The FTAA and the WTO: the meta-program for global corporate rule

(10) There is within the global corporate system no requirement of any kind, theoretical or practical, to recognize any life need of any individual (eg. nourishing food) or society (eg. non-toxic air) as rightful, or as a priority, or as an issue of choice within this system, however massive and extreme the gap between life-deprivation and over-consumption grows. As a few hundred "investors" exponentially increase their money demand to more than the total income of the majority of the world's population with their "investments" irreversibly stripping the world's ecosystems at the same time, no policy is even mooted by the U.N. to regulate this planetary disaster. The U.N. Secretary-General, on the contrary, has instituted in 2001 a U.N. "Global Compact" to require all U.N. agencies to enter into "corporate partnership" with the world's richest transnational corporations.

(11) Whatever pollution, degradation, overloading, exhaustion or destruction of local or planetary ecosystems occurs, and however irreversibly devastating in consequences to human and biodiverse life these damages from corporate extractions, effluents, and commodities are, there is not one binding article in any transnational trade treaty or agreement (excepting intra-European) which protects or seeks to protect any human or environmental life condition or good. All "scarcities" thus arising are assumed, with no scientific evidence to substantiate the assumption, to be correctable by market price mechanisms alone. This is why the U.S. Congress refuses to comply with the Kyoto Treaty until it makes all pollution abatement measures conform to a system of salable pollution credits - which have never reduced pollution, but which accord instituted corporate rights to pollute which can be sold as new and free equity, and which can be profited from at another, new level of the global market.

(12) However many millions or billions of society's or the world's human population are misemployed, underemployed or starvation-waged with not enough to live on, and however life-destructive and chronically debilitating their hours and conditions of work are – a majority of the world altogether – there is no principle, norm or standard in neo-classical market theory or global market practice which recognizes or can recognize any of these depredations of human life as an issue or a problem. On the contrary, this life-blind paradigm can only compute these strippings of most of the world's people as a new "flexibility of labour supply" and a multiple "opportunity to reduce the costs of labour" by exercise of new transnational corporate rights to produce in the lowest-cost zones of the world and sell in the highest-scale markets with no "barriers to trade".

(13) Any public or government intervention in the presupposition and implementation of any and all of principles (1) to (12) in any way is attacked as "an interference in the free market". Any prior cultural, historical, or democratic achievement or institution limiting the systematically life-destructive effects of their unrestricted operation is deplored as "a distortion" or "impediment to market competition", and targeted for elimination by transnational trade and investment instrument. This is a cumulative and always advancing line of demand by endless transnational regulatory "agreements", and it moves across national borders and domains of life like a sustained military campaign in its relentless uniformity of prescriptions to target populations, and its blanket denials of the destructive effects which follow wherever its occupying forces usurp evolved ways of life.

(14 ) No autonomy of domestic market in any good or service, strategic use of any natural resource or necessity, protected public utility or social sector, product-safety, quality or licensing standard, local procurement practice or grant is consistent with the defined principles of this transnational market regime. All have been and continuously are, therefore, slated for challenge and irreversible elimination by trade prescription or scheduled regulatory assimilation. This is a pattern everywhere documentable, but concealed by corporately financed politicians, the corporate media, and former corporate employees who negotiate the agreements. What remains constant through the cumulative momentum and volume of trade and investment decrees is that every article of tens of thousands is constructed to guarantee that dominantly transnational corporations can exploit and increasingly control domestic economies and public sectors across the world with no curtailing limit permissible in law.

(15) Local, national and global management of the money-demand drivewheels of this system is over 95% controlled by for-profit corporate financial and banking institutions which have covertly appropriated control over almost all government bond issues and investor and consumer lines of credit from government currency creations, national bank loans and state statutory reserves. With no gold or other non-paper standard remaining to control it, corporate bank and financial leveraging has become effectively limitless, with central bank interest-rate raises in the new regime applied only to decrease workers' rising wages and social-sector spending. This is the always hidden underside of the system's propelling domestic and transnational force, why covert financial deregulation of money-demand supply is the secret to its every advance, and why no deep limit can be drawn against world occupation by corporate financial chicanery until the creation of money demand is constitutionally re-appropriated by public authority as its essential basis of sovereignty and investment in the common interest.

Together these underlying principles of the global market system constitute its fixed and largely unseen meta-structure of perception, understanding and judgement in accordance with which all its policy formation and enforced regulation of societies and economies across the world proceed. There is no principle of "the free market", "investment", "competition", "comparative advantage", "efficiency", "fiscal responsibility", "labour flexibility", "inflation control", "growth", "sustainability", "social welfare", "national prosperity", "justice", "civil society participation", "poverty reduction", or other old or new slogan promulgated by global market institutions and advocates that does not conform to all of (1) through (15) in doctrine and effect. Whenever it is claimed otherwise, ask for the evidence from any "free trade agreement" on the planet. The response will always be silence, diversion to another topic, and, if the question is pursued publicly, surveillance by the police.

However well-placed its hirelings, this mind-locked creed is corporately self-driven and self-referential, and threatens to usurp every level of social and ecological life condition still existing. Given its invasionary past and history, we should not be surprised. Like every Pharaoh of the past, it will topple – the more totalitarian, the more complete the collapse. But remember who advocates for this regime now, for they are agents of the corporate occupation of all of the world's societies and ecosystems by decreed financial and market mechanisms never electorally agreed to by any people on earth.