Reference:
John McMurtry, Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph
Interdisciplinary Conference on the Evolution of World Order:
Building a Foundation of Peace in the Third Millenium
Toronto: June 7, 1997
The Multilateral Agreement on Investment is a document being secretly negotiated by economist bureaucrats and corporate advisors from the 29 nations of the Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Resembling the NAFTA and the WTO agreements in its one-sided logic, it is the latest fast track initiative to institute a transnational regulatory framework of private corporate ownership and trade as a sovereign order which overrides national, regional and municipal jurisdictions and laws.
The MAI's focus is protection of foreign investment capital. Its master principle is the blanket right to "national treatment" of transnational corporations in host societies. Under the agreement, foreign corporations must never be "discriminated against" by any government on any level on any account, such as their contribution to the well-being of the home society.
Serving the interests of the home society is deemed to be "protectionist". To accomplish the full colour of this right, a massive re-engineering of the access of foreign corporations to the the wealth of all societies is required.
Accordingly, the MAI has written into its detailed draft articles the rights of transnational corporations:
Under the proposed agreement, all provision by domestic governments of goods to their citizens by public ownership or control are construed as "monopolies".
Monopolies of knowledge by corporate copyright, in contrast, are specially excepted as non-monopolies. This double standard is significant because monopoly designation entails special legal restrictions on pricing and distribution of goods which would be "an interference with business freedom to transact" on private corporations.
Any public non-profit"monopoly" in health-care, education or other universally accessible life-good is, therefore, to be bound by the obligation to act "solely in acordance with commercial considerations in the purchase or sale of its good or service"; to "in particular" be prevented from the "abusive use of prices" which might adversely affect the market share of foreign corporate investors; and, in general, to be liable for damages for any "lost opportunity to profit from a planned investment" which might be incurred by public involvement in providing citizens with goods in which private oreign corporations could assert a market interest.
Worker buy-outs of enterprises, or return of their ownership to home investors are, moreover, not to be permitted any favourable loan, tax or start-up cost by public authority, since this would constitute a "discriminatory treatment" against foreign investors.
"Educational products" as well as any other product, except military, the one article of trade given full protectionist walls by the treaty, are also prohibited from any limit on foreign control or domination.
Any requirement for long-term commitment of investment in any strategic area such as the nation's natural resources or high-employment sector are, moreover, forbidden.
Any other condition which reduces the right of foreign transnationals to move their profits and assets from the home society to other jurisdictions with lower environmental, labour, corporate tax or safety standards is likewise prohibited by MAI law.
To avoid protests by citizens against such a one-sided bill of rights to transnational corporations at the expense of societies' established right to govern themselves, the MAI's planning and drafting were not reported by any government or, with rare exception, any mass media in any of the 29 countries involved, including Britain, France and Canada during their national election campaigns.
To round out its assertion of overriding rights to multinationals at public expense, all the costs of this new regime to privilege transnational corporations above governments and electorates that is, the costs of its planning, negotiation, enforcement, adjudication, liablities for infraction are under the agreement to be paid for out of the public purse.
All of these facts are drawn from a draft of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, Paris, January 13 Draft, 1997.
The draft in question includes reservations from specific countries on specific clauses for example, Norway with respect to the MAI's inclusion of "authorizations, licences and concessions for the prospection, exploration and production of hydrocarbons", a right of the home country which Norway's negotiators, mindful of Norway's reliance on public control of public oil resources for the funding of its social infrastructure, sought to exclude Definitions 2.b.9).
The Unifying Principles
What unifies the diverse and sweeping prescriptions of this extra Parliamentary formation of a transnational framework of law is the single, final goal of releasing corporate investment from any interference or social condition set by national or local public authority. Every term of the agreement is to guarantee this free subjecthood of "Investment" as sovereign over any democratic decision to set limits on its movement, location, time-frame, objective, or volume.
What unifies the private monetary interests driving this would-be regime, in turn, is the fact that transnationally mobile corporations in of the signatory jurisdictions are freed from accountability to any other interest, government or citizen body in their new guarantee of unlimited access to all of the markets, resources, subsidies and assets of the 29 societies involved.
What makes this appropriation of public power by for-profit transnational corporations possible to impose on peoples' historically evolved rights of self-government is, in further turn, its absolutized expression of the market program of value which is widely accepted as the final authority on how all societies ought to live. This dispossession of citizens and communities of their collective rights to protect their lives and resources as their own is, in the end, grounded on a metaphysical principle that unfettered market rule has a natural right to regulate all of the world's societies in their best interests.
Society's liberation from this invisible prison begins with the clear recognition of what it is. This has been the task of the above analysis. The next step is to understand the ground of its acceptance a program of thinking which has become decoupled from all life interests other than the transnational investor in corporate form.
The third step is both complex and straightforward. It is to ensure that other international laws than those protecting private corporations are inserted as terms of agreement in this and other codes of trade law.
Long-established international laws governing the community of nations include laws for the prevention of crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and war crimes, international labour and civil rights conventions, and environmental protocols and treaties. Currently there is no recognition or inclusion of of these international laws in the MAI or other transnational trade agreements, with the sole exception of Article 104 of the NAFTA which parenthetically acknowledges that international protocols on the ozone layer and transboundary pollution can be complied with by societies without triggering transnational trade sanctions.
The exception is not heeded. Virtually all international laws, however solemn and far-reaching, are daily violated in the new corporate-regime, then condoned as "necessary for profitable international trade" and "competiveness within the new market order".
This is not the development of a world system which respects life. It is the forging of a global absolutism of special-interest rule which has-no place for individual, community or environmental life in its regulatory framework. All that is recognized is the protection of corporate investor rights to other societies' wealth.
To restore some sanity to this perfectly one-sided regime, already evolved and signed international laws must be included in these trade agreements as prior obligations of contracting parties and their enterprises, upon which their right of access to other societies' markets, assets and resources is conditional. If they do not comply, they can be subject to barriers against their access to domestic markets, assets and resources.
This long overdue rule of law in the new transnational trade order does not solve the problem of the loss of sovereignty of peoples over their own societies. But it renders the monster of money-to-more-money rule across nations less internationally lawless than it now is.
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