The World Trade Organization ruled Wednesday that US restrictions on overseas-based Internet gambling operations violate 'Free' Trade laws.
The ruling has huge repurcussions, and the Bush administration vowed an
immediate appeal. The reaction from the US was hysterical, in both
meanings of the word. "It's appalling," said Representative Bob
Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican. "It cannot be allowed to stand that
another nation can impose its values on the U.S. and make it a trade
issue."
If course, imposing US and Western values on other nations is precisely
what 'free' trade does. And the whole principle of the 'free' trade
deals brokered by corporatist interests behind closed doors is to
subvert and subordinate national laws to the 'broader' interests of
international trade (read: the interests of multinational corporations
and the governments they finance). Under such agreements domestic
social and environmental laws can be overturned as a 'restriction on
trade', to the extent they exceed the lowest standards in any of the signatory countries to the agreement. Social laws include not only labour laws, but any laws that impede the unregulated flow of goods and services across borders, including anti-gambling laws.
In principle, therefore, the US hasn't got a leg to stand on. But in
law, of course, money buys the best lawyers and allows rich murderers
and criminals to go free, while the poor, even if innocent and in the
right, usually lose. And if money doesn't buy off the WTO, the US has
already signaled that it will consider itself above the law, and ignore
it. Several members of Congress said they would rather have an
international trade war or withdraw from future rounds of the World
Trade Organization than have American social policy dictated from
abroad.
The Bush regime, which has promised its corporatist backers to pursue
'free' trade, cannot break its old unilateralist habits when things
don't go its way. Bush has yet to learn that 'my way or the highway' is
not a negotiation strategy. "The U.S. says it wants open competition,"
said Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua's foreign affairs representative. "But
it only wants free trade when it suits the U.S."
The unresolved question is whether international Internet service businesses can be regulated at all. But that's a 'World of Ends'
issue. Right now, to the American trade imperialists and anti-gambling
lobbies, it's an 'End of the World' issue. Expect much moaning and
wringing of hands.
Every once in awhile I find an
article that simply speaks for itself. It cannot be improved by
summarizing, annotating, digesting or synthesizing. The Empire Strikes Out, by Kenny
Ausubel in Orion Magazine Online, is one such article. Here it is:
NATURE BATS LAST
For all the chatter about the Age of Information, we really seem to be
entering the Age of Biology. We didn't invent nature. Nature invented
us. Nature bats last, as the saying goes and, more importantly, it's
her playing field. We would do well to learn at least some of the
ground rules.
The great ecological play takes place in a food web that makes no
waste, powered by a solar economy that neither mines the past nor
mortgages the future. Some of its guiding principles are diversity,
kinship, symbiosis, reciprocity and community. It's alive. It's
intelligent. It's connected. It's all relatives.
One of the beauties of biology is that its facts can become our
metaphors. These underlying codes may also serve as inspiring parables
for how as human beings we might organize a more just, humane, and
authentically sustainable society.
Life is intimacy interconnected. As a culture we've made a basic
systems error to believe that we exist somehow separate from nature, or
from one another. That illusion could prove fatal at this momentous
cusp, this time at which our turbo-charged technologies and
overwhelming numbers have given us, for the first time in history, the
capacity to blow it on a planetary scale.
Our globalized corporate empire menaces the future of the entire
biosphere. Empires are castles made of sand: They always crumble, they
always fade away. But by the time this empire strikes out, the
biological game could be all but over. Corporate globalization is
killing off its host -- and ours. Gary Larsen once did a cartoon in
which a ship is sinking, and a pack of dogs crowded into a lifeboat are
watching it go down. The lead dog says to the others, "OK -- all those
in favor of eating all the food all at once, raise your paws." That's
economic globalization in a nutshell.
The real-world situation that is spontaneously combusting today is a
perfect storm of extreme environmental degradation and rolling
infrastructure collapse. It is by no means the first time this has
happened. Previous civilizations have slid into ruin through
self-induced environmental catastrophe, but in the past the damage has
always been localized.
But there's more to it. They had foolish leaders...who embroiled them
in destabilizing wars and didn't pay attention to problems at home.
HISTORY LESSON:
DISINTEGRATION OCCURS SUDDENLY, JUST AFTER THE PEAK
As Jared Diamond pointed out in "Guns, Germs, and Steel," these
societies met their demise by cutting down forests, eroding topsoil and
building burgeoning cities in dry areas that eventually ran short of
water. Sometimes hastened by sudden climate change, the ensuing
disintegration occurred suddenly -- in a matter of a decade or two
after a society reached its peak of population, wealth and power.
Because that pinnacle also marked maximum resource consumption and
waste production, it produced unsupportable environmental impacts.
But there's more to it, Diamond says. "They had foolish leaders...who
embroiled them in destabilizing wars and didn't pay attention to
problems at home. They were overwhelmed by desperate immigrants, as one
society after another collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to
tax the resources of the societies that weren't collapsing."
When Diamond studied the ecological downfall of Mexico's ancient Mayan
civilization, he determined that the final strand in its unravelling
was a crisis of political leadership. "Their [leaders] attention was
evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves,
waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and
extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these
activities." Sound familiar, fellow peasants?
Today we're going mano a mano with the whole biosphere, and she's
responding with her own form of deregulation. The planet is reeling
from record-smashing temperatures, violent storms, long-term droughts,
hundred-year floods, unstoppable fires, massive insect infestations,
migrating disease patterns, rising seas, and a level of species
extinctions not seen in 65 million years. Twelve-thousand people died
in France this summer from record-setting heat. In Phoenix, Arizona,
people's flip-flops melted on the pavement. One woman who tripped and
fell face-first on the sidewalk was rushed to a burn unit. And global
warming is just getting going.
Last year, the White House pressured the EPA to hit the delete key in
its state-of-the-environment report regarding the forty-weight
connection between global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. The
US political class says we need more scientific study while they march
us backwards into the 21st century dragging sacks of coal behind them.
But the science is unequivocal: It's no longer a matter of connecting
the dots. It's a matter of connecting the elephants in the room.
Global warming means more and bigger storms, and one of the most
striking images from the relatively mild Hurricane Miserabel was the
battered mall of the Washington Monument. A large stand of flagpoles
forlornly flew the stars and stripes, shredded to tatters by the
violent weather. As the great urban farmer Michael Abelman said, "After
all, what good is a country and a flag if there is no more fertile
soil, no ancient forests, no clean water, no pure food? If you really
love your country, protect and restore some wildness. Support local
agriculture. Plant a garden. Those who work to protect and restore
these things are the real patriots."
THE BREEDING GROUNDS FOR
TERRORISM HAVE THE WORST ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION AND POVERTY
In truth, the US political class is clueless. Its only plan is to eat
all the food all at once. Although the empire may seem awesomely
powerful, it's coming apart at the seams.
But what is also true here and around the world is that people are
stepping up with real solutions. There's a new superpower: Global
popular movements. They are growing from the bottom up, taking back
control over our lives, our communities, our economies and our
cultures. People are again starting to assume responsibility for the
lands, the waters, the forests, and the global commons we all share.
People worldwide are rejecting the deification of the market over
environmental and human rights. As Amory Lovins has said, "Markets make
a great servant but a bad master and a worse religion... And a society
that tries to substitute markets for politics, ethics, or faith is
seriously adrift."
There are brilliant scientific and social innovators among us who've
been patiently incubating the seeds of successful local, regional, and
even societal plans for the transformation to a sustainable
civilization. An alternative globalization movement of unprecedented
proportions is taking shape, weaving a green web of innovative models
grounded in true biotechnologies and social equity.
This new world is being born right now before our eyes. It mimics the
decentralized intelligence of living systems, the innate democracy of
life. It's founded in the recognition that the first homeland security
comes from environmental security. Our civilization's out-of-body
experience is screeching to a halt as we awaken to our absolute
dependence on natural life-support systems and our interdependence with
all life. Cleaning up the environment will happen only when we clean up
politics and reclaim our government.
In a world where half the people live on $2 a day or less, we can have
no peace. The world's most dangerous political hot spots and breeding
grounds for terrorism are exactly the same places with the worst
environmental devastation and poverty. Go figure.
DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR
SPORT
We're entering into unknown territory. There will be little to hold
onto. It could be a time of unimaginable suffering and loss. But it
will also be a renaissance of flourishing creativity and deep healing.
The regenerative capacity of nature is powerful beyond our imagination.
And the boundless nobility of the human soul is arising everywhere in
waves of caring and kindness. Our social security is being woven in
community, as people gather to mend our shredded social fabric and
solve problems together. There is as much cause for hope as for horror.
And we know we must prevail.
We can start by attending to our worst wounds. In very practical terms,
the solution is to invest in our problems. We need a Green New Deal, a
massive global investment in repairing the environment, transforming
our infrastructures, and restoring people. The measure of any solution
is whether it solves for pattern by resolving multiple problems in one
fell swoop.
What's called for is strong government leadership to reboot the system.
We need an immediate global Marshall plan of clean, renewable energy,
and the re-design and rebuilding of our decaying infrastructures and
clotted transportation systems. We can jump-start a permanent
transition to an ecological agriculture that produces healthy,
nutritious food in regionalized foodsheds -- restores the land, air and
water -- and revives rural economies thriving with small and
medium-sized farms. We need a just legal system that puts human and
environmental rights above corporate rights. All these programs will
yield dramatically positive results -- environmentally, economically,
socially and spiritually. And all of it is attainable.
In great measure we already know what to do, in practical terms, to
realize this vision. The vexing bottleneck we face is political, not
technological. As the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, known as The
Father of Fascism, said in a refreshing moment of candor, "Fascism
should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of
state and corporate power." As the whole world becomes a company town,
democracy is in peril of becoming a phantom limb, severed from the body
politic while we imagine it's still attached. Cleaning up the
environment will happen when we clean up politics and reclaim our
government. Democracy is not a spectator sport. Voting is not something
we can do just every two or four years. We need to vote every day with
our lives.
The coming environmental blowback and social dislocation could just as
easily swing us toward martial law and totalitarian rule. If we don't
change direction, we will end up where we're heading.
Thanks to Jeff Gold of the
Ontario Green Party for the link.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
The World Trade Organization 
