Local Trade Barriers Targeted
Just when you thought the World Trade Organisation was back in its box, up pops the news of another multinational organisation with similar intentions - to promote global profit making for big business above all other considerations.
The TABD - TransAtlantic Business Dialogue - is a hush-hush group of American and European CEO big boys who believe they have an inalienable right to pursue global profit. They meet annually with US and European government officials to push for the removal of any impediment to their pursuit of profit, such as domestic regulations governing environmental or social concerns.
Meeting in Cincinnati last month, the TABD urged for a new negotiating round of the WTO which has kept a very low profile since the overwhelming public protests at the Battle of Seattle in April.
The TABD's mission is to force the US-European trade relationship into a deregulatory agenda that corporate watchdog Robert Weissman suggests, in his November 19th column in the Washington, DC based weekly Corporate Crime Reporter, will then be imposed on the entire world. Including us.
The TABD is not talking traditional tariffs. As stated in the TABD's 2000 Mid Year Report, the successful removal of traditional tariffs as "inefficient restraints on economic liberty" was achieved at the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) - which also created the powerful WTO.
"The new obstacles to trade," says the Report, "are now domestic regulations. Non-tariff barriers to operations should be tackled with the same zeal as tariffs were reduced."
The list of domestic regulations constituting "obstacles to trade" include: differing standards of chemical safety; labelling requirements for inch/pound rather than metric; differing standards for regulating electromagnetic fields (relevant to mobile phones); restrictions on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising in the EU; and, the entire US product liability system, seen as a "serious impediment to transatlantic trade and investment."
Clearly, the TABD views inconsistency in regulations between various countries as a major no-no to trade. Others might counter that this is a blessing of democracy and healthy diversity.
The TABD wants uniformity or, if it cannot force a single global standard, at least Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) which allow products cleared in one country a free pass into another, regardless of the importing country's regulatory system.
When TABD speaks, governments listen. American government Commerce heavy Timothy Hauser told a Congressional committee back in 1997 that "virtually every market-opening move undertaken by the United States and the EU in the last couple of years has been suggested by the TABD."
All is not lost, however. With groups like the Corporate Europe Observatory (www.xs4all.nl/~ceo) and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch (www.tradewatch.org) getting the information about TABD out to the growing number of ordinary folks concerned about abusive corporate globalisation power, the TABD is being deprived of hatching deregulatory plots in secret.
The Cincinnati meeting was the first time informed protesters focused world attention on the TABD's agenda. The TABD won't be stopped, but hopefully minimised; it is up to us consumers to make it so.
Business News 7 December 2000
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