Posted on 19-9-2003

Biting The Hand That Bleeds
by Alan Marston

Successive governments in New Zealand have toed the line on international
trade and as everyone with a smidgen of detached observation foresaw, that
line was strung out in Cancun and has hung New Zealanders out to dry.

Free trade was, is and always will be a cover for commercial colonisation
which if unsuccessful is quickly followed by armed attack. The Labour
Government in New Zealand, both the current one and that of the 1980's has
made appeasement its main aim in politics. Perhaps, like 1939 UK PM
Chamberlain, it is intended to keep the peace, but that's surely too
generous, the long arm of greed and ambition must explain the way New
Zealand's commercial defenses were torn down by a tiny minority for a tiny
minority. To have to hear the carping of current NZ trade minister Jim
Sutton `what more do we have to do to get a fair deal' is really too much
to bear. True, the policy and practice of unilateral disarmament in the
ever-present trade wars is appallingly yellow, but to keep calling it gold
is verging on mania.

At the talks in Cancun, in Mexico the nations that were official colonies
and are now commercial colonies bit the hand that bleeds them by rejecting
an offer that they couldn't possibly accept, ie. an "investment treaty", the infamous
Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This was a proposal that would have
allowed corporations to force a government to remove any laws that
interfered with their ability to make money, and that was crushed by a
worldwide revolt in 1998. In return for granting corporations power over
governments, the poor nations would receive precisely nothing. The
concessions on farm subsidies that Europe offered amounted to little more
than a reshuffling of the money paid to European farmers. They would
continue to permit the subsidy barons of Europe to dump their artificially
cheap produce into the poor world, destroying the livelihoods of the
farmers there.

As the philosopher Hobbes knew, "if other men will not lay down their right
.... then there is no reason for anyone to divest himself of his: for that
were to expose himself to prey". Yet The brilliant minds of the likes of
Clark, Prebble and now Sutton appear to be utterly ignorant of what any
second-hand car dealer could acquaint them with. One has to conclude that
it is not ignorance of basic commercial deal-making that is the problem, it
is outright political fraud. After all, a contract, Hobbes noted nearly 300
years ago, is "the mutual transferring of right", which a man enters into
"either in consideration of some right reciprocally transferred to himself,
or for some other good he hopeth for thereby". By offering the poorer
nations nothing and expecting everything the Corporatised North forced them
to walk out. But did Jim Sutton walk out, quite the contrary, he walked in
to the very cabal that is robbing us blind.

It appears incontrovertible that the NZ trade minister sees his public duty
as the defence of the corporations and industrial farmers of the EU and USA
against all comers, be they the citizens of Europe or the people of other nations. It
is surely inconceivable that Sutton is so blindingly naive about the true
intentions of trade-talks of any ilk by any party, which is to get more
than you give, that he would line-up with those who seek to rob and
plunder--so another conclusion has to be drawn. The Labour Government is
lying about its intentions to do the right thing by trade for the majority
of New Zealanders. Does the Labour Cabinet imagine that there is a law of
nature that governs the WTO whereby weaker parties are forced to capitulate
and forced to grant to private corporations the little that had not already
been stolen from them? That even when it became clear that the poor nations
were, for the first time, prepared to mobilise - as the state of nature
demands - a collective response to aggression would not be the natural
thing to happen?

The developing countries, for the first time in some 20 years, are
beginning to unite and to move as a body. That they have not done so before
is testament first to the corrosive effects of the cold war, and second to
the continued ability of the rich and powerful nations to bribe, blackmail
and bully the poor ones. Whenever there has been a prospect of solidarity
among the weak, the strong - and in particular the US - have successfully
divided and ruled them, by promising concessions to those who split and
threatening sanctions against those who stay. But now the rich have become
victims of their own power. Since its formation, the rich countries have
been seeking to recruit as many developing nations into the WTO as they
can, in order to open up the developing country's markets and force them to
trade on onerous terms. However, as the rich have done so, they have found
themselves massively outnumbered. The EU and the US may already be
regretting their efforts to persuade China to join. It has now become the
rock - too big to bully and threaten - around which the unattached nations
have begun to cluster. At Cancun the weak nations stood up to the most
powerful negotiators on earth and were not broken.

The lesson they will bring home is that if this is possible, almost
anything is. Suddenly the proposals for global justice that relied on
solidarity for their implementation can spring into life. Even if the WTO
is buried, smaller nations will use their collective power to find a way of
negotiating together. Poor nations, if they stick together, can begin to
exercise a collective threat to the rich.

The old war cry rings loud, which side are you on?