alternative reader no. 138

On Repressive Governments, the WTO and Neoliberal 'Globalization'

BY RESIST PLUNDER AND WAR NETWORK
Posted by Bulatlat

The collapse of World Trade Organization (WTO) talks is very welcome even if it far from puts an end to neoliberal “globalization”. Certainly the WTO has been used to open up hundreds of third world countries to unequal trade and plundering investment for over a decade. However, it has been doing this as just one of many mechanisms of the big powers – albeit the most expansive – and in collusion with third world governments and business elites. These other options such as bilateral or regional deals and even outright invasion remain. Likewise, the domestic political and economic elites that have been collaborating to push not just the WTO as such but the neoliberal agenda as a whole also remain. Indeed, many of these governments have resorted to political repression and brute force to overcome mounting people’s resistance. The Philippine experience is a case in point.

The Philippine government is a member of the ostensibly “progressive” G33 bloc of the WTO that has been lobbying for concessions in agricultural trade reforms, particularly limited exceptions from liberalization in identified “special products” (SPs) and through “special safeguard mechanisms” (SSMs). Yet upon accession to the WTO in 1995 the government actually implemented an agricultural liberalization program that went far beyond what was formally required under the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). For instance, average agricultural tariffs were slashed by two-thirds from 28 percent in 1995 to just 9 percent in 2004. There was a similar eagerness in industry with industrial tariffs slashed by four-fifths from 14 percent to 3 percent in the same period.

Indeed the 1990s has actually been a decade of severe opening-up of the country to imperialist trade and investment. There was foreign investment liberalization starting in 1991 followed by the removal of capital and foreign exchange controls. Public infrastructure, water, power, oil and oil were privatized. Telecommunications, air and water transport, retail trade and banking were also liberalized. The end result is that monopoly capital has achieved unparalleled strength over Philippine economic and even political affairs. While the profits of foreign and domestic big business are at double- and triple-digit highs, domestic agriculture and industry have been devastated and unemployment is at a historic sustained high. The collaboration of the Philippine state has been crucial to achieving these.

Filipino workers, peasants, youth, indigenous peoples, women, church workers and even professionals have been vigorously opposing imperialist “globalization” especially since the last decade. The breadth of mass organizing, protests, grassroots education and alliance work has already greatly strengthened the country’s mass-based resistance movement. Today these organized forces are the greatest barrier to the next level of “globalization” being pushed by the government and demanded by foreign monopoly capital: the outright revision of the Philippine Constitution, the country’s basic “law of the land”.

The Philippine government has already twice tried to revise the Constitution particularly to remove its explicit provisions on national sovereignty and patrimony. The first time was a few years after accession to the WTO, in 1997, when it became clear that the “free market” demands of its agreements were contrary to the Constitution’s “nationalist” and “protectionist” provisions. The second time was in the wake of the so-called Asian Crisis in 1997 which foreign investors sought to exploit to increase their penetration into the domestic economy. Both these efforts were successfully stymied by the organized anti-globalization resistance movement and the neoliberal agenda in the Philippines has been forced to nominally conform to the charter.

However the current Arroyo administration has begun the government’s third attempt and has stepped-up its efforts since last year. It is on an ideological offensive and is peddling the tired myth that opening up to foreign trade and investment are the keys to national development. Yet the successes of national and global campaigns to expose the bankruptcy and plundering nature of neoliberal “free market globalization” limit the effectiveness of this tactic of deceit. To make up for this deficiency the government has intensified its political repression especially of the progressive mass movement.

Leaders and members of activist and community organizations have been killed by state military and paramilitary forces since the first few months of the Arroyo presidency in 2001. There has been a drastic leap in the number of extrajudicial killings since last year with 705 deaths and 182 disappearances already documented by the human rights group Karapatan. The peasantry is most affected with some 44 percent of these victims being farmers, most of whom are active in peasant organizations struggling against neoliberal “globalization”. The other victims are workers, students, teachers, church workers, lawyers and also human rights advocates. In the last five years there have also been over 50,000 documented cases of threats, harassment and intimidation.

The government has cracked down even on public officials critical of trade and investment liberalization, privatization and deregulation and hence of the Arroyo administration’s moves to change the Constitution. After declaring a “state of national emergency” to justify a crackdown in February 2006, six militant legislators were charged with spurious cases of rebellion. Five of them were able to evade arrest and detention although one currently remains in the custody.

The country’s activists, progressive groups, mass movements and nationalist legislators are at the forefront of protests in the country against plunder and exploitation through neoliberal policies. They are also at the core of the people’s struggle for true democracy and against fascism, militarism and imperial wars of aggression. The state is well aware of this for which they are being viciously targeted. Yet history has shown that while a people rising may be attacked they can never be truly defeated.

July 29, 2006 

Posted by Bulatlat

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© 2006 Bulatlat ■  Alipato Media Center

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