Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 2: The Contours of World Order Segment 11/14
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Under existing conditions of social organization and concentration of power, (selective) free trade is hardly likely to increase the general welfare, as it could under other social arrangements. Those who declare their allegiance to Adam Smith are careful not to attend to his words: the principles of economic liberalism can have favorable consequences when implemented with appreciation for fundamental human rights. When shaped by "the savage injustice of the Europeans" and blind obedience to "the vile maxim," the consequences may favor "the architects" of policy, but others only by accident.

The experience of the US-Canada free trade agreement illustrates the process. In two years, Canada lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, many to industrialized regions of the US where government regulations virtually bar unions (the Orwellian term is "right to work," meaning "effectively illegal to organize"). These government policies, natural in a business-run society with the public largely marginalized, leave workers unprotected and much easier to exploit than in Canada, with its more vigorous union movement and its cultural climate of solidarity. The agreement has also been used to require Canada to abandon measures to protect the Pacific salmon, to bring pesticide regulations in line with more lax US standards, to refrain from steps to reduce emissions from lead, zinc and copper smelters, to end subsidies for replanting of forests after logging, and to bar a single-payer auto insurance plan in Ontario modeled on Canada's health insurance system, which would cost US insurance companies hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, if enacted. All such practices have been judged illegal barriers to free trade. By similar reasoning, the US objects to a GATT provision that allows countries to restrict food exports in times of need, demanding that US agribusiness must control raw materials no matter what the human cost.

At the same time, Canada, an asbestos exporter, is bringing charges against the US for imposing EPA standards on asbestos use in violation of trade commitments and the "international scientific evidence" about health risks of asbestos: the EPA has improperly gone beyond the "least burdensome requirements" for the corporations, Canada claims. At the GATT negotiations, the US is backing corporate proposals to restrict environmental and consumer protection to cases supported by "scientific evidence," to be judged by an agency made up of government officials and executives from chemical and food corporations.39

Perhaps the most dramatic current examples of the cynical pursuit of the "vile maxim" in international trade are Washington pressures to force Third World countries to accept US exports of tobacco, the world champion killer among lethal narcotics by a substantial margin. The Bush Administration launched its hypocritical "drug war" (timed nicely to produce the proper mood for the invasion of Panama) simultaneously with steps to force Third World countries to import this leading killer, and to allow advertising aimed at new markets, women and children particularly. GATT backed these efforts. The media, while climbing aboard the "drug war" bandwagon with appropriate fanfare, obliged the Administration further by completely suppressing the major drug story of the day. There were no headlines reading "US Demands to be World's Leading Narcotrafficker," or even a line in the back pages (statistically insignificant dissidents aside).

With Eastern Europe rejoining the Third World, drug pushers are leading the way in investment. "Cigarette makers flock to E. Europe," an upbeat front-page story is headlined in the Boston Globe : "While many American companies have been criticized for not being aggressive in investing in Eastern Europe, American cigarette companies have been trail-blazers." A tobacco executive explains: "There is little awareness of health and environmental problems in Hungary. We have about 10 years of an open playing field" -- ten years of profits, before PC left-fascists begin to interfere with lucrative mass murder. "Of 30 developed countries," the news report reads, "life expectancy is shortest in Eastern Europe." US corporations will try to improve the statistics further, "trail-blazers for capitalism," basking in applause.

Note that Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, the former Yugoslavia, etc., are "developed countries," to be compared with Western Europe so as to demonstrate the evils of Communism -- but not with Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and other quasi-colonial domains that they resembled before they separated from the traditional Third World. That practice is an ineradicable feature of contemporary ideology. Honesty on this crucial issue is strictly verboten.40

Another story in the same issue illustrates how flexible an instrument economic doctrine can be. It celebrates the achievements of New Hampshire in dealing with its fiscal problems. The method was to encourage a successful enterprise that has become "the largest retail volume outlet for wine and liquor in the world, according to state officials," with $62 million in profits from sales of over $200 million in 1991, a $5 million increase in profit in a year. The increase is attributed in part to doubling of the advertising budget for alcohol, which ranks second to tobacco as a killer. The enterprise is a state monopoly. Hence its profits allow the most conservative state in the union to keep to the free market doctrines its leaders revere and to avoid taxes that would rob the wealthy to enrich welfare mothers. Another free market triumph, unnoticed.41


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39 Jim Stanford, "Going South: Cheap Labour as an Unfair Subsidy in North American Free Trade," Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Dec. 1991; Andrew Reding, World Policy Journal, Summer 1992. Edward Goldsmith, Mark Ritchie, The Ecologist, Nov./Dec. 1990; Watkins, Fixing, 103-4. Brief amicus curiae of Government of Canada, US Court of Appeals, "Corrosion Proof Fittings, et al., vs. EPA and William K. Riley," May 22, 1990. See ch. 3, n. 43.

40 "Drug war" and media, DD, ch. 4; ch. 7, on comparative study. Jonathan Kaufman, BG, May 26, 1992.

41 Bob Hohler, BG, May 26, 1992.