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Quiet Takeover Of Public Service After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we produced a documentary, The Invisible Wall, anticipating that the elimination of the east-west wall would be followed by the strengthening of the north-south divide. With the collapse of a counter ideology, the developing world would lose one of its few bargaining chips - playing one power block against the other for economic favours. Just as Thatcherism - or Rogernomics - benefited some of the lower middle classes while further marginalising the poorest, global Thatcherism would bolster the Malaysias and South Koreas while plunging the likes of Sudan into an even deeper crisis. In our programme a GATT executive acknowledged that world free trade had nothing to offer the poorest societies. The much-vaunted "trickle-down" effect might more accurately be described as " peed upon". We would have rather been wrong, but it's encouraging to see how far public opinion has come in recognising the realities for the developing world of unfettered market forces. What the 50,000 anti-WTO demonstrators last November in Seattle were ultimately demonstrating against was their own sense of powerlessness. There seemed to be nowhere else to turn. In an age when half of the world's hundred strongest economies are now companies rather than countries, asking the nation state to curb the likes of Microsoft - even if it wanted to - is about as helpful as deploying a slingshot to bring down Concorde. On the health front, of course, things look bad for the world's poorest countries. The WTO is pressing them to abandon their efforts to make desperately needed medications more affordable through generic drugs and other policies. WTO rules allow corporations to secure exclusive marketing rights over medicinal remedies that have been used by indigenous groups for centuries. Similarly, millions may face starvation because agribusiness has been given the go-ahead to patent seeds created over generations in villages around the world, and then charge annual re-planting fees to the subsistence farmers who developed them. What hasn't come out of the Seattle and post-Seattle coverage is the vulnerability of the world's richest countries as well. WTO intends to privatise the provision of traditional public services - social housing, transport, education, health and welfare, through the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). International competition has resulted in the decline of manufacturing as an economic base, so American and European corporations are turning to services as an alternative money-spinner. The WTO's preoccupation with the service industry underlines its immense commercial significance. The shared risks and public accountability of traditional public health services are now under sustained attack. The private sector's growing involvement in the health and welfare field means the dismantling of the European welfare state, and its culture of universality and equality. Governments are deregulating and privatising public service funding and delivery; services are contracted out, and compulsory competitive tendering - "best value" - is rationalising the establishment of public-private partnerships. Two-thirds of the European Union's economy and employment is in the service sector, which accounts for a quarter of total exports and a half of all foreign investment. In the USA, service exports account for a third of economic growth over the last five years and, even in the less developed world, private investment promises a bonanza. Powerful transnational groupings like the Coalition of Service Industries in the U.S. have long protested that the public ownership of health care in many countries has been an impediment to the ambitions of American private sector interests - with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries at the forefront. GATS Article 1.3 states that a government service is one "which is supplied neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more service suppliers". According to the WTO, such services must be provided free of charge, yet the hospital sector in many countries consists of government-owned and privately owned entities which charge either the patient or the insurance company. WTO argues that wherever there is such a combination of private and public funding, the service sector should be wide open to foreign corporations. In other words, in much of the developing and developed world everything from hospitals and outpatient clinics to home care facilities will be up for grabs. Income and health inequalities will continue to widen. It's a worrying reflection on the state of current affairs coverage in the mainstream media that, in their generally uncritical acceptance of the inevitability of these directions, the implications have not been brought before the public. It was left to a medical journal, The Lancet, to spell them out in a recent remarkable, if daunting, article. Its writers called for public action: "The US and European Union governments are aggressively backing this project in the interests of the business corporations. But the assault on our hospitals and schools and public service infrastructure depends on a promise from one government to another to expand private markets. Such promises can be kept only if domestic opposition to privatisation is held in check. We need to constantly reassert the principles and values on which European health-care systems are based, and resist the WTO agenda.". While the WTO sees its agenda as entirely desirable, the WHO recognises the social costs of creating a system that will further enrich some while plunging billions worldwide into greater poverty. The World Health Organisation says that by 2020 the treatment of such mental illnesses as depression will consume more resources than heart diseases, as populations struggle with heightened anxiety and unprecedented social dislocation. We're expected to enthuse over our brave new economic world, where high inflation is becoming a thing of the past, as are universal health care, job security and state pensions. The transnational corporations, untouched by the constraints of national loyalty, social responsibility and democratic accountability, are on an incessant global search for vulnerable public services and the cheapest "flexible" workforces. . posters with messages that demand jobs and an end to poverty. These foot-soldiers are mobilisi
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