Neo-liberalism: Myths and Reality: by Martin Hart-Landsberg
Agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have enhanced transnational capitalist power and profits at the cost of growing economic instability and deteriorating working and living conditions. Despite this reality, neoliberal claims that liberalization, deregulation, and privatization produce unrivaled benefits have been repeated so often that many working people accept them as unchallengeable truths. Thus, business and political leaders in the United States and other developed capitalist countries routinely defend their efforts to expand the WTO and secure new agreements like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) as necessary to ensure a brighter future for the world’s people, especially those living in poverty.In 2001, Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardoff, and Robert Stern published a study that claimed that a WTO-sponsored elimination of all trade barriers would add $1.9 trillion to the world’s gross economic product by 2005. Their study was widely showcased in media stories that appeared before the November 2001 start of WTO negotiations in Doha, Qatar.This focus on trade hides what is in fact a much broader political-economic agenda: the expansion and enhancement of corporate profit making opportunities. In the case of the WTO, this agenda has been pursued through a variety of agreements that are explicitly designed to limit or actually block public regulation of economic activity in contexts that have little to do with trade as normally understood.
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