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Newsletter Issue 1 Jan - Feb 2001 |
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| Editorial Welcome to the first issue of the new Corporate Watch Newsletter! This is currently a stopgap publication while the new website is being prepared - soon all the features and analysis you were used to finding in the magazine will be available on the web, along with fortnightly news updates, diary, contacts etc. etc… We will continue to publish the newsletter as a resource for those without web access, and as a means of promoting articles and research on the website. Paper versions of all website content will be available on request for a small fee. In this issue’s main article, (see centre pages) Laura Wilkes exposes how a new trade treaty – the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is set to devastate public service provision through forced liberalisation. Taking the GATS rules to their logical conclusion would see an end to free, uncommercialised health and education: in future we will be able to choose between an appendectomy provided by SmithKline Beecham and one supplied by Merck Sharpe and Dohme, while sending our kids to Virgin schools with science teachers sponsored by Shell and history lessons freshly sanitised by Disney. School lunches, of course, will be from McDonalds… okay, you get the picture. Joking aside, this is already happening. GATS shares its commercialising philosophy, which sees every human actrivity as a market opportunity, with the major corporations and other prophets of the current world order. The result is essentially anti-human – it ignores complex, messy human needs and measures society in financial terms. Human beings are increasingly valued only as consumers; those who cannot pay are not only excluded from essential goods and services but, by extension, dehumanised. What we are seeing is a shift in the model by which people are asked to define themselves. In twentieth century Western democracies, the model was one of citizenship – the true human being was a citizen and a voter: a class which excluded, for example, criminals, children, many members of poor and minority communities, and sometimes women, but which nevertheless acknowledged human needs and voted largely by ballot papers rather than wallets. The ‘consumer’ model is different: in it, people exist only through the ‘ability to pay’ – one dollar equals one vote, things which cannot be bought and sold do not exist, people with no dollars have no vote and, on some level, people without money cease to exist themselves. Stopping GATS will not replace this worldview – much wider work is required for that – but allowing GATS to continue will erode still further the space in which we can be human, and will blight the lives of millions while accelerating environmental destruction. Only we can stop it. |
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