En kort artikkel fra Naomi Klein om nyliberalisme versus demokrati. Verd å
lese.
Mvh,
Per
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4144152,00.html
Comment
Fighting free trade laws
The best-selling Canadian author of No Logo, the international
anti-corporate activists' guide, begins her fortnightly column for the
Guardian today.
Naomi Klein
Thursday March 1, 2001
The Guardian (London)
Anyone still unclear about why here in Canada the police are
constructing a modern-day Bastille around Quebec City in preparation
for a forthcoming American summit and the unveiling of the Free Trade
Area of the Americas should take a look at a case being heard by one
of the Canadian provincial supreme courts.
In 1991, a US waste management company, Metalclad, bought a
closed-down toxic treatment facility in Mexico, in Guadalcazar. The
company wanted to build a huge hazardous waste dump and promised to
clean up the mess left behind by the previous owners.
In the years that followed, it expanded operations without seeking
local approval, earning little goodwill in Guadalcazar. Residents lost
trust that Metalclad was serious about cleaning up, feared continued
groundwater contamination, and eventually decided that the foreign
company was not welcome.
In 1995, when the landfill was ready to open, the town and state
intervened with what legislative powers they had available: the city
denied Metalclad a building permit and the state declared that the
area around the site was part of an ecological reserve.
By this point, Nafta, the North American free trade area, was in full
effect, including its controversial Chapter 11 clause which allows
investors to sue governments. So Metalclad launched a legal challenge,
claiming Mexico was "expropriating" its investment.
The complaint was heard in Washington by a three-person arbitration
panel. Metalclad was awarded $16.7m. Using a rare mechanism allowing
appeal to a third party, Mexico has chosen to challenge the ruling
before a Canadian court.
The Metalclad case is a vivid illustration of what critics mean when
they allege that free-trade deals amount to a "bill of rights for
multinational corporations". Metalclad has successfully played the
victim, oppressed by what Nafta calls "intervention" and what used to
be called "democracy".
Sometimes democracy breaks out when you least expect it. Maybe it's in
a sleepy town, or a complacent city, where residents suddenly decide
that their politicians haven't done their jobs and step in to
intervene. Community groups form, council meetings are stormed. And
sometimes there is a victory: a hazardous mine never gets built, a
plan to privatise the local water system is scuttled, a rubbish dump
is blocked.
These outbreaks of grassroots intervention are messy, inconvenient and
difficult to predict. It is precisely this kind of democracy that the
Metalclad panel deemed "arbitrary".
Under so-called free trade, governments are losing their ability to be
responsive to constituents, to learn from mistakes and to correct them
before it's too late. Metalclad's position is that the federal
government should simply have ignored the local objections.
There's no doubt that, from an investor perspective, it's always
easier to negotiate with one level of government than with three. The
catch is that our democracies don't work that way: issues such as
waste disposal cut across levels of government, affecting not just
trade but drinking water, health, ecology, and tourism.
Furthermore, it is in local communities where the real impacts of
free-trade policies are felt most acutely. It is cities which are
asked to absorb the people pushed off their land by industrial
agriculture, or forced to leave their provinces due to cuts in federal
employment programmes.
It is cities and towns which have to find shelter for those made
homeless by deregulated rental markets, and municipalities which have
to deal with the mess of failed water privatisation experiments - all
with an eroded tax base. There is a move among many local politicians
to demand increased powers in response to this offloading.
For instance, citing the Metalclad ruling, Vancouver city council
passed a resolution last month petitioning "the federal government to
refuse to sign any new trade and investment agreements, such as the
Free Trade Area of the Americas, that include investor-state
provisions similar to the ones included in Nafta".
Cities and towns need decision-making powers commensurate to their
increased responsibilities, or they will simply be turned into passive
dumping grounds for the toxic fallout of free trade. Sometimes, as in
Guadalcazar, the dumping is plain to see. Most of the time it is
better hidden.
No Logo is published in the UK by Flamingo (£8.99)
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