----- Forwarded message from Bob Olsen <bobolsen@interlog.com> -----
Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 20:43:40 -0400
From: Bob Olsen <bobolsen@interlog.com>
Subject: TONY RUSHES IN WHERE BILL FEARS TO TREAD - The Observer (UK)
Subject: TONY RUSHES IN WHERE BILL FEARS TO TREAD - The Observer (UK)
The Observer (UK) Sunday May 21, 2000
TONY RUSHES IN WHERE BILL FEARS TO TREAD
Clinton has 'wimped out' but the corporate big
hitters are pleased with Blair 'the believer'
By Gregory Palast
For all you conspiracy cranks and paranoid anti-globalisers who
imagine that the planet's corporate elite and government functionaries
actually meet to conspire about their blueprint for rewriting the laws of
sovereign nations... be advised that the next meeting of the New World
Order will be held next Tuesday at the Swiss Hotel in Brussels, at 9am.
This is the mid-year meeting of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue -
and you aren't invited.
In 1997, just after Labour's general election victory, US Commerce
Secretary Bill Daley met privately with the new Trade and Industry
Secretary, Margaret Beckett, to instruct her on the ways of the world.
According to the US Secretary's own briefing notes - obtained under
the US Freedom of Information Act - Daley dictated a list of four changes
in UK law and policy required to smooth the path of American
corporations in Britain. In addition, further guidance would be provided
by what Daley described as 'the most influential business group advising
government on US-EU commercial relations', the Transatlantic Business
Dialogue (TABD). 'Your encouragement,' he admonished the Minister,
'would be helpful.'
As Butch said to Sundance, Who are these guys? TABD is a working
group of the West's 100 most powerful chief executives. When
presidents, prime ministers and other transitory heads of state meet at
the World Trade Organisation, this more permanent grouping provides
their agenda.
The TABD's system is masterfully efficient. One US bigwig is paired
with one European for each sector grouping. For example, Monsanto's
Robert Harness and Unilever's Huib Vigeveno are in charge of Agri-
Biotech.
The US government and the EU each assign an official to each
industry pair. TABD has privileged access not to small fry, but to top
bananas such as Pascal Lamy, European Commissioner for Trade, and
Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society.
Next week, the officials will report to their corporate duos on the
headway they have made on the 33 items on the current TABD
implementation table. This lists 33 environment, consumer and worker
protection laws in selected nations which TABD wishes to defeat or
water down.
The corporates will render their verdict on what TABD calls the
scorecard. This will then be turned over, along with a new
implementation table - including agenda items for the WTO - to
Presidents Clinton and Prodi at their summit meeting in Portugal later
this month.
The 1988 implementation table, one of the first documents obtained,
grudgingly, from the EC under its access to information rules, makes
good reading for those wanting to know what's planned for our brave
new world.
For example, several of the 'tetra-partite groups' (the two-on-two
government-business trysting sessions) seek expansion for something
called the MRA. The initials stand for Mutual Recognition Agreement, or
what the TABD describes as, 'approved once, accepted everywhere'. It
is the globalisers' cruise missile.
Here's an example of how it works. Years ago the Pfizer company
manufactured defective heart valves which cracked, killing 165 patients
in whom they had been implanted. Understandably, this made Europe
wary of accepting devices merely because they had been blessed by the
US Food and Drug Administration. But the MRA brushes aside individual
nations' health and safety regulatory reviews - including individual
regulation of medical device manufacturing plants.
Given the ill-feeling in Europe about genetic modification, the MRA
rules for GM products are devilishly complex and savvy, effectively
applying only to the developing nations. Does Brazil have a problem with
Monsanto's Bovine Growth hormone? Sorry, approval by the WTO's
Codex Alimentarius committee means Brazil must accept the product or
face WTO trade sanctions.
The US, too, is a target of TABD's contempt for consumer protection.
TABD's products liability group, under the guise of eliminating 'non-tariff'
trade barriers, takes aim at the unique right of American citizens to sue
corporate bad guys. One TABD proposal would reverse the $5 billion
judgment against Exxon in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case.
Recently, however, the TABD lobby locomotive has been slowed by
lambs on the tracks.
The demonstrations in Seattle and Washington had, according to
TABD members I interviewed, an effect far beyond anything the
demonstrators themselves could have imagined. The first purpose of the
WTO meeting was to launch a new round of cuts in import duties and a
push to eliminate more of the rules covering imports, known as non-tariff
regulatory barriers. That went up in tear-gas smoke. Sweating under the
TV lights, the WTO shrank from voting a new 'comprehensive round'.
Worse, TABD's deregulation programme was publicly rejected by an
erstwhile ally. The implementation table clearly told government officials,
on page 17, that 'the basic purpose of an MAI [Multilateral Agreement on
Investments] should not be undermined by language on labour policy
and environmental policy', dicta adopted by the US and EC.
Yet there was Bill Clinton, spooked by opinion polls showing public
support for the demonstrators' views, telling the Seattle audience weepy-
eyed stories of the horrors of child labour in Brazil.
Business leaders were infuriated. Frustration with their former
champion Clinton burst into the open two weeks ago when, at a meeting
of the International Chamber of Commerce in Budapest, industrialists
shouted down a proposal to 'dialogue' with non-governmental
organisations such as Amnesty International.
'I don't believe that those who were in Seattle represented somebody
with a legitimate stake,' fumed Peter Sutherland, head of investment
bank Goldman Sachs UK. Sutherland, who jumped to Goldman from his
post as director of the WTO, prefers the company of his own kind. 'We
have to be very careful on engaging in this debate, as those NGOs [non-
governmental organisations] should not have a say with government!'
(Interestingly, the Goldman bank chaired the TABD when Sutherland
was running the WTO.)
Clinton had wimped out on business. But, just in time, the Chambers
of Commerce have found a new knight errant.
'Tony Blair, he was great! He had guts! That's the leadership we
need,' economist Jagdish Bhagwati, globalisation guru, told the
disheartened suits in Budapest. He applauded the PM for speaking out,
'against anti-capitalist NGOs'.
When I spoke with Bhagwati this week, he contrasted Clinton's
'absurd, ignorant' pleas for Brazil's child labourers with the attitude of
Clare Short. Bhagwati, who sat next to the International Development
Secretary at the WTO in Seattle, described with giggly approval how she
kept him in stitches, mocking a speaker from the African National
Congress while the ANC man spoke of the connection between
globalisation and child labour. 'No one in the Clinton administration
would have done that.' No, they would not.
Businessmen lobbying their way into government offices is an old
story, but the supercharged TABD version - infiltration by invitation -
began only in 1995 as the brainchild of Ron Brown, Clinton's first
Commerce Secretary.
Brown, who died in a 1996 air crash, was Clinton's Mandelson,
architect of the scheme to turn Democrats into New Democrats, the party
of business. When Brown died, Clinton's passion for pairing with
business passed away too, not uninfluenced by the demolition of the
New Democrats in the 1994 Congressional elections.
Clinton lopped off the 'New' label - take note, Tony - when his good
buddies in industry, sensing his weakness, rushed back to their natural
home in the Republican Party.
Clinton still goes through the motions of meeting TABD, as required
by commercial realpolitik, but its leaders, such as Jim Wootten of the US
Chamber of Commerce, tell me they doubt the President's sincerity.
But Blair is different. 'Blair really believes,' says Bhagwati admiringly
of Blair's globalising fervour. And TABD members agree. Unlike that
scamp from Arkansas whose expressions of policy are as inconstant as
his expressions of fidelity, Blair is a man of convictions. His heart leaps
at visions of a flexible labour force, of entrepreneurs liberated from
bureaucrats' rule-books, of a new economy relieved of the antique task
of bending metal into Rovers.
In 1997, according to US documents, Blair personally stepped over
Margaret Beckett to water down regulations permitting Americans to
build gas-fired power plants in the UK. He also hopped about to
accomplish the other three tasks on the US Commerce Secretary's
favours list.
Don't dismiss this as just a series of tawdry fixes. The Prime Minister
rolled out the golden doormat in Downing Street to American companies
because he looks on these bold screw-the-rules operators as an
entrepreneurial stud pool whom he hopes will breed with and revitalise
the hoof-dragging local stock.
It's sad, really. Unlike Clinton, who wised up quickly, Blair confuses
the TABD's self-serving wishlist with a programme of economic salvation.
He trusts his industry darlings will never leave his side. But as his re-
election becomes ever more doubtful, he will find that, as they say in
Arkansas, Tony's been kissed - but he ain't been loved.
.............................................
Bob Olsen, Toronto bobolsen@interlog.com
.............................................
----- End forwarded message -----
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