The Corporate Play for China

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted November 20, 2001.

"This is a defining moment," declared the head of the World Trade Organization. "The world has now changed."

Indeed it has. He was not referring to Sept. 11 crashbombing into the World Trade Towers, but to another attack on the well-being of workaday people here in America and all around the world. This is the assault by global corporate greedheads and their political henchmen on: one, the jobs, wages and middle-class aspirations of workers; two, the purity of the world's air, water, and food supply; and three, the very sovereignty of free people, enthroning corporate power as supreme over the democratic policies enacted by the people themselves.

What made the WTO's head man so exultant was that the corporate creators of this anti-democratic, secretive, powerhouse had just managed to bring China into its ranks. This has long been their dream. Most of our Congress critters, funded by these same greedheads, rationalized their support of this by claiming that WTO membership means China will have to open its markets to more U.S. products. Horsefeathers. China's people are overwhelmingly impoverished. The corporate powers are not after China's markets, but after the dirt cheap labor, cheap land, and non-existent enforcement of environmental protections.

WTO membership opens up China's unlimited production capacity to global corporations, and it prohibits our country from putting any tariffs, quotas, or other restrictions on the China-made products that they'll flood into our markets. There'll now be a gold rush of corporations moving their manufacturing and agricultural production over there. Indeed, Motorola, an eager proponent of getting China into the WTO, announced just one week prior to the vote that it would invest $6.6 billion in new Chinese factories, abandoning more jobs and communities here.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... To support bringing China into the WTO is like chickens giving a henhouse membership to Col. Sanders.

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