Sir, - For two decades now, governments and industry associations have been telling us that in future we must accept uncertainty and economic insecurity as basic conditions of modern life. We have been told repeatedly that we must expect to switch careers four, five, even six times in the course of our working lives, and that the only social constant will be endless change. Necessarily, then, we can expect that we will have a sense of ourselves as living a life more or less permanently on the edge.
That's one face of the message. Having just reviewed some of the pertinent documents from the World Trade Organisation's recent gathering in Qatar, as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), I can see there is a completely different agenda for global corporations and speculative international capital. For these documents are nothing if not agreements to reduce uncertainty, eliminate insecurity, and provide protectionist measures for global corporations and private capital operating across borders.
In other words, we are being hoodwinked to accept social conditions of personal insecurity and future uncertainty that the global corporations and the corporate lobbies will not accept for themselves. The social protections that preserved public security are, in effect, being transfered from the public realm to global corporations.
So much for "the level playing field". It's social Darwinism and the law of the jungle for working people, but the most assiduous protectionism and a carefully regulated and secure international business environment for the global corporations.
Who, then, are the real "protectionists"? It's hard not to agree with the anti-globalisation protesters that neo-liberalism is profoundly anti-democratic, that national and international instruments of public policy are being handed over to private interests at public expense, and that we are being sold the corporatist vision of globalisation through a carefully crafted propaganda campaign. - Yours, etc.,
Scott Preston, Castle Park, Ashbourne, Co Meath.