Dunblane, Bse and Pharmers.

PART TWO: REVIEWS

A review of Jerry Mander & Edward Goldsmith (eds) 'The Case Against the Global Economy' Sierra Club Books, San Francisco 1996. This work was first written in may 1997. An edited version was published in the july/august issue of greenline. This version has been slightly rewritten.

Introduction.

The ratification of the uruguay round of the gatt treaty established a world treaty organization (wto) which is effectively an unelected and unaccountable world government run solely by multi-national corporations whose aim is to ensure global free trade and the free movement of capital. This world tyranny has been granted sovereignty over the social, economic, and environmental, policies of every country around the world. In brutland during the last tory government, right wing tories dominated the media with scares about brutland's loss of sovereignty to the european union but they neglected to mention they had handed over more of the country's sovereignty to the world tyranny organization than parliament had given to the european community. These rabid, right wing extremists were supposed to be anti-government but they created the most powerful government on Earth; they were supposed to oppose bureaucracy and yet they created a whole new tier of global bureaucracy; and, they were supposed to be patriots but they traitorously sold this country's sovereignty to multi-national corporations. [1] Although their campaign against european integration and a single european currency was primarily a last ditch attempt to win electoral support for their failed free market policies it also served as a means of distracting public attention from their transfer of powers to the new world tyranny. [2] What more opportunistic way is there of covering up their transfer of parliamentary sovereignty to a world tyranny than by denouncing the pooling of sovereignty with europe?

The gatt treaty gives multinational corporations the right to invest, and deinvest, in any country around the world. This means that if a multi-national corporation is not satisfied with its investment in one country e.g. because of environmental or workplace restrictions, it can uproot and find another country where such regulations don't exist. This puts every country around the world in open competition with each other to attract multi-nationals by abolishing as many restrictions as possible. Countries are now like Magpie chicks sitting in their nest with their beaks wide open squawking as loudly as possible to attract the attention of their multi-national mother with a juicy investment Worm. So, even if national governments still had the right to enact laws against multi-national corporations, which they don't, they wouldn't do so for fear of frightening away corporate investments.

The gatt treaty prevents governments from passing many types of regulations on multi-national corporations. Governments can no longer legally stop multinational corporations from destroying the environment, paying low wages or taking over local economies e.g. if a multi-national corporation wants to build a string of nuclear power stations across brutland there is nothing that could be done to stop their construction - other than by burning them down. Multi-national corporations' global rights now take precedence over national laws. In effect, gatt has abolished all democratic controls over the activities of multinational corporations. Even worse, is that much of the reformist work carried out by environmental organizations over the past thirty years to persuade governments to pass regulations to protect the environment has now been rendered virtually useless.

The uruguay round of the gatt treaty has also abolished restrictions on the global movement of capital. National governments no longer have any legislative mechanisms for stabilizing their currencies. [3] Given that national governments have also lost the financial clout to protect their currencies, because their currency reserves are insignificant in comparison to the trillions of dollars' worth of loose money sloshing around the world's markets in search of short term profits, then this leaves national sovereignty in shreds. Even worse is that the incentives for the world's gigantic financial corporations to destabilize currencies are greater than ever before because of the huge profits that can be made - firstly, destabilize a currency; then buy the currency when it is at its lowest point and, finally, sell when it recovers. [4] The greater the disparity between national currencies and the astronomical increase in speculators' resources, the greater the instability of the world's currency markets. The world is moving towards global blocs because this is the only way countries can acquire some degree of protection from currency speculators.

What the gatt treaty has done, both de jure and de facto, is to abolish national laws protecting the environment and ooman/Animal rights. It has transferred a huge range of powers from national governments to multi-national corporations. Many multi-national corporations are bigger than most of the world's national economies and gatt gives them the legal protection they need against interfering democratic governments. In effect, the treaty has transformed the world into a virtually lawless state in which multi-national corporations, through the world tyranny organization, can do what they want. The world created by gatt is reminiscent of what 17th-18thC political philosophers called the 'state of nature' i.e. the war of all against all before the creation of civilized society. [5]

Gatt has rendered the 1992 rio Earth summit meaningless. It is illuminating to compare these two international agreements. Whilst the text of the rio climate agreement was fought over word by word, line by line, until it was watered down into platitudes with no legal status, the gatt treaty was ratified in most countries around the world almost on the nod and has the status of global law, with considerable punitive powers if countries disobey its rulings. Very few of the politicians around the world read the 500 pages of the gatt treaty before voting for it. [6] In this country the ratifcation of the maastricht treaty was accompanied by months and weeks of intense ballyhooing but ratifcation of gatt happened almost without a comment. The next phase of the world community's attempt to combat global burning takes place in kyoto in 1997 but it is difficult to see how any decision can avoid being over-ruled by gatt.

The Book.

'The case against the global economy' is a collection of essays by a sizeable proportion of the world's leading environmentalists. These authors highlight the dangers of the new world order and outline the localist alternatives to gatt's free market tyranny. It might have been thought that if solutions to today's political and environmental problems are likely to come from anywhere, they would do so from these front-line environmentalists. Unfortunately most of the contributors are better seen as supergreens whose ideas about the environment were formed in the 1960s and 1970s and who have failed to come to terms with more recent developments in green thinking.

There is no mention of Wildlife in this book except the usual inconsequential hand wringing - 'isn't it sad they're disappearing'. The only times that Animals are mentioned is as a resource for oomans. There is not the slightest reason why anyone interested in the protection of Animals should bother to read this book. Is it any wonder the green movement has been such a failure when there is so little co-operation between environmentalists and Animal rightists? [7] There is no evidence that these so-called environmentalists understand that the Animal exploitation industry is by far the biggest cause of geophysiological destruction. This reveals their ignorance about the state of the Earth's life support system. They simply do not recognize that the Animal exploitation industry must be abolished in order to prevent a collapse of the Earth's life support system for oomans. There is no point in promoting renewable energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, pollution abatement, recycling, sustainable growth, etc, without abolishing the Animal exploitation industry. [8] If people won't stop eating meat then there is no point in their doing anything else to save the Earth - they might as well continue buying as many commodities as they want, driving as much as they want, stuffing as many exotic foods down their fat faces as they want, wasting as much energy as they want, etc., until the Earth's life sustaining processes for oomans collapses. It is impossible to stop the collapse of the Earth's life support system without dismantling the Animal exploitation industry. [9] It is quite true that economic growth (like population growth) is one of the primary causes of ecological destruction but it has not had the same impact as the Animal exploitation industry. [10]

Another striking feature of this book - which partly explains the lack of interest in abolishing the Animal exploitation industry - is that there is no mention of the works of james lovelock. There are only three, fleeting, references to gaia in this book - all of them appearing in the last few dozen pages. There has surely got to be something wrong with the analysis and solutions put forward by these environmentalists when they pay so little attention to lovelock's geophysiological theory of the Earth's life support system. A number of authors mention the need to protect the Earth's ecosystem (a very 1970s term) but this is not the same as the Earth's geophysiology. The contributors to this book make no demand for Reforestation - as if Forests weren't the basis of the Earth's life support system!! The only author to mention Reforestation is edward goldsmith .. "if the world climate is to be stabilized it will not be by the absurd geo-engineering works proposed today but by increasing the biosphere's capacity to absorb Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. This means allowing the world's badly depleted Forests to recover and drastically reducing emissions of greenhouse gases." (p.510). And that's it - as if all that needs to be done to stop global burning is to allow depleted Forests to regrow. No mention is made about those in the over-industrialized world which have disappeared under car parks, shopping malls, industrial sites, etc. No mention is made about the fact that the Earth is one continent short of the Forest cover it needs to combat global burning. No mention is made about where this new continent of Forests should be allowed to grow. No mention is made about how third world countries could be persuaded not to devastate their Forests in the same way as those in the over-industrialized world. Doubtlessly some of these authors support a degree of Reforestation but, since they don't give prominence to the idea, it can't be significant. It is quite simple; if greens such as porritt, parkin, ekins, monbiot, vidal, etc., don't support Reforestation then they aren't green and they're a waste of time.

The authors in this book believe that oomans can solve their social, economic, political, and environmental, problems simply by going local. Whilst, in the past, many of them may have insisted that multi-national corporations should carry out environmental impact statements on prospective construction projects, they do not show the slightest interest in doing anything similar for their own localist proposals. They have no criteria for determining whether their proposals are geophysiologically sound or not. They just assume 'going local' is the answer. Sorry, but the days when it was possible to trust environmentalists not exploit the environment, murder Animals or encourage dirt bikers to plough up the countryside, are long gone.

There are interesting attempts in a number of articles in this book to delineate the changing nature of third world exploitation. Jeremy rifkin updates what was a popular bogey issue in the 1970s - the threats posed by automation. It seems that if workers in the over-industrialized nations aren't made redundant by chinese people working for a bowl of rice a day, then they're all too likely to be replaced by a machine. There are lots of facts mentioned in this book which environmentalists might find useful during green jumble sales raising funds for so-called green organizations but this book is nothing like as momentous as the subject it covers.