[asia-apec 1794] Mike's Masquerades (from www.zmag.org)

[GATT Watchdog]

Mike's Masquerades
By Aziz Choudry

"The tide is high but I'm holding on, I'm gonna be your number one, I'm
not the kind of guy who gives up just like that..." Mike Moore,
two-thirds of the way through his stint as Director-General of the World
Trade Organisation is crooning to the Third World - and anyone else who
might be listening - again.

Commenting on the "Battle of Seattle" Moore said: "The people that stand
outside and say they work in the interests of the poorest people ...they
make me want to vomit. Because the poorest people on our planet, they
are the ones that need us the most."

If I hear Mike masquerading as champion of the world's poor again I will
probably puke. As a long-serving politician down under, New Zealanders
concerned about the WTO's global free market economic agenda are grimly
familiar with his political and economic views. He is frequently
described - rather grandly - as "a former Prime Minister of New
Zealand". Few realise that this was for a mere eight weeks before his
Labour government's resounding loss to the National Party in the 1990
elections.

Now Moore has other worries. November's WTO Ministerial Meeting in Qatar
may not end with an agreement to initiate another round of multilateral
trade negotiations. Without this, he says, "the WTO will be condemned to
irrelevancy for quite some time". 

Backed by the USA, Moore began a three-year post as head of the WTO in
September 1999 after a job-sharing compromise arrangement ended an
acrimonious deadlock with the Thai contender, Supachai Panitchpakdi.

That month he told an African trade ministers conference in Algiers that
he was "a citizen of a very small country", "I want to be your
Ambassador in Geneva", and could advocate for smaller, poorer countries
at the WTO. His speech shocked many in the audience. It totally ignored
Africa's realities and concerns about globalisation, instead campaigning
for a new round of negotiations and a raft of new issues - to which the
African nations had clearly stated their opposition. The African
ministers did not want to be "sidelined and rejected" again, and issued
a statement clearly opposing a new round. Ghanaian economist Tetteh
Hormeku described Moore's Algiers address as a "travesty".

Moore's claims to be a champion for the world's poor do not sit well
with his disregard for the human costs of applying free market ideology
in his own country. More recently he has not been successful in winning
over increasingly sceptical Third World members of the WTO who question
the benefits of the last round of GATT negotiations. Many of them have
consistently sought a moratorium on further trade negotiations at the
WTO until there has been a review and assessment of existing agreements.

Moore's economic fundamentalism has probably not helped the WTO. Nearly
two years after the failure of the Seattle meeting to launch a
"Millennium round", the tide is indeed high. The WTO membership is just
as polarised between those who want a new round of multilateral trade
talks and those who do not. While the US, the EU and others are expected
to increase pressure for a new round, the majority of the WTO's 142
member countries are not prepared to agree that the November meeting
initiate negotiations towards new rules or agreements on new issues.
Ministers from least developed countries met in Zanzibar this July and
rejected a new round of negotiations and reiterated a demand for a
review of existing WTO commitments. Reporting on the positions of
"developing" countries at a 30-31 July WTO General Council informal
"stocktaking" meeting, Third World Network's Martin Khor wrote: "When
they face so many problems in existing agreements why should they agree
to enter negotiations in new areas that will land them with new
obligations which they will then have more problems in trying to
implement?" 

Yet Moore is not listening. Instead he says "I want to be their (poor
countries') champion inside the round" and asks, "Can I be politically
incorrect? Just because the great economic powers want something, that
does not automatically make it wrong." 

At the WTO, Moore has learnt little of the realities of the majority of
the world's population. But then again, he claims the WTO job is "a walk
in the park compared to internal Labour politics". 

When it suits, Moore claims leftwing internationalism as a shared
tradition of the WTO: In July 2000 he told the International Union of
Socialist Youth Festival in Malmo, Sweden, "We on the Left have a lot to
be proud of. We built the welfare state that looks after people when
they are sick, poor, or old. We fought for the equality of women and
minorities. We argued passionately for internationalism, for solidarity
between workers in Sweden and those in Africa .... I am, and always will
be, a Labour man". Moore's Labour is the version embodied by the 1984-90
New Zealand long before Blair's "New" Labour ruled Britain. It was, The
Economist wrote "the sort of socialism of which millionaires approve..."
a "free-market experiment in socialist sheep's clothing". 

The 1984-1990 Labour Governments in which Moore was Minister for
Overseas Trade (and briefly, Prime Minister) implemented the most
radical economic reforms that any OECD country had ever seen. Many
cheered the government on for its anti-nuclear policy. Few realised the
implications of the economic changes being unleashed. While many were
lulled into a false sense of security by Labour's multisectoral
"consultation" on social and economic issues, few predicted the ruthless
imposition of sweeping reforms which had never been part of its election
manifesto.

In 1988, The Economist described this period as "out-Thatchering Mrs
Thatcher". A New Zealand business weekly compared it to Pinochet's Chile
"without the gun". Between 1988 and 1993, New Zealand led the world in
the sale of state-owned assets, often at bargain basement prices, to
overseas investors, mostly transnational corporations. Some NZ $14
billion (from a total $19 billion in asset sales from 1987-1999) was
sold off during these years. The market value of the assets sold to
overseas investors since 1987 is equivalent to about two-thirds of the
worth of New Zealand's top 200 companies. 

The Labour Party programme - dubbed "Rogernomics" after former Finance
Minister, Roger Douglas - included unilateral and rapid removal of
virtually all restrictions on foreign investment, all import controls
and most tariffs, floating the NZ dollar, an independent Reserve Bank
with the exclusive objective to control inflation, extensive programs of
corporatisation and privatisation, and radical restructuring of the
public sector. The first major steps to deregulate the labour market
also began under Labour. 

New Zealand went into recession with the highest unemployment since the
1930s depression. The number of New Zealanders estimated to be below the
poverty line rose by at least 35% between 1989 and 1992. By 1993 one in
six New Zealanders was considered to be living in poverty. Nearly 76000
jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector between 1986 and 1992 (25% of
all manufacturing jobs) - many directly due to aggressive tariff
reduction. As National Party governments pushed on further with this
economic model in the 1990s, the human costs of implementing
"globalisation as ideology" intensified. 

During Moore's time as Trade Minister, the New Zealand government became
an enthusiastic activist for agricultural trade liberalization in the
Uruguay Round of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade).
Moore was regarded as "one of America's best allies" by the US special
trade negotiators in agricultural matters.

A February 1999 US government document "Scenesetter for FBI Director
Freeh's Visit to New Zealand", recently obtained under the US Freedom of
Information Act states "we have no better friend than New Zealand in our
push to open markets and liberalize trade worldwide. We work
hand-in-glove in APEC and at the World Trade Organization (WTO)." 

While some Labour Party members have tried distancing themselves from
their involvement in the New Zealand market experiment, hoping to bring
back many of its traditional supporters who felt betrayed and alienated
by the 1980s reforms, Moore has not.

This is the legacy which Mike Moore left in New Zealand and some of the
historical baggage he brings to his WTO position. The relentless pursuit
of free market goals which he engaged in back home has continued
throughout his first two years of his WTO role.

Even in opposition - between 1990 and the time he took up the WTO post -
Moore remained one of New Zealand's most zealous exponents of free
trade. Following yet another election defeat and an bitter internal coup
which removed him as Labour leader, in April 1994, he attended the final
signing of the GATT Uruguay Round agreements in Marrakesh which led to
the formation of the WTO. His presence stymied any attempts within the
Labour party and caucus to debate the benefits of free trade and
investment. He rarely missed a chance to wax lyrical about the supposed
wonders of free trade and investment and to attack critics of
globalisation. 

Mike Moore is a genuine free market evangelist. New Zealand media had
long dubbed him "Mad Mike". One journalist described him as having ten
ideas a minute but not being sure which was the good one. In 1996, as
Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs and trade, he railed maniacally
at New Zealand critics of free trade, dubbing them "primitives who if
they had their way would plunge our nation and the region into chaos and
depression" and "grumpy geriatric communists...a mutant strain of the
left... who tuck their shirts into their underpants." Now as the
mouthpiece of the WTO he is seeking "civilised discourse" with NGOs.... 

In 1997, he claimed all Parliamentarians "except the terminally
deranged" would support the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)
which stalled at the OECD a year later. He is forever creating straw men
to try to discredit critics of free trade and investment. Again
referring to the anti-MAI campaign, "The left in New Zealand", he
claimed, "have borrowed a lot of the literature and arguments used by
the extreme right-wing militia type in the United States who believe
there is a sinister group of people plotting away trying to make a World
Government and deny people their individual and national rights."
Curiously, this is the man who last year, on a brief return visit to New
Zealand, lamented "There's something about our country. We've always got
a bad word to say about each other".

Moore was a Member of New Zealand's Parliament (MP) for all but three
years since 1972 - most of his adult life. Yet some international media
characterised Moore as a feisty trade unionist. Jagdish Bhagwati,
Columbia University professor and economic policy adviser to the GATT
Director-General from 1991-93, said Moore's "union background might make
him seem sympathetic to labour standards being linked to trade within
WTO negotiations". 

Bill Rosenberg, a New Zealand foreign investment analyst and unionist
wrote two years ago:

"It is not clear where Moore got this reputation: he does not have it at
home....The Labour Party originated from the union movement, and was
heavily supported by it in gaining power in 1984, but its subsequent
actions led many unions to disaffiliate themselves from it. Some MPs
made attempts to retain the connections.

"As a national union president in 1994, I regularly attended meetings in
Christchurch (where Moore's electorate is situated) between local Labour
MPs and union representatives. Though most other Labour MPs attended at
various times, Moore never did. A recent check with a local union leader
confirmed that he still has no contact with unionists, at least in the
town of his constituency base". 

Successive New Zealand governments - Labour, National, and now a
Labour-led coalition (ironically elected promising to reject freemarket
fundamentalism in its domestic policies) have followed a programme
placing this country at the extreme end of trade and investment
liberalisation. For us the WTO agenda remains the New Zealand freemarket
experiment writ large. 

And Mike still wants to be our number one....