<nettime> Katz: Activists use Internet to slow trade liberalization

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

From: Olivier Hoedeman <paxaran@antenna.nl>

Katz: Activists use Internet to slow trade liberalization

US business leader sees free-trade threat

BY JACK LUCENTINI JOURNAL OF COMMERCE STAFF 12/10/98

NEW YORK -- Increasingly mobilized by the Internet, labor and
environmental activists are a growing threat to free trade and an open
global economy, a business leader said Tuesday.

Abraham Katz, outgoing president of the U.S. Council for International
Business, gave the keynote speech at the organization's annual dinner on
Tuesday.

He will retire from the post in February, to be replaced by Thomas M.T.
Niles, a former ambassador to Greece who has been serving as vice
president of the National Defense University.

Mr. Katz laid out several accomplishments achieved during his 14-year
tenure, as well as a number of continuing problems.

"The enemies of an open market system have marshalled a serious
counterattack on further liberalization of trade and investment and on
multinational companies as the main agents of globalization," said Mr.
Katz, who joined the council after a long career with the State
Department.

Officials of the business group have been alarmed about what they see as
growing threats to business, often spurred by the Internet. For instance,
recent charges that Nike Inc. mistreats its workers in southeast Asia were
largely spread across the electronic medium.

Organized labor and environmental groups are pushing for unilateral
sanctions against offending countries and companies, Mr. Katz said.

"The more worldly and knowledgeable among them (activists) are aware that
the U.S. neither singly, nor in any combination of countries, can
introduce a unilateral sanction-based approach into the multilateral
rule-based system without tearing it apart," Mr. Katz said.

"Frankly," he charged, many of them "would just as soon see this happen."

One of the chief accomplishments that Mr. Katz cited is the International
Labor Organization's Declaration of Principles and Rights at Work, which
was ratified in June at the ILO, a 174-member group affiliated with the
United Nations.

Mr. Katz's organization saw the declaration as a way to use the UN to
pursue better labor rights principles in countries that violate them
egregiously, without letting those concerns get in the way of trade.

Labor groups that oppose the business group's agenda favor extending the
declaration of principles so that it can be used to punish or sanction
countries or individual companies.

"The objective of these groups, supported by certain governments, is to be
able to judge the behavior of companies in what would amount to kangaroo
courts in which non-governmental organizations and trade unions would have
a major voice," he said.

Another initiative of the business group that Internet-mobilized activists
have derailed is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. That would
standardize rules so that each country would have to treat outside
investors the same way. It would protect investors from government
interference such as arbitrary seizure of property.

Opponents say it would give multinational corporations unprecedented power
to challenge governments' consumer, labor and environmental laws.

Mr. Katz also complained that labor groups have defeated fast-track trade
negotiating authority for President Clinton. In September, the House of
Representatives defeated a Republican-drafted fast-track bill. The
president has pledged to bring a new, comprehensive fast-track bill to
Congress in January.


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