From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: In GATT They Trust (VII)
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 05:11:04 GMT

In GATT They Trust (VII)


The following article was taken from the _Covert Action_ Spring 1992
[special issue dedicated to  Native people's rights/struggles]
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Terry Allen is co-editor of CAIB [CovertAction Information Bulletin] 
and a journalist who has worked in the U.S. and abroad. 
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For more information about CovertAction Information Bulletin and
subscription information, please see bottom or email Rich Winkel at
rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
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============================================= 
Efforts to Prevent Wars of Commercial Rivalry 
============================================= 

Immediately following the enc of the Second World War, there were two 
important initiatives aimed at preventing yet another war stoked[sic? 
-D.B] by industrial and commercial rivalries.  A European Common 
Market, it was hoped would lean ultimately to political unification 
within the continent that had been the scene of nearly endless 
warfare. 

The second strategy was the proposed International Trade 
Organization(ITO), an ambitious and very positive effort to create a 
global institution to regulate trade.  This international institution 
would have established clear and precise rules to regulate the role of 
global corporations and the ways governments could promote or restrict 
international trade, while at the same time institutionalizing the 
advantage of the victor nations. 

The ITO was seen by its earliest proponents, including economist John 
Maynard Keynes, as a part of the Bretton Woods trilogy that included 
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund(IMF).  In 1947 and 
1948, some two dozen countries participated in negotiating sessions in 
Havana and Geneva aimed at both the founding of the ITO and drafting 
an agreement based on an initial package of tariff reductions. 

On April 28, 1949, when President Truman presented the charter of the 
ITO to Congress, he ran into a brick wall.  Congress viewed the 
agreement as a step toward world government and failed to give it the 
two-thirds approval constitutionally required for all treaties.  The 
president then removed a loose brick in the constitutional wall and 
the agreement slid through: The tariff reduction deals assembled into 
GATT were labled an "executive agreement" and were brought into force 
without the approval Congress.  This successful opening for 
circumventing the Constitution remains useful. 

Like its companion structures under the Bretton Woods agreements, the 
IMF and World Bank, the early GATT provided the economic underpinnings 
for the U.S.  post-World War II global dominance. 

GATT served to institutionalize the contradictions ingerent in the 
ideology of free trade.  First, since the powerful North could 
unilaterally determine the value of the South's raw materials, and 
currencies, the playing field was from the beginning slanted so that 
the profits flowed North.  Second, jacking the tilt even higher, those 
products like agricultural goods within the U.S.  which required 
special protection were given special status.  The selective 
application of the ideology of "free trade" and the ability of the 
U.S.  to make other nations swallow its rules continue to be a 
hallmark of U.S.  trade policy. 

Some analysts see multilateral trade agreements such as the ITO and 
GATT as a progressive force restricting the ability of transnational 
corporations to operate beyond the reach of individual nations. 
Others see their main role as limiting the ability of national 
governments to regulate corporate-especially transnational-activities 
through a process of global deregulation. 

A third group sees a concordance of interests between transnational 
corporations and the governments of powerful industrialized nations. 
They assert that the agreements institututionalize the power advantage 
of these elites over Third World nations and provid a forum in which 
those differences which do exist among the elites to be worked out. 

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