As the WTO champions a new world order in which money rules, the old politics of left and right are giving way to a new politics defined by a choice between money and life as the measure of our lives and institutions. Will we give ourselves over to roles serving money as consumers and workers in a global economy ruled by global corporations and financial speculators? Or will we act as whole human beings, citizens of planet Earth, with the right and responsibility to create a planetary society ruled by people for the benefit of the whole of life?
 

Capitalism trains and selects as its leaders those imbued with a highly developed financial consciousness --"think money." Its favoured institution is the publicly traded, limited liability corporation, which concentrates power in the hands of a chief corporate executive accountable to absentee owners who themselves are shielded from public accountability for the decisions made on their behalf. Imposing on corporate directors and officers a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize short-term returns to its shareholders, the legal structure of the corporation virtually compels it to mimic a cancer pursuing its own unlimited growth without regard to consequences for either itself or its host.

Though living capital, human, social, institutional, or natural, is the ultimate source of all real wealth, capitalism assigns it no value and makes no accounting for its depletion. The ultimate power over both governments and corporations resides with global financial markets in which speculators gamble with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money. Corporate ownership of media and politicians renders democracy meaningless as the institutions of money rewrite laws to free themselves from public regulation, economic borders, and restraint on their ability to eliminate competition through mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances.

Meanwhile the WTO, a body created at the instigation of the world's largest corporations to serve their financial interests, has been given the power to challenge local and national laws that conflict with the corporate view of global priorities. Through the WTO the world's rich and powerful aggressively advance the negotiation and enforcement of international agreements to place the protection of property rights ahead of the protection of human rights, regulate governments to prohibit them from regulating global corporations and finance, remove barriers to the spread of a homogenized corporate-friendly consumer culture, mould all countries into a standardized laissez-faire capitalist economic model, press governments to privatize public goods and services, assure global corporations unrestricted access to natural resources, and provide public guarantees for private investors and speculators.

The increasingly shaky legitimacy of this flawed economic model rests in large measure on two constantly repeated fallacies:

Fallacy 1: The fairest and most effective way to end poverty is to expand the economic pie through economic growth, thus improving the standard of living of everyone. Reality: The economic growth we currently experience is destroying the real living wealth of society and the planet, thus reducing the pie of real wealth, in order to generate financial profits that go primarily to the already wealthy.

Fallacy 2: The global victory of capitalism is a victory for democracy and the market economy. Reality: Democracy and market economies are exactly what we should be seeking, because they are the foundation of equitable, self-organizing societies. Capitalism is the mortal enemy of both. By definition, design and practice, capitalism is a system that concentrates economic power in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many, creating an illusion in the minds of power holders that it is an engine of prosperity rather than an engine of destruction and upward redistribution.
 
 

Consider the possibility of a planetary society in which life is the measure of value and the defining goal is to assure the happiness, well-being and creative expression of each person. Well-being and progress are evaluated on the basis of indices of the vitality, diversity and productive potential of the whole of society's living capital, human, social, institutional and natural. These indices are monitored as carefully as we now monitor GDP and stock prices. Any sign of decline evokes prompt corrective action. Leaders are trained and selected for their highly developed community and planetary consciousness.

Human rights and political sovereignty reside in real persons on the basis of one person one vote. Active participation in civic associations facilitates the practice of direct democracy. Public funding of elections and free access for political candidates to media minimize the role of money in elections.

Economic life centres on well regulated, self-organizing markets that function within a strong ethical culture of co-operation and mutual responsibility. Some call it "the mindful market economy." Firms are human-scale and owned by real human stakeholders, their workers, customers, suppliers and community members. There are many forms of enterprise, including proprietorships, co-operatives, partnerships and stakeholder-owned corporations, but the once common publicly traded, limited-liability corporation that separated ownership from community responsibility and accountability no longer exists.

The right of each person to a means of livelihood is considered to be the most basic of human rights, a right secured in part through owning a share in the assets on which one's livelihood depends. Concerns for equity and public accountability are hallmarks of economic life.

Money is society's servant, not its master, and is used solely to facilitate productive investment and beneficial exchange. Its creation is a public function. Financial speculation is strongly discouraged by regulation and tax policy. Local currencies are common, as are independent community banks and credit unions. Thus, finance is predominantly local, as are most enterprises and most production. Countries trade their surplus production based on their comparative natural endowments.

Cultural diversity is highly valued, as is economic diversity and experimentation. Individual local and national economies vary substantially in their mix of public and private ownership and in the extent of their participation in a planetary trading system depending on their circumstances and preferences. Experience, culture, information and technology are freely shared among people, communities and nations through individual travel and electronic communication, thus facilitating rapid social learning toward constant improvements in real living standards and the quality of life of all.

Each community or nation has the right to determine what and how much it will trade, with whom, and under what circumstances. Similarly, it has the right to decide on the terms, if any, under which it will invite others to participate in its economy through investment. These rights, as well as other appropriate standards for an equitable and beneficial planetary trading system, are secured by international agreements implemented under the supervision of the United Nations.
 

Fair and balanced trade that serves the mutual interests of the trading partners is welcomed, however, the planetary society has a natural preference for local production to strengthen local control and economic security, increase the stability and resilience of economic relations among countries, and reduce transportation costs and energy use. Another point of difference between the planetary society and the global economy is that the former takes seriously the underlying principles of market and trade theory, including the principle that markets must be regulated to maintain the conditions of efficient market function. It thus uses regulatory and fiscal measures to maintain a reasonable balance in trade between countries, assure that full costs are internalized by producers and reflected in selling prices (no direct or hidden subsidies and no unfair competitive practices such as dumping), and keep finance and ownership predominantly national (limit international financial flows and foreign/absentee ownership).

In short, the planetary society takes seriously the negotiation and implementation of trade and investment rules based on market principles.

So isn't this what the WTO is about? What about the free-trade advocates who regularly tell us that we need the WTO to make trade rules to prevent trade wars and protect the interests of poor nations? Most of those who make this claim are just blowing smoke. Trade rules are anathema to free-traders, and the WTO, which was created by free-traders, has no mandate to regulate international trade or the conduct of global corporations and financial markets. Its mandate is quite the opposite, to prevent national and local governments from implementing any regulation that restricts the free flow of international trade and investment.

The real mandate is evident in what the WTO actually does and in proposals now on the table. For example, it has told Japan that its tax on bourbon whiskey produced in the United States is too high. Apparently, the WTO believes that the Japanese people will be better off drinking more US bourbon. Canada is told it cannot protect its culture by taxing US magazines. India is told it cannot provide its people with inexpensive generic drugs because it is unfair to foreign drug companies that profit handsomely from branded products. The United States is told it cannot choose not to import tuna fish caught with methods harmful to dolphins.

Europeans are told they cannot give an import preference to bananas produced by small banana co-operatives located in the Caribbean. They are also told they cannot restrict the import of beef treated with growth hormones or genetically modified food products that pose potential risks to human and environmental health until they provide conclusive proof that those products are harmful. The WTO even takes for itself the responsibility for determining whether Europeans, and others, will be allowed to label such products and thus let consumers decide for themselves.

Proposals that were up for consideration at the Seattle conference would have prevented governments from acting to favour local over foreign investors (including banking, media and other service sectors), favour local firms in public procurement, preserve national food security by protecting local farmers from foreign competition, protect forest and water resources from exploitation by foreign corporations, or regulate speculative movements of international money. They would also have opened the way to priva-tizing public services such as public schools and health care. While stalled, these proposals are far from dead and will surely be reintroduced in meetings less subject to public scrutiny and protest.

The WTO was created at the behest of international corporations and financiers to prevent and rollback the regulation of trade, corporations or finance by governments. As to the claim that the WTO is saving us from trade wars and protecting the interests of smaller countries in the global economy, the banana case mentioned above is instructive.

The United States decided that Europe's import preference for bananas produced by small farmers in the Caribbean was unfair to two giant US agribusiness corporations, Chiquita and Dole, that grow bananas in Central America, control half the world's banana trade, and make large political contributions to both the Democratic and Republican parties. The United States took the case to the WTO, which ruled in favour of the corporations and thus placed the livelihoods of some 200,000 small farmers at risk. The Europeans refused to yield and the US, acting on the WTO decision, launched a retaliatory trade war by levying massive tariffs on such things as European-made cashmere sweaters and Roquefort cheese. In one move the WTO ruled against a preference for the poor and sanctioned a retaliatory trade war, thus revealing that the professed WTO concern for trade rules, the prevention of trade wars, and the interests of the poor is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
 

We have desperate need of a system of rules for the global economy that reverses its destructive course and puts us on the path toward a planetary society in which life is master and money the servant. The Seattle protests called for a moratorium on negotiating any new trade agreements, for a review of the consequences of existing agreements, and for repair of the damage already done. Post-Seattle we must craft an agenda that is both proactive and comprehensive, aimed at creating a planetary society that works for all.

For example, we need strong international agreements that:

• Regulate transnational corporations and finance to sharply curb financial speculation, the money laundering activities of transnational banks, trade in arms and illegal drugs, corporate tax evasion using off-shore financial havens, the sale abroad of chemicals and drugs banned in a corporation's home country, and anti-competitive practices such as price-fixing cartels.
 
• Establish a strong international anti-trust regime to reverse the trend toward the global concentration of corporate power, especially in such sensitive areas as banking, media and agribusiness, and maintain competitiveness in international markets.

• Require global corporations to adhere to the highest of international, local or their home country standards regarding human rights, labour, environment, health and safety everywhere they operate.
• Monitor national trade and financial balances and facilitate negotiations toward agreement of corrective action where consequential and persistent imbalances are found.
 
• Reduce extreme disparities in per capita resource use and CO2 emissions between countries.
 
• Eliminate market-distorting export and international transport subsidies.
 
• Organize sanctions in cases where a country engages in an economic assault on another by dumping products at prices substantially below the real costs of production, uses bullying tactics to force a country to open its markets to products it considers harmful or unnecessary, or intentionally disrupts the economy of another country by unilaterally imposing an economic embargo not sanctioned by the United Nations General Assembly.
 
• Create mechanisms for dealing with such matters as the problem of invasive alien species like the Asian longhorn beetle, the threat to human food security created by the growing number of countries in which domestic agriculture has been undermined by subsidized imports, threats to human, economic and environmental health posed by the reckless introduction of genetically modified organisms into food supplies and the environment, the use of child and slave labour in export production, and the abuse of intellectual property rights to overprice beneficial drugs and technologies and limit their availability to poor people and countries.

If these are the needs, then what are the mechanisms? Here we must address the larger question of what institution should be assigned the responsibility for global economic governance. Some suggest broadening the mandate of the WTO, because it has the means and authority to enforce its rulings. This seems highly risky, given that the WTO has no expertise in such areas as labour and the environment, is strongly committed to a myopic and largely destructive agenda that moves us ever further from a planetary society, and is perhaps the most undemocratic of all major international institutions. The United Nations, with its much broader mandate and expertise and its more open and democratic structures, is a far more promising option. We should also be clear that it makes no sense to have two independent global governing institutions, the UN and the WTO, with overlapping jurisdictions.

The world has no need for an organization which protects global corporations from regulations implemented by democratically elected national and local governments to protect the well-being of their citizens. Therefore, it is time to face up to the fact that creating the World Trade Organization was a mistake and it is best dismantled. Responsibility for managing global economic relations properly resides with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations. ECOSOC is already responsible under the General Assembly for carrying out the functions of the United Nations with regard to international economic, social, cultural, education, health, and related matters. For all the evident deficiencies of the United Nations, it will be far easier to build the requisite competence and democratic processes within the existing structure of ECOSOC than to build it within that of the WTO. And though corporations and the International Chamber of Commerce are moving aggressively to establish their presence in the United Nations, it will be far easier to block their attack on the integrity and legitimacy of the UN than to purge the WTO of their already deeply entrenched influence.

The road ahead to a planetary society will be long and difficult, but the protest at Seattle was a hopeful beginning.

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