’s rules, the developed world exports its toxins to the developing world (e.g. the Inuit have the highest concentration of neurotoxins and gender shifters such as toxaphene, mercury and PCPs of any human population on earth) and the developing countries export diseases and problems to the developed countries (e.g. AIDS, SARS, cholera, West Nile virus, influenza, illegal immigrants, terrorists, debt, etc.) [Diamond, 517]. 15

LYLE A. BRECHT

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