[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 116 (Tuesday, September 26, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H8195-H8197]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  THREATS TO OUR NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shimkus). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Metcalf) 
is recognized for the remaining time until midnight.
  Mr. METCALF. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida.


                             Illicit Drugs

  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much for yielding.
  Again, I just want to conclude by saying that we cannot forget the 
legacy, the true legacy of this administration. It is a sad legacy. 
This is not a partisan statement. I feel I would be here regardless of 
what party was in power making this speech because this is one of the 
most important challenges facing this Nation. Some serious mistakes 
have been made. We have repeatedly asked the administration not to take 
the course they have taken relating to the national drug policy. We 
have seen a failure that has resulted in death and destruction across 
our Nation. We are going to have to pick this up, whoever the next 
leader of our country is, whoever the next leaders in Congress are. But 
certainly we should learn by these mistakes.
  These are not fudged figures. In fact almost all of these charts and 
information have been given to me by the administration.

                              {time}  2330

  But unless we address this in a serious fashion, unless we learn by 
these mistakes, unless we try to bring the most serious social problem 
our Nation has ever faced under control, we will continue to see death 
and destruction, there will be no family spared in America. The pain 
will not be just in quiet deaths across this Nation, but it will be in 
tragedies of lives destroyed by illegal narcotics and drugs.
  So I hope to work with the next administration. I hope to work with 
the leaders of the next Congress. We may have one more shot at a 
special order to bring this to the attention of the Nation and the 
Congress and I am hopeful even in these last few days that will make a 
difference, that we will not repeat the mistakes and we can do a better 
job. There are so many people counting on us, especially people whose 
lives have been ravaged by illegal narcotics.
  Mr. Speaker, I am so pleased to thank the gentleman from Washington 
(Mr. Metcalf) for yielding me the time and also for the patience of the 
staff who have worked with me during these many special orders to bring 
the subject I hold near and dear to my heart, illegal narcotics, to the 
attention of the Congress and the American people.
  Mr. METCALF. Mr. Speaker, I have spoken before on the absolute 
necessity of maintaining U.S. sovereignty in every area stated by our 
Constitution. We must be ever alert to threats to our sovereignty. That 
is our responsibility and it is the theme of my message tonight.
  During 1969, C.P. Kindelberger wrote that, ``The nation-state is just 
about through as an economic unit.'' He added, ``The world is too 
small. Two-hundred thousand ton tank and ore carriers and airbuses and 
the like will not permit sovereign independence of the nation-state in 
economic affairs.''
  Before that, Emile Durkheim stated, ``The corporations are to become 
the elementary division of the State, the fundamental political unit. 
They will efface the distinction between public and private, dissect 
the Democratic citizenry into discrete functional groupings which are 
no longer capable of joint political action.'' Durkheim went so far as 
to proclaim that through corporations' scientific rationality

[[Page H8196]]

``will achieve its rightful standing as the creator of collective 
reality.''
  There is little question that part of these two statements are 
accurate. America has seen its national sovereignty slowly diffused 
over a growing number of international governing organizations, that is 
IGOs. The WTO, the World Trade Organization, is just the latest in a 
long line of such developments that began right after World War II. But 
as the protest in Seattle against the WTO ministerial meeting made 
clear, the democratic citizenry seems well prepared for joint political 
action.
  Though it has been pointed out that many protesters did not know what 
the WTO was and much of the protest itself entirely missed the mark 
regarding WTO culpability in many areas proclaimed, yet this remains a 
question of education and it is the responsibility of the citizen's 
representatives, that is us, to begin this process of education.
  We may not entirely agree with the former head of the Antitrust 
Commission Division of the U.S. Justice Department, Thurman Arnold, 
1938 to 1943, when he stated that, ``The United States had developed 
two coordinating governing classes: The one called `business,' building 
cities, manufacturing and distributing goods, and holding complete and 
autocratic power over the livelihood of millions; the other called 
`government,' concerned with preaching and exemplification of spiritual 
ideals, so caught in a mass of theory, that when it wished to move in a 
practical world, it had to do so by means of a sub rosa political 
machine.''

  But surely the advocate of corporate governance today, housed quietly 
and efficiently in the corridors of power at the WTO, the OECD, the IMF 
and the World Bank, clearly they believe.
  Corporatism as ideology, and it is an ideology; as John Ralston Saul 
recently referred to it as, a hijacking of first our terms, such as 
individualism and then a hijacking of western civilization. The result 
being the portrait of a society addicted to ideologies. A civilization 
tightly held at this moment in the embrace of a dominant ideology: 
Corporatism.
  As we find our citizenry affected by this ideology and its 
consequences, consumerism, the overall effects on the individual are 
passivity and conformity in those areas that matter, and nonconformity 
in those which do not.
  We do know more than ever before just how we got here. The WTO is a 
creature of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, which 
began in 1948 its quest for a global regime of economic 
interdependence. By 1972, some Members of Congress saw the handwriting 
on the wall and realized that it was a forgery.
  Senator Long, while chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, made 
these comments to Dr. Henry Kissinger regarding the completion and 
prepared signing of the Kennedy Round of the GATT accords: ``If we 
trade away American jobs and farmers' incomes for some vague concept of 
a new international order, the American people will demand from their 
elected representatives a new order of their own which puts their jobs, 
their security, and their incomes above the priorities of those who 
dealt them a bad deal.''
  But we know that few listened, and 20 years later the former chairman 
of the International Trade Commission argued that it was the Kennedy 
Round that began the slow decline in America's living standards. Citing 
statistics in his point regarding the loss of manufacturing jobs and 
the like, he concluded with what must be seen as a warning:
  ``The . . . Uruguay Round and the promise of the North American Trade 
Agreement all may mesmerize and motivate Washington policymakers, but 
in the American heartland those initiatives translate as further 
efforts to promote international order at the expense of existing 
American jobs.''
  Mr. Speaker, we are still not listening very well. Certainly, the 
ideologists of corporatism cannot hear us. They in fact are pressing 
the same ideological stratagem in the journals that matter, like 
Foreign Affairs and the books coming out of the elite think tanks and 
nongovernmental organizations. One such author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, 
proclaimed her rather self-important opinion that state sovereignty was 
little more than a status symbol and something to be attained now 
through transgovernmental participation. That would be presumably 
achieved through the WTO, for instance? Not likely.
  Steven Krasner in the volume, International Rules, goes into more 
detail by explaining global regimes as functioning attributes of world 
order: Environmental regimes, financial regimes, and, of course, trade 
regimes.
  ``In a world of sovereign states, the basic function of regimes is to 
coordinate state behavior to acquire desired outcomes in particular 
issue areas . . . If, as many have argued, there is a general movement 
toward a world of complex interdependence, then the number of areas in 
which regimes can matter is growing.''
  But we are not here speaking of changes within an existing regime 
whereby elected representatives of free people make adjustments to new 
technologies, new ideas, and further the betterment of their people. 
The first duty of the elected representatives is to look out for their 
constituency. The WTO is not changes within the existing regime, but an 
entirely new regime. It has assumed an unprecedented degree of American 
sovereignty over the economic regime of the Nation and the world.
  Then who are the sovereigns? Is it the people, the ``nation'' in 
nation-state? I do not believe so. I would argue who governs rules. Who 
rules is sovereign.
  And the people of America and their elected representatives do not 
rule nor govern at WTO, but corporate diplomats. Who are these new 
sovereigns? Maybe we can get a clearer picture by looking at what the 
WTO is in place to accomplish.

                              {time}  2340

  I took an interest in an article in Foreign Affairs, a New Trade 
Order by Cowhey and Aronson. Foreign investment flows are only about 10 
percent of the size of the world trade flows each year, but intrafirm 
statements, for example, sales by Ford Europe to Ford USA, now accounts 
for up to an astonishing 40 percent of all U.S. trade.
  This complex interdependence we hear of every day inside the beltway 
is nothing short of miraculous according to the policymakers that are 
mesmerized by all this, but clearly the interdependence is less between 
people of the nation-states than people between the corporations of the 
corporate states.
  Richard O'Brien in his book titled Global Financial Integration: The 
End of Geography states the case this way. The firm is far less wedded 
to the idea of geography. Ownership is more and more international and 
global, divorced from national definitions. If one marketplace can no 
longer provide a service or an attractive location to carry our 
transactions, then the firm will actively seek another home. At the 
level of the firm, therefore, there are plenty of choices of geography.
  O'Brien seems unduly excited when he adds the glorious end-of-
geography prospect for the close of this century is the emergence of a 
seamless global financial market.
  Mr. Speaker, barriers will be gone, services will be global, the 
world economy will benefit and so, too, presumably the consumer. 
Presumably? Again, I think not.
  Counter to this ideological slant, and it is ideological, O'Brien 
notes the fact that governments are the very embodiment of geography, 
representing the nation-state. The end of geography is, in many 
respects, all about the end or diminution of sovereignty.
  In a rare find, a French author published a book titled The End of 
Democracy. Jean-Marie Guehenno has served in a number of posts for the 
French Government including their ambassador to the European Union. He 
suggests this period we live in is an Imperial Age. The imperial age is 
an age of diffuse and continuous violence. There will no longer be any 
territory to defend, but only order, operating methods, to protect. And 
this abstract security is infinitely more difficult to ensure than that 
of a world in which the geography commanded history. Neither rivers nor 
ocean protect the delegate mechanisms of the imperial age from a menace 
as multiform as the empire itself. The empire itself? Whose empire? In 
whose interests?
  Political analyst Craig B. Hulet in his book titled Global Triage: 
Imperium in Imperio refers to this new global regime as imperium in 
imperio or

[[Page H8197]]

power within a power, a state within a state. His theory proposes that 
these new sovereigns are nothing short of this: they represent the 
power not of the natural persons which make up the nations' peoples, 
nor of their elected representatives, but the power of the legal, 
paper-person recognized in law. The corporations themselves are, then, 
the new sovereigns. And in their efforts to be treated in law as equals 
to the citizens of each separate state, they call this national 
treatment, they would travel the sea and wherever they land ashore they 
would be the citizens here and there. Not even the privateers of old 
would have dared impose this concept upon the nation-states.
  Mr. Speaker, can we claim to know today what this rapid progress of 
global transformation will portend for democracy here at home? We 
understand the great benefits of past progress. We are not Luddites 
here. We know what refrigeration can do for a child in a poor 
country, what clean water means everywhere to everyone, what free 
communication has already achieved. But are we going to unwittingly 
sacrifice our sovereignty on the altar of this new God, progress? Is it 
progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

  Can we claim to know today what this rapid progress of global 
transformation will portend for national sovereignty here at home? We 
protect our way of life; our children's futures; our workers jobs; our 
security at home, by measures often not unlike our airports are 
protected from pistols on planes, but self-interested ideologies, 
private greed and private power? Bad ideas escape our mental detectors.
  We seem to be radically short of leadership where this active 
participation in the process of diffusing America's power over to, and 
into, the private global monopoly, capitalist regime, today pursued 
without questioning its basis at all.
  An empire represented not just by the WTO, but clearly this new 
regime is the core ideological success for corporatism.
  The only step remaining, according to Harvard professor Paul Krugman, 
is the finalization of a completed multilateral agreement on investment 
which fails at the OECD. According to OECD, the agreement's actual 
success may come through, not a treaty this time, but arrangements 
within corporate governance itself, quietly being hashed out at the IMF 
and the World Bank as well as the OECD. In other words, just going 
around the normal way to accomplish things. We are not yet the united 
corporations of America, or are we?
  The WTO needs to be scrutinized carefully, debated with hearings and 
public participation where possible. We can, of course, as author 
Christopher Lasch notes, peer inward at ourselves as well when he 
argued the history of the 20th century suggests that totalitarian 
regimes are highly unstable, evolving towards some type of bureaucracy 
that fits neither the classic fascist nor the socialist model. None of 
this means that the future will be safe for democracy, only that the 
threat to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collective 
movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological cultural 
and spiritual foundations from within.
  Mr. Speaker, are we not witness to, though, the growth of a global 
bureaucracy being created, not out of totalitarian or collectivist 
movements but from autocratic corporations which hold so many lives in 
their balance? And where shall we redress our grievances when the 
regime completes its global transformations? When the people of each 
nation and their state find that they can no longer identify their 
rulers, their true rulers.
  When it is no longer their state which rules?
  The most recent U.N. development report documents how globalization 
has increased in equality between and within nations while bringing 
them together as never before.
  Some are referring to this globalization's dark side, like Jay Mazur 
recently in Foreign Affairs, and I am quoting him, ``a world in which 
the assets of the 200 richest people are greater than the combined 
income of the more than 2 billion people at the other end of the 
economic ladder should give everyone pause. Such islands of 
concentrated wealth in the sea of misery have historically been a 
prelude to upheaval. The vast majority of trade and investment takes 
place between industrial nations, dominated by global corporations that 
control a third of the world's exports. Of the 100 largest economies of 
the world, 51 are corporations.''
  With further mergers and acquisitions in the future, with no end in 
sight, those of us that are awake must speak up now, or is it that we 
just cannot see at all: believing in our current speculative bubble, 
which nobody credible believes which can be sustained much longer, we 
miss the growing anger, fear and frustration of our people; believing 
in the myths of our policy priests pass on, we miss the dissatisfaction 
of our workers; believing in the god progress, we have lost our vision.
  Another warning, this time from Ethan Kapstein in his article Workers 
and the World Economy of the Foreign Affairs Magazine, while the world 
stands at a critical time in post war history, it has a group of 
leaders who appear unwillingly, like their predecessors in the 1930s, 
to provide the international leadership to meet the economic 
dislocations.

                              {time}  2350

  Worse, many of them and their economic advisors do not seem to 
recognize the profound troubles affecting their societies. Like the 
German elite in Weimar, they dismiss mounting worker dissatisfaction, 
fringe political movements, and the plight of the unemployed and 
working poor as marginal concerns compared with the unquestioned 
importance of a sound currency and balanced budget. Leaders need to 
recognize their policy failures of the last 20 years and respond 
accordingly. If they do not respond, there are others waiting in the 
wings who will, perhaps on less pleasant terms.
  We ought to be looking very closely at where the new sovereigns 
intend to take us. We need to discuss the end they have in sight. It is 
our responsibility and our duty.
  Most everyone today agrees that socialism is not a threat. Many feel 
that communism, even in China, is not a threat. Indeed, there are few 
real security threats to America that could compare to even our recent 
past.
  Be that as it may, when we speak of a global market economy, free 
enterprise, massage the terms to merge with managed competition and 
planning authorities, all the while suggesting we have met the hidden 
hand and it is good, we need also to recall what Adam Smith said, but 
which is rarely quoted:
  ``Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant 
and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their 
actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular 
action and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbors and 
equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination because it is usual 
and, one may say, the natural state of things. . . . Masters, too, 
sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink wages of labor 
even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost 
silence and secrecy till the moment of execution. . . .''
  Thus, now precisely whose responsibility is it to keep an eye on our 
masters? That is the question we need to think about.

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