In reality, globalization is being shaped and advanced by carefully planned legal and institutional changes embodied in a series of international agreements. To achieve this goal, the MAI would ban a wide range of regulatory laws now in force around the globe and preempt future efforts to hold transnational corporations and investors accountable to the public.
Negotiations are already at an advanced stage.
Yet few Americans have even heard of the agreement. Whether the MAI is adopted, and if so, just how far its deregulatory tentacles will extend, depends on whether opponents can force the proposal from its present obscurity into the light of public debate. Under these conditions, transnational corporations would find it easier and more profitable to move investments, including production facilities, to low-wage countries. Efforts to promote local development by earmarking subsidies for home-grown businesses and limiting foreign ownership of local resources would also be barred. If adopted, the MAI will mean foreclosure of Third World development strategies, increased job flight from industrial nations, and new pressures on countries, rich and poor, to compete for increasingly mobile investment capital by lowering environmental and labor standards.