The juggernaut drive of corporate globalization has hit a huge bump in the road because of the recent protests in Seattle at the WTO Meeting and in Washington during the IMF and World Bank gatherings. The grassroots groups who turned en masse had broad representation from the labor, environmental, and human rights communities, but the peace movement was less well represented at the teach-ins, seminars, marches and direct actions which took place during those exciting wake-up calls that the institutions which promote globalization needed to be either “nixed” or “fixed.”

Yet, there is a deep connection to the Global War System and the forces of corporate globalization. The WTO rules, are based on the premise that the only legitimate role for governments is to provide for its military. While the WTO attacks social policies, such as overturning the Massachusetts legislation which prohibited trade with Myanamar because of its terrible human rights record, and environmental policies, such as the ruling against US legislation to safeguard dolphins from huge tuna fishing operations, it consistently protects the war industry through a “security exception” in Article XXI in the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.) This security exception permits a country to take any action it considers necessary to protect its essential security interests; actions “relating to the traffic in arms, ammunition and implements of war and such traffic in other goods and materials as is carried on directly for the purpose of supplying a military establishment” are exempt from its rules.

Thus the WTO spurs military spending as in a 1999 case where the WTO ruled against Canada and its Technology Partnership program which planned to subsidize the Bombardier Corporation’s aerospace program to build and export regional passenger jets.. In order to avoid another WTO challenge, the Canadian Defense Department announced a $30 million annual subsidy program for weapons corporations to develop new weapons. This new program won’t be challenged as it falls within the GATT’s national security exception and can thus fund Bombardier’s military production.

US military programs are driven by corporations and are feeding the global war machine. Lockheed Martin played a key role in the tragic deterioration of US-Russian relations, which empowered the rusty cold warriors in Congress to actually increase the military budget by $17 billion, more than even the Pentagon requested last year swelling their already bulging corporate coffers..

The Bush administration promised Gorbachev that if Russia did not oppose the admission of a reunified Germany into NATO when the Berlin wall crumbled ten years ago, we would not expand NATO. Yet the US Committee to Expand NATO, which lobbied furiously on the Hill to disregard our pledge to Russia, was chaired by the Vice-President of Lockheed-Martin, working successfully to expand its lethal market to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. NATO’s 50th Anniversary Summit in 1999 was hosted by corporate sponsors, including Boeing, Raytheon, and the like, who paid up to $250,000 to mingle and peddle their deadly wares to the 19 Foreign Ministers in attendance.

Russia proposed, last August in meetings with US arms control negotiators, that each country agree to cut its supply of long-range nuclear bombs from 5,000 down to 1,500 warheads. The Russian offer could give us the opportunity to make a full accounting of all warheads and provide for early de-alerting of bombs poised at hair-trigger readiness, which would considerably ratchet down the nuclear danger to our planet.

Were the US to follow through on this generous Russian proposal, we would have an extraordinary opportunity to bring all the nuclear weapons states to the negotiating table for a treaty to ban the bomb. The US response has been appalling. Seeking to squeeze the final bitter cup of humiliation from Russia, which is still smarting from the expansion of NATO up to the Russian border, the continued unilateral bombing of Iraq without UN approval, and the unauthorized NATO bombing of Yugoslavia without Security Council sanction, the Clinton administration persists in demanding that Russia yield to our corporate-driven scheme to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and move full speed ahead with “Son of Star Wars”. There will be some hard bargaining on the ABM Treaty at the upcoming Clinton-Putin summit, despite the fact that the recent NPT Review finessed the issue.

The same merchants of death who drove through the provocative expansion of NATO are driving the Star Wars revival as well, which is unashamedly proclaimed as the ultimate enforcer of protection for US corporate interests. In an illustration of a laser beam from space zapping a target, the US Space Command’s report, Vision for 2020, nakedly trumpets, “US Space Command--dominating the space dimensions of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict”. "Vision For 2020" compares the U.S. effort to "control space" with the effort centuries ago when "nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests" by ruling the oceans.

General Joseph Ashy, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command, has said: "It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen. Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but--absolutely--we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space….We will engage terrestrial targets someday-ships, airplanes, land targets-from space….That's why the U.S. has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms" Last year, the U.S. signed a multi-million dollar contract for a "Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator." A promotional poster shows the laser firing its ray from space, a U.S. flag waving in space above it. The Star Wars lobby has been lead by companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and TRW who are dividing up billions of dollars in contracts, obtained in no small part to the $23million they spent lobbying and $4 million in campaign contribution to a corrupt political process in 1997-98. The Space Command’s Long Range Plan: Executive Summary has a long list of “Acknowledgements to Commercial Industry including 48 companies who are helping them to “dominate the military uses of space to protect US interests and investments.”

Secretary of Defense William Cohen in a meeting at Microsoft last year, lobbied Silicon Valley to support higher Pentagon budgets saying,, “ I will point out that the prosperity that companies like Microsoft now enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have”. He urged them not to “dismiss the importance of the national security world” adding that “some soldiers in the high-tech revolution do not fully understand or appreciate the soldiers in camouflage...Real stability involves predictabilitypredictable and secure borders, threats that don’t emerge unexpectedly and confidence that opposing interest will be resolved peacefully.”

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times writer and the darling of the free marketeers, who champions globalization, argues that ”The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fistMcDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnel Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” These chilling remarks appeared in the March 28, 1999 Sunday Magazine section of the Times, illustrated by a clenched fist clad in the red, white and blue stars and stripes of the US flag on its cover, with the caption “For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almightly superpower that it is.”

There are other connections. President Clinton said in a speech delivered the day before his televised address to Americans about Kosovo, “If we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key...That’s what this Kosovo thing is about.” The bombing and missile strikes over Yugoslavia were giant bazaars for selling the wares of arms merchants. David Shea at Raytheon said, “ We are expecting the Kosovo conflict to result in new orders downstream.” Officials at Raytheon announced that replacing munitions used in the Balkans could lead to about $1 billion in new contracts. And a recent peasant revolt in Bolivia against a corporate privatization effort to take over their water supply, resulted in the expulsion of Bechtel, the company which conducts the sub-critical nuclear explosions at the Nevada test site, despite the recent negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

President Eisenhower who warned of us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of it laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

The United Nations Human Development Report 1999 notes that threats to human security are being exacerbated by globalization. It calls for actions to protect cultural diversity, control global crime, preserve the environment, promote fairer trade - especially for the poorest countries. Security exceptions in trade instruments which exempt military transactions must be expanded to accord the same protection to government actions necessary for human security. Governments should be free to rely on an exception for actions required for protection of the environment, human rights, and culture as well as for their war efforts.