Dear Diary...Our Jubilee Year begins with some disturbing changes in the capitalistic system—the immerging power of the conglomerate multinational corporations. The banking industry, for example, has hyped the banking bill signed by President Clinton last November as the biggest revolution in financial regulation in more than a half century. Wow--one stop shopping for securities, brokerage and insurance at the same banks that gave us ATM surcharge fees. Wow, and they are going to save us $15-billion, too, while offering us a greater choice.
I am torn between Nader’s claims and that of the American Bankers. Who should I believe?
Many people moan about the immerging power of big government, but big government at least is ultimately answerable to the electorate. When government is insensitive, we can change the cast of characters; we can make change by creating laws through the initiative process as voters did in San Francisco to end bank's double dipping of ATM fees. The courts will ultimately decide that controversy.
On the other hand, multinational corporations are only answerable to stockholders. Stockholders want returns on their investment and their stock increasing in value. This requires the corporation to make profits. Management needs profits to justify their big salaries. Have you ever heard of a stockholders revolt because a corporation made too much profit? If moving the manufacturing end of the company to Mexico, Saipan, or Indonesia to exploit cheap labor means more profit, say Hasta la vista to your job, your pension, and hello to unemployment. However, don't expect lower prices at the check-out counter for things that were manufactured here. The profits will go to the executive suites, not the workers, not the consumers.
If you have wondered what all the hullabaloo in Seattle over the World Trade Organization's December meeting was about, it was about multinational corporate profits versus workers’ rights and the environment. It was a protest against multinational corporations, sanctioned by the WTO, which governs trade between 135 countries. Perhaps most of us were unaware of the WTO before Seattle. Take notice! Many consider that it is trying to become an unelected fourth branch of our government. It is allowing our democracy to be under cut and restructured by the power to circumvent our laws. The result is that when we don’t have a voice in the process, we go to the streets to make a voice.
Juliette Beck and Kevin Danaher with Global Exchange, a San Francisco based human rights organization, claim that "the U.S. adoption of the WTO was undemocratic" in itself. Think about it. The approval of the WTO required entire sections of U.S. laws to be rewritten to conform to the WTO rules in a similar way to how treaties often redefine how the U.S. will interact with other countries. Moreover, "had the agreement been voted on as a treaty, requiring a two-thirds majority in the Senate," they claim, "it would have been defeated." Trade policy has shifted from elected representatives to private interests and global bureaucrats pandering to a materialistic global society.
In its four years of existence, the WTO has "established a set of global trade rules that benefit mostly transnational corporations while ignoring the needs of communities, workers, and the environment" and it has "created a super-national court system that can economically sanction countries," according to Beck and Danaher. It has replaced accountable national governments with an unaccountable, corporate-backed government without regard to the dignity and rights of those who produce the profits.
However, business leaders like Lewis E. Platt, former Chairman of Hewlett-Packard Company, don't agree. He claims that the WTO’s removal of all import duties on information technology has "increased opportunities for the U.S. high-tech workers and reduced the price of information-technology products." Have you noticed the reduced prices on the HP's manufactured out of the country?
Pope John Paul II observations about workers and unbridled capitalism need greater exposure. In his Encyclical, Laborem Exercens (1991) on the occasion of the nineteen anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Pope states something that the WTO should contemplate as it tries to guide a global economy. "It should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work." He further states "that the justice of a socioeconomic system and, in each case, its just functioning, deserve in the final analysis to be evaluated by the way in which man's work is properly remunerated in the system."
"The Church considers it her task always to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work," the Pope said, and "to condemn situations in which that dignity and those rights are violated… and help to ensure authentic progress…."
The question that concerned Christians should ask is this? Is the WTO ensuring authentic progress in the trade between nations or fostering unbridled capitalism?
Fr. Joe Landi is a Parochial Vicar at St. Cecilia Parish, San Francisco, the Archbishop's Liaison to the Charismatic Renewal, the Editor of the San Francisco Charismatics, and Board Chair of Sierra Point Credit Union, South San Francisco, serving the community, parochial and government schools in San Mateo County, and the Charismatic Renewal.
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