Subject:  Re GATS Privatising all Services (Philips)(Johnson)(Weiner).
Date:     Fri, 02 Mar 2001 190740 -0600
From:     Roy Beavers 
To:       guru , gephardt@mail.house.gov
--------------------------------------------------

........Response from EMF-L.......

I hope that everyone who found Carolyn Johnson's info
about the GATS (or the guru's commentary) interesting 
... will follow the URL below and read the FULL STORY 
of this menace to our democratic freedoms......  

The only way I know to do anything about it is to 
RAISE HELL with your Congressman and Senators........  

Of course -- there is a great danger that "their
souls" (votes) have already been bought and paid for on
this.......!!!??  .......guru......(Thanks Bob Weiner)


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: GATS Privatising all Services (Philips)(Johnson).
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 15:55:55 -0600
From: Bob Weiner 
To: roy@emfguru.com
References: <3A9FF894.604853CB@emfguru.com>

Roy,

There is an excellent brief summary article on GATS and its chilling implications
at:
http://www.theecologist.org/lastfrontier.html

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was formed in October 1947 as the
world's trading club. Members account for over 80 percent of world trade.

A few brief excerpts from the Ecologist article:

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is one of more than twenty trade
agreements administered and enforced by the World Trade Organisation. The GATS was
established in 1994, at the conclusion of the 'Uruguay Round' of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which led to the WTO's creation. GATS was one
of the trade agreements adopted for inclusion when the WTO was formed in 1995.
Negotiations were to begin five years later with the aim of 'progressively raising
the level of [trade] liberalisation'. These talks got underway as scheduled in
February 2000. The plan is to reach a final agreement by December 2002 – less than
two years away.

The mandate of GATS is the 'liberalisation of trade in services'. In plain English,
this means the
dismantling of government barriers to the privatisation of public services. Its aim
is to make it
impossible for governments to run public services on a notforprofit basis, without
the participation of private companies. GATS will allow the WTO to restrict
government actions relating to public services through a set of legally binding
constraints. Any government disobeying the rulings of the WTO will face sanctions.

The implications of this are chilling. It means that the 137 member countries of the
WTO are
about to agree to open up all their public services, lock stock and barrel, to free
trade laws – the same laws which have allowed the WTO to strike down health, food
safety and environmental laws in dozens of countries. The corporate wolves are being
allowed into the last remaining fold. And once they get in, it will be too late to
ever get them out.

Bob


Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com