PART V

 

                        INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS & RESPONSIBILITIES

 

 “The aim of aid (to poor countries) is to perpetuate

 the system that makes aid necessary.”

Joan Robinson, Cambridge University

 

“A regime of global governance is needed in which world markets are managed

so as to promote the cohesion of societies and the integrity of states. Only a

framework of global regulation — of currencies, capital movements, trade and environmental conservation —can enable the creativity of the world economy to

be harnessed in the service of human needs..”

John Gray, from ‘False Dawn’

 

GOVERNMENTS & WORLD TRADE

 

            Thus far, I have defined the individual's relationship to his own powers, to his immediate blood relations, and to the organic world around him. There remains one final step which must needs knit them all together. This step must relegate and order man's relation to his fellow man upholding and perfecting these preceding rights and responsibilities. Today without this final step, the individual, the family and the community are at the mercy of larger forces over which there is as yet no adequate control.

            Humans band together to protect and expand their mutual interests through size and strength so long as these seem to be the best available means to them. These amalgamations, limited only by their own strength and not by any mutual agreement with other amalgamations of men, are prone to trample the rights of outsiders and even nullify their own citizens' rights in a vain attempt to compete more efficiently. Indeed, as competition increases, each state or confederation of states comes to look more and more like the others; each adopting features of the others which will help it to compete more favorably. Like athletes on steroids, the immediate results look good but the long-term results may be disastrous.

            Free flow of information is often felt to be threatening to one's local form of government, just like the free flow of products and information in the international market is often thought to be a threat to local (national) governments, manufacturers and labor. The government censors information, the manufacturer seeks tariff barriers. Today few local governments will be able to restrain this flow. At a time when international communications have become a dominant technology for change and emerging businesses are in search of world markets and a worldwide labor pool, trade becomes more and more difficult to regulate at a national level. The one thing which is becoming eminently clear to even the most liberal local power is that it no longer has all the answers. Scientists, artists and philosophers have long realized this and have consistently ignored local boundaries in the exchange of information.

            But free trade at the international level must bear the same responsibilities as city, state or regional trade bears within a given nation, i.e., it must abide by the same rules. Present day economic colonialism does not comply. Nor does the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (G.A.T.T.) square with comprehensive rights. Trade negotiators insisted on a version of free trade which seeks minimal restrictions on resource exploitation, toxic emissions, waste disposal and human safeguards. Any attempt to control international transactions the negotiators insisted on labeling "restraints to trade". With this format free trade has become profitable for a very few but costly for many. Kathryn Collmer[1], a Food and Agriculture analyst with the Kansas Rural Center, explained one aspect of the proposal as follows:

 

"The threat lies in the proposed creation of an unelected international body called the Multilateral Trade Organization, or MTO, which would be the judiciary and enforcement arm of GATT. The MTO would have the power to force all 108 GATT countries to repeal any of their national, state or local laws that the MTO declares to be out of compliance with GATT rules. The proposed rules are sharply at odds with existing U.S. food regulations. Currently, the U.S. has the authority to ban imports of foods that do not meet certain standards. Under the new GATT rules, however, a country that wants to export its foods into the U.S. can challenge our food-safety regulations as being 'unfair barriers to trade.' The complaint would be taken to an MTO dispute-resolution panel, which the new GATT rules prohibit from considering any factors other than strictly commercial ones. Arguments about consumers' health, worker safety or environmental impact would not be allowed. Under GATT rules, the U.S., as defendant, would have to convince the panel that the law in question does not restrict trade in any way - a virtually impossible burden of proof."

 

            The trouble with this arrangement is that we have the foxes watching the chicken coop. Nations party to the agreements are captives of transnational corporations.

            Here is how journalist Chakravarthi Raghavan views the results of G.A.T.T in an excerpt from his detailed book on the trade negotiations titled Recolonization: G.A.T.T., the Uruguay Round and the Third World:

 

"The powers and position of the trans-national corporations would be enhanced, the sovereign space of countries would be reduced and the process of Transnationalization of the world economy (and the third world) would be carried forward to an extent where it would not be easily reversible. It will divide the world between the `Knowledge-Rich' and Knowledge-Poor' with the latter permanently blocked from acquiring the knowledge and capacity to be rich. In economic and social terms, third world countries and their people could be said to be on the point of being rolled back to the colonial era."

 

            In his book, The Political Economy of Imperialism, Dan Nadudere discusses one obvious aspect of the restraint of information, or as Raghavan puts it "knowledge," affecting trade - monopoly patent laws and copyrights.

 

"Once inventors and developers have been adequately paid, inventions are a more or less costless store of knowledge (that) is captured by monopoly capital and protected in order to make it secret and a 'rare and scarce commodity,' for sale at monopoly price(s). So far as inventions are concerned a price is put on them not because they are scarce but in order to make them scarce to those who want to use them." (Nadudere)

 

"There is one recent and remarkable exception to this rule. In certain remote parts of Africa as many as 60 percent of the people over age 55 are partly or completely blind from becoming infected with a parasitic worm. Possibly 18 million people are affected. The pharmaceutical corporation, Merck & Co., owned the patent on the drug, Ivermectin, used to kill worms in animals. In October 1987, however, Merck announced they would provide the drug free of charge for Africans afflicted with the parasite. The company chairman, Dr. P. Roy Vagelos noted that, 'It became apparent that people in need were unable to purchase it.' Here the loss to society from monopolization was so obvious that these corporate executives made a moral decision to save millions of people. The cost to them was negligible, while the gain to society is so large it is immeasurable. There is a loss to society from monopolization of any technology; it is just usually not as obvious as in this dramatic example where the rules of patent monopolies were abandoned."

 

            Physicist, biodiversity conservation activist and author Dr. Vandana Shiva, discusses patents in a 1998 interview with In Motion Magazine:

 

“Patents are a replay of colonization as it took place 500 years ago in a number of ways. Interestingly, even at that time, when Columbus set sail and other adventurers like him, they also set out with pieces of paper that were called the letters patent which gave the power to the adventurers to claim as property the territory they found anywhere in the world that was not ruled by white Christian princes.

 

Contemporary patents on life seem to be of a similar quality. They are pieces of paper issued by patent offices of the world that basically are telling corporations that if there’s knowledge or living material, plants, seeds, medicines which the white man has not know about before, claim it on our behalf, and make profits out of it.

 

That then has become the basis of phenomena that we call biopiracy, where seeds such as the Basmati seed, the aromatic rice from India, which we have grown for centuries, right in my valley is being claimed as a novel invention by Rice Tec.

 

            Both the G.A.T.T. trade agreement and the discussions of patent monopolies point out attempts by transnational corporations to control the content of services - through monopoly of money and technology, ergo through information. Transnational corporations seeking new markets have no eleemosynary goals in mind. They represent pure unfettered and untempered free enterprise. Instead of a rule of law "of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations," each country must individually, lacking a larger collective will, assert its own comprehensive rights. This too may not be easy noting that local dictators, landed gentry, giant corporations and other self-interest groups often control policy in their respective countries.

            Ancient as well as modern states have thrived at the expense of other states. In their quest for a continually expanding market, developed countries turn to underdeveloped ones exchanging their technologies and capital for the developing countries' resources and indebtedness. This process is driven by the nearsighted greed of those who own or control local resources and those who own or control advanced technologies and capital. One case in point which may help to clarify the nature of the problem is presented by Khor Kok Peng of the Consumers' Association of Penang/Third World Network 1988 in an article entitled "The Third World Environmental Crisis: A Third World Perspective:"

 

"Third World countries became more and more tied up with the world trading, financial and investment system with transnational corporations in the forefront, setting up trading and production bases in the Third World and selling products and technologies to them. They were aided by an entire infrastructure of aid programmers funded by the rich-country governments, by multilateral institutions like the World Bank, and also by transnational banks which loaned billions of dollars to finance expensive projects and the importation of highly capital-intensive technologies. They were also supported by foundations and research institutions and scientists in the rich countries which sponsored and carried out research on new agricultural technologies which would `modernize' the Third World, in other words create the conditions whereby the Third World would have to depend on the transnational companies for technology and inputs. In order to pay for the import of modern technology and inputs, these Third World countries were forced to export even more goods, mainly the natural resources like timber, oil and other minerals, and export crops which took up a larger and larger portion of total land area. Economically, financially and technologically, Third World countries were sucked deeper and deeper into what has proved to be the whirlpool of the world economic system. In the process the Third World has lost or is in the process of losing its indigenous products, resources and skills. Our people are losing their self-reliant capacities, their confidence, and in many cases their very resource base on which survival depends. The world economic and technological systems are themselves facing crises. The Third World is now hitched onto these systems over which they have very little control. The survival and viability of most Third World societies will thus be put to the test in the next few decades."

 

            Infringement of use rights here are manifest. Resources are being depleted without conservation possibly leading to drastically altered ecosystems. The world monetary system, based on a wide disparity of technologies and capital, results in both the transfer of resources and money from underdeveloped countries to the developed ones. The Third World is also robbed of its indigenous skills by the presumably efficient imported ones which are more capital and energy intensive than the local labor intensive ones. The U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development, in an article entitled "Our Common Future," sums up this situation as follows:

 

"Ecology and economy are becoming ever more interwoven - locally, regionally, nationally, and globally into a seamless net of causes and effects. Debts that they cannot pay force African nations relying on commodity sales to overuse their fragile soils, thus turning land to desert. The production base of other developing world areas suffers similarly both from local failures and from the workings of the international economic system. As a consequence of the 'debt crisis' of Latin America, that region's natural resources are now being used not for development but to meet financial obligations to creditors abroad. This approach to the debt problem is short-sighted from several standpoints; economic, political, and environmental. It requires relatively poor countries simultaneously to accept growing poverty while exporting growing amounts of scarce resources. Inequality is the planet's main 'environmental' problem; it is also its main 'development' problem."

 

            Two extreme examples of this dichotomy, privileged vs. underprivileged, were highlighted by a series of articles in the Philadelphia Enquirer. One focused on the trade in human blood, or better stated, the flow of human blood from poor countries to rich ones. Robbed of other means of support, the poor are reduced to selling themselves; even their organs are for sale, the last resources of the poor. In a second article, the Philadelphia Enquirer traced the odyssey of a U.S. ship's attempt to unload 13,000 tons of waste (which no state in the U.S. would have) by paying some impoverished Third World country to take it. For two years this infamous ship, the Khian Sea, sought a dumping ground for its cargo. It did manage to unload 3,000 tons in Haiti before even the poor Haitians protested. The article concluded:

 

"After leaving Haiti the Khian Sea sailed around the Caribbean, along the African coast, across the Mediterranean Sea and through the Indian Ocean....... somewhere between the Suez Canal and Singapore the ash disappeared."

 

            A deal even the poor refused.

            Nor are the poor in rich countries much better off. Earlier, under the title "Securing Use Rights," I discussed how businesses "externalized" costs. They do so by simply transferring what should be private operating costs to the public. Moving their production to underdeveloped countries they repeat these practices while continuing to take advantage of their original home markets. They exploit foreign workers who have no union protection and no social benefits in countries whose resources they are decimating and shipping abroad and whose ruling elite ask little of them by way of legitimate taxation. Their products are then returned to the home market where they can easily eliminate competition. The result is a loss of local, skilled jobs and a reduced tax base with which to cope. The flip side is, at least temporarily, a lucrative market for the private investors/stockholders. While G.A.T.T. sees nothing remiss with all this, it is pretty obvious to local industries and their employees and should soon become equally so to their governments as their ability to perform normal functions becomes strapped for funds.

            G.A.T.T., with the collusion of participating developed states, has managed to write an international agreement with little democratic input and one so favorable to commercial interest that it will hasten both the collapse of our collective environment and expand the dichotomy between haves and have-nots. When a sufficient number of individual nations awake to these realities they will need to revisit their mistakes and rectify them. They will need to reassert a rule of law which puts every citizen's rights above those of the economic sector. Commerce's ability to outrun government controls mired in cumbersome democratic processes is obvious. A strong United Nations seems to be the best approach.

            In trade agreements the comprehensive rights of all citizens in every country should be fully respected and protected. It is no longer sufficient to protect ones' own citizens and their environment. The world is too small and too fragile and the cost of protecting ones own territory alone has become too expensive if not impossible. Rights of use and mutual rights, however, can not be easily won or protected with force. They must be primarily won through enlightenment - through an understanding of how the real world works. This means that both developed countries with their international corporations and their high consumption rates and poor countries with their high population growth rates, meager education and exploitable (but often non- renewable) resources must mutually come to terms for the sake of a sustainable future. While we still have much to learn about how this can be accomplished it is clear that the solutions do not lie with corporate executives parading as good will trade ambassadors. It is also clear that we need to act rather than procrastinate. It is also fair to say that responsibility for initiating these reforms should lie with the powerful countries acting through the U.N. Not because they are in any way morally superior but only because they have the means and, more importantly, because it is in their best interests.

            If the prospect of redefining ownership and inventing a new monetary system seems impossible or just improbable today, it may not be so tomorrow. As Third World countries begin to join the developing or developed countries, their workers are going to push hard for living wages. In developed countries, labor is already demanding an end to poor country sweatshops as unfair competition. They are also fighting the disparity of environmental protections which have encouraged world class corporations to set up shop in countries with the least restrictive environmental regulations, little or no social welfare laws and no unions. These reactions, though weak at present may soon mature, as did the rise of unions in the U.S. and other western countries. Yes, there will be some bloody battles with those last vestiges of economic colonialism and their benefactors. But they will fail as the U.N. and most developed countries' citizens side with the poor in developing nations. In all ways there will be a struggle to universalize labor laws, social welfare laws and to demand common environmental laws. In the process of this transformation it just may become apparent that the present concept of property needs to be modified because it is both dangerous and unjust, but mainly because international labor will be strong enough to insist that it change.

 

* * * * * * *

            So much for my undeserved optimism, suggesting that the powerful countries, acting through the U.N., could act in a morally superior way to protect everyone's rights. After ratifying G.A.T.T., the U. S., Canada and Mexico went on to approve a North American Free Trade Agreement (N.A.F.T.A.) which embodied most of G.A.T.T.'s substance.

            Now in 1998 comes the mother of all free trade agreements: the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (M.A.I.). To quote from the organization Public Citizen:

 

"The MAI is a new international economic agreement currently being negotiated at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international body comprised of the world's 29 wealthiest nations. The MAI is designed to ease the movement of capital - both money and production facilities – across international borders by limiting the power of governments to restrict and regulate foreign investment. The MAI is based on the investment provisions of (NAFTA) but the MAI amplifies these provisions and, unlike NAFTA, which only applies to (North America), would apply them worldwide."

 

            While MAI has had little or no public exposure via the media its implications for most citizens in rich or poor countries alike is negative - and this is probably an understatement. With some luck it might, at least, be modified before being ratified.

 

            Briefly the main provisions according to the Public Citizen organization are as follows:

 

1.       National Treatment – requires all governments to treat foreign and domestic investors alike, but could actually favor foreign over local;

2.       Most Favored Nation (MFN) – requires treating all investors and governments alike regarding regulatory laws;

3.       Limitation of Performance Requirements – restricts any local laws which might require investors to invest in the local economy or meet social or environmental standards in exchange for market access.

 

Banning restrictions on the Repatriation of Profits and the Movement of Capital, thus ensuring that corporations and individuals can move their assets more easily.

 

A ban on Uncompensated Expropriation of assets. The MAI would require governments, when they deprive foreign investors of any portion of their property, to compensate the investors immediately and in full. Expropriation would be defined not just as the outright seizure of a property but would also include governmental actions tantamount to expropriation. Thus, certain forms of regulation could be argued to be expropriation, potentially requiring governments to compensate investors for lost revenue.

 

The MAI includes “Roll-back” and Standstill” Provisions that require nations to eliminate laws that violate MAI rules (either immediately or over a set period of time) and to refrain from passing any such laws in the future. State and local, as well as federal laws, would likely be affected. Some existing laws will be exempted.

 

In its current form, the MAI does not contain language on the Responsibilities of Corporations regarding treatment of employees, environmental protection, fair competition or other issues. There is discussion of including an existing OECD code of corporate responsibility in the MAI, but these provisions would be non-binding.

 

Investor-to-State Dispute Resolution. The MAI would enable private investors and corporations to sue national governments, and seek monetary compensation, when they believe a law, practice or policy in a country violates investors’ rights as established in the agreement.”

 

            Here is a brief update regarding the actual workings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), with thanks to Greg Palast for his in-depth investigative reporting. The following is from his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

 

            Re: Bolivian riots in April 2000:

 

“The count in Bolivia was 6 dead, 175 injured including two children blinded after the military fired tear gas, then bullets, at demonstrators opposing the 35 percent hike in water prices imposed on the city of Cochabamba by the new owners of the water system, International Waters LTD (IWL) of London – a subsidiary of construction giant Bechtel of San Francisco.”

 

Re: Why? Because the IMF, World Bank, and the IAD Bank required water sell-offs to help bail out the over-valued Bolivian peso.

 

“Long before ministerial limousines clogged the U.S. capital for the April 2000 World Bank “Ministerial” meeting the big policy decisions were settled in far-flung ‘Sectorial’ meetings. In the case of water, nearly 1,000 executives and bureaucrats gathered in the Hague in March 2000 to review and refine a program to privatize the world’s water systems.

 

But these private operators who carved up the planet into ‘Market Segments’ in March can only turn in profits if prices rise radically and rapidly. IWL secured from Bolivia a 16 percent real guaranteed return. This profit boost itself was enough to account for the initial 35 percent hike in rates. The ransacking of Bolivia’s water supply would not have occurred without a bit of helpful arm-twisting by the World Bank…

 

The IMF, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank have written water system sell-offs into what they modestly term ‘Master Plans’ for each Latin American nation. Consortia such as IWL were formed to capture these cast-off public assets.”

 

From his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man here is a pertinent quote from John Perkins who was about to begin working for one such contractor (MAIN)

 

“There are two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and to other U.S. companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone and Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other U.S. contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would  present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.

 

            Here we have free trade masters and their world bankers privatizing non-competitive city utilities (those absolutely critical for local welfare), and becoming absentee owners of vital foreign resources. This is indeed a recipe for continued local rioting, and a disaster for any independent democracy. Other causes for the Bolivian unrest include additional austerity demands and the debt-burdened payback loan from created money, both of which drained the local economy.

Forget the “foxes protecting the chicken coop;” they want to own it. What we have here are investors – transnational corporations, investment bankers, mutual fund managers, brokerage firms, the World Bank and the IMF - writing international rights laws for themselves.

            Why should their rights dominate any international law? The answer to this, unfortunately, is that commercial interests in developed countries have obviously convinced their governments and those in developing countries that minimally restrained economic growth on a world scale is our collective salvation that the good results of this policy will “trickle down” to all of us. This premature assumption by captive governments will only intensify problems and hasten the collapse of this new economy which Swedish business executive Rolf Oosterberg claims is built on pure air. It will also hasten the collapse of local eco systems.

            Like many blue movies this proposed agreement has no redeeming qualities. For a thorough analysis of MAI, I suggest Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Clinical Project Program publication The Multilateral Agreement on Investment: A Step Backward in International Human Rights.

            Before moving on I would like to offer one additional aside which speaks to the current hypocrisy of those who control this great international economic paradigm – world trade. Here is another  comment on the subject by John Perkins from his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

 

“In the final analysis, the global empire depends to a large extent on the fact that the dollar acts as the standard world currency, and that the United States Mint has the right to print those dollars. Thus, we make loans to countries like Ecuador with the full knowledge that they will never repay them; in fact, we do not want them to honor their debts, since the non-payment is what gives us our leverage, our pound of flesh. Under normal conditions we would run the risk of eventually decimating our own funds; after all, no creditor can afford too many defaulted loans. However, ours are not normal circumstances. The United States prints currency that is not backed by gold. Indeed, it is not backed by anything other than a general worldwide confidence in our economy and our ability to marshal the forces and resources of the empire we have created to support us.

 

We in developed countries and especially here in the U.S. have been exporting capitalism without democracy. We found it easier to do business with those locally in power and to overlook the absence of social justice wherever we traded. Not only did we overlook social justice in these countries, we sold the local tyrants weapons with which to protect their (and our) interests. The costs of this shortsighted approach are now apparent and they are not good.

 

THE KILLING TRADE

 

            Perhaps equally as tragic as the economic and ecologic plight of those in the Third World Countries has been that of the eastern block nations under Soviet Communist rule and the peoples of the Soviet Union themselves. In the Soviets’ rush to compete with the West, and perhaps dominate it, they subjected their own people and those of their satellites (the captive nations of eastern Europe) to the worst possible environmental degradation trampling human rights with impunity. Heavy industries were established without regard for health or safety standards. Whole cities and regions were subjected to excessive air, water and soil pollution. Here, from the Gannett News Service, is how Ellen Hale reported the story:

 

“Throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, years of abuse of natural resources are taking their toll on people’s health – just as these countries struggle to emerge from decades of political repression and catch up with modern times. Illnesses vanquished in most societies thrive here; diseases declining elsewhere are on the rise; and life spans are actually dropping. Worse, millions of children exposed to air pollution, radiation, contaminated food and toxic water have turned the future generation into a medical time bomb and imperiled the intellectual development of their countries.”

 

            This is a case of a powerful dictatorship literally enslaving its neighbor states as participants in an arms race which finally bankrupts both the instigators and their unwilling partners. Individual rights, mutual rights, use rights and the rights of citizens to govern themselves are all totally squelched. Instead all energies, resources and labor are focused on building up the destructive might of a dictatorship. Here is perhaps the ultimate in economic and political tyranny.

            A final example of destructive international trade is that which involves the manufacture and sale of weaponry and/or integral elements thereof. This need for arms, for or against potential or actual aggression in an anarchic world, generates vast expenditures of resources both human and environmental. Not only does warring itself devastate populations, plunder resources and bankrupt nations but the very act of preparation for modern warfare depletes resources, pollutes the environment and deflects human energies into destructive channels. One need only contemplate the costs of the so-called “Cold War” between east and west blocks to understand this tragedy.[2] So long as warring was limited to modest weaponry like battle axes and swords and transportation limited to long boats and animal caravans civilization was not threatened, but today, with nuclear bombs and biologic weapons available and missile capability a few hours away from almost anywhere, the situation is radically different. With both private dealers and national governments engaged in the sale of arms (and usually only to nations who can afford them) we trample human rights, diminish our own resources and endanger civilization. An arms race becomes a race to oblivion.

            A tragic case in point – Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. This megalomaniac of a dictator has, with the help of his former opportunistic friends, the democracies of Europe, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, created a nightmare of a war machine with which he was attempting to eliminate his neighbors and, in the process, a staggering number of his own people. How did he get all this help? He got it with oil proceeds, with promises to be a good socialist ally and by spending state money on aggressive weaponry instead of social services, i.e., he robbed his own people. And he got it because just about everybody hated his first intended victim, Iran, and was willing to take his money or his oil or to loan him money (including another intended victim, the Kuwaitis). The Russians furnished him with missiles, guns, tanks, and advisors, the French with war planes and a nuclear plant, the British with fortifications, the Germans with chemical and biological plants and weapons, and the Americans with satellite surveillance capability (for rent). And Saddam did not hesitate to use poison gas against the Iranians and some of his own countrymen, the Kurds.

            Next, Saddam decided to attack Kuwait, acquiring their oil. The income/energy from this source would allow him to further expand his warring capabilities. He obviously did not count on the United States to protect the Kuwaitis, a terrible miscalculations.

            ‘Desert Storm’ was all about the control of oil, the primary resource that drives all modern war machines. It was clear to most that the United States and it’s allies, the world’s biggest oil users, would not allow some of the world’s richest supplies to fall into the hands of a dangerous, unpredictable tyrant.

 It will be sometime long after this war before the total destruction is assessed but you can be sure it will be monumental; for the combatants, the non-combatants, the world’s resources and the planet.

            Oscar Arias, the former President of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, states in a June 23, 1999 The New York Times article:

 

“While the arms industry profits, people throughout the world suffer. Americans   are hurt when the defense budget squanders money that could be used to repair schools or to guarantee universal health care. Overseas, American-made arms are often turned against civilians or used to strengthen dictators. Indeed, the true weapons of mass destruction are the jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and other military exports that the United States ships to non-democratic countries – a record $8.3 billion worth in the 1997 fiscal year. The United States should strongly support an international code of conduct on arms Transfers. This initiative, which is being promoted by a commission of 17 Nobel Peace laureates, would insure that weapons are not sold to countries that violate Human rights or suppress democracy.”

 

            Arias should know. Coming from Central America he is painfully aware of U.S. collusion with many of the most oppressive regimes there—the dictators in Cuba and Nicaragua, and the brutal oligarchs in El Salvador. In each case we (U.S.) have been accomplices in the murder of thousands and the destruction of their economies. In Guatemala we did nothing to stop the slaughter of native Indians by the country’s ruling junta, less some action on our part might hurt business.

            Until the independent governments of the world reject these most destructive and, as Jonathan Schell points out, self-defeating activities they will not only fail in their aim of self-defense but will hasten their own demise and that of the environment which sustains them. Instead, the leading nations, with UNESCO and other U.N. agencies, need to develop models like the Marshall Plan to assist some countries or ones like E.F. Schumacher’s intermediate technology strategy to aid others. These approaches in lieu of weaponry proliferation have worked in the past and are by any standard less costly. The leading developed powers must also terminate their economic colonialism currently disguised as free trade under the WTO.

 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final scene a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower


[1] From a Chicago Tribune Editorial, June 29, 1992.

[2] July 2, 1998 New York Times News Service: definitive cost accounting, not including yet to be completed clean-up costs, puts nuclear weapons production and related costs to date at 4.85 trillion. But these costs are still increasing as dangerous nuclear creators from Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries, flee elsewhere for money and jobs, along with their country's stockpile(s).