Year 501 (23 page)

These developments give new urgency to the US demand for increased protection for “intellectual property”—including patents—at the ongoing GATT negotiations. “America's interest in intellectual property is by no means altruistic,” the
Economist
observes. “From movies to microchips, America ran a healthy $12 billion surplus on its trade in ideas in 1990,” while most other developed countries ran a loss, and the Third World is not even in the game. The new protectionist measures are intended to ensure that US corporations dominate the health and agricultural industries, thus controlling the essentials for human life; and to guarantee to US pharmaceutical corporations huge profits. Prices of the 20 most used prescription drugs rose at four times the inflation rate from 1984 to 1991, a 1992 study revealed, yielding skyrocketing profits for the drug companies; nearly half the 10 percent annual increase was devoted to marketing, profits, and administrative expenses.

“Basic biomedical research has long been heavily subsidized by United States taxpayers,” the
New York Times
business pages observe, and “high-tech pharmaceuticals owe their origin largely to these investments and to Government scientists,” funded by billions of taxpayer dollars. But drugs created with a public subsidy are priced beyond the reach of those who pay for their development, let alone the bulk of the world's population. Protection of “intellectual property” is designed to guarantee monopoly profits to the publicly-subsidized corporations, not to benefit those who pay; and the South must be denied the right to produce drugs, seeds, and other necessities at a fraction of the cost.

On similar grounds, the US refused to sign the a treaty on preserving the world's biological species. The Assistant Secretary of State for the Environment, Curtis Bohlen, said that the treaty “fails to give adequate patent protection to American companies that transfer biotechnology to developing companies,” and “tries to regulate genetically engineered materials, a competitive area in which the United States leads,” the
Times
reports.
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The US International Trade Commission estimates that US companies stand to gain $61 billion a year from the Third World if “intellectual property” rights are protected in accord with US demands, a cost to the South of somewhere between $100-300 billion when extrapolated to the other industrial countries, dwarfing the debt service flow of capital from South to North. The same US demands will require poor farmers to pay royalties to TNCs for seeds, denying them the traditional right to re-use seeds from their harvests. Cloned varieties of commercial crops exported by the South (palm oil, cotton, rubber, etc.) will also be commercial property, subject to increased royalties. “The main beneficiaries will be the core group of less than a dozen seeds and pharmaceuticals companies which control over 70 percent of world seeds trade,” and agribusiness generally, Kevin Watkins observes.
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While the US seeks to ensure monopoly control for the future, the drug companies it protects are cheerfully exploiting the accumulated knowledge of indigenous cultures for products that bring in some $100 billion profits annually, offering virtually nothing in return to the native people who lead researchers to the medicines, seeds, and other products they have developed and refined over thousands of years. “The annual world market value for medicines derived from medicinal plants discovered from indigenous peoples is US $43 billion,” ethnobotanist Darrell Posey estimates. “Less than 0.001 percent of the profits from drugs that originated from traditional medicine have ever gone to the indigenous people who led researchers to them. “Profits of at least the same scale derive from natural insecticides, insect repellents, and plant genetic materials, he believes. The international seed industry alone accounts for some $15 billion a year, based in large measure on genetic materials from crop varieties “selected, nurtured, improved and developed by innovative Third World farmers for hundreds, even thousands of years,” Maria Elena Hurtado adds.
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Only the knowledge of the rich and powerful merits protection.

The director of India's Working Group on Patent Laws comments that “the levels of contradiction and hypocrisy are breathtaking.” The rich “call for competitiveness, but what they want is monopoly. It is blackmail. They are seeking to do through economic rules what formerly the powerful did through armies of invasion and occupation.” The manager of a Bombay drug company adds that the West “protected their own infant industries, and they pirated the world to create wealth; and they now preach to other countries to practice what they never did themselves.” The developed countries “only permitted product patents after their domestic industry and infrastructure were well established. Germany allowed product patents in pharmaceuticals only in 1966, Japan in 1976, Italy in 1982.” The effect of the new economic rules will be to prevent such countries as India from manufacturing life-saving drugs at a fraction of the cost charged by the state-subsidized corporations of the rich countries.

Like other developed countries, the US did not abide by the rules it now seeks to impose. In the 19th century, the US rejected foreign claims to intellectual property rights on grounds that they would hamper its economic development. Japan followed the same course. And today, the concept of “intellectual property rights” is finely crafted to suit the needs of the powerful. Exactly as in the case of “free trade,” Churchill's disruptive “hungry nations” with their indecent clamor are to be denied the methods that were used by the “rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.”
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The array of plans of the rulers is viewed from the South as “an act of unbridled piracy,” Watkins observes, given that the genetic materials used by the Western corporations to create their patented and protected products are derived from Third World crops and wild plants, cultivated, refined, and identified over countless generations. The seed and pharmaceutical companies thus “reap monopoly profits, while the genius of the Third World farmers, past and present, in selecting and developing individual seed strains goes unrewarded.” The New World Order as a whole is described by Egypt's leading newspaper,
al-Abram
, as “codified international piracy,” referring in this case to Bush Administration maneuvers to set up a confrontation with Qaddafi for domestic political purposes in the routine manner. The terminology is apt enough.
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The unbridled piracy takes on increased urgency as indigenous agriculture and knowledge are undermined by pressures on the South to abandon production for domestic needs in favor of ecologically unsustainable agroexport in the interests of the TNCs. One consequence is that the world's biological resources—mostly in the South—are in decline, raising the danger of disease and blight to potentially quite serious levels. To whatever extent biotechnology may provide a remedy, the effect again will be to transfer power and wealth to the world rulers, if the demands of the corporations for increased protection are implemented. That they will be is almost a foregone conclusion, given the distribution of power and the insulation of decision-making from public interference in the new imperial age of Year 501.

Chapter 5

Human Rights: The Pragmatic Criterion

1. Reality and Its Abuse

Prominent among the high principles to which we are dedicated, alongside of Democracy and the Market, stands Human Rights, which became “the Soul of our foreign policy,” fortuitously, just at the moment when popular revulsion over monstrous crimes had become difficult to contain.

It is recognized, to be sure, that our service to the cause of humanity is not entirely without flaw. By “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy,” we go too far, press thinkers warn, quoting high-ranking officials. This nobility puts us at a disadvantage in dealing with the “fierce savages” of whom Justice Marshall warned, a problem that has bedeviled Europe throughout its history of “encounters.” The Korean war raised “serious questions as to how the soft, humanitarian West could compete with such people” as the “ruthless” Asian leaders, top Kennedy adviser Maxwell Taylor wrote. Taylor's “uncomfortable thoughts about the future of the West in Asia” were echoed by leading liberal critics of the Vietnam war as it spiralled out of control. The “Asian poor” used “the strategy of the weak,” inviting us to carry our “strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide,” but we are unwilling to “destroy ourselves...by contradicting our own value system.” Soft humanitarians, we feel that “genocide is a terrible burden to bear” (William Pfaff, Townsend Hoopes). Strategic analyst Albert Wohlstetter explains that “the Vietnamese were able to bear the costs imposed on their subjects more easily than we could impose them.” We are simply too noble for this cruel world.

The dilemma we face has engaged the deepest thinkers. Hegel pondered “the contempt of humanity displayed by the Negroes” of Africa, “who allow themselves to be shot down by thousands in war with Europeans. Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object,” a thought beyond the grasp of these “mere things.” Unable to comprehend our lofty values, the savages confound us in our quest for justice and virtue.
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The burdens of the righteous are not easy to bear.

There are ways to test the theses that are confidently proclaimed. Thus one might look into the correlation between US aid and the human rights climate. That was done by the leading academic scholar on human rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, who found that US aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens, ...to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” The flow of aid includes military aid, is not correlated with need, and runs through the Carter period, when at least some attention was given to human rights concerns. A broader study by Edward Herman found the same correlation worldwide. Herman carried out another study that directs us to the reasons. Aid is closely correlated with improvement in the investment climate, a result commonly achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and so on. We therefore find the secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights. These studies precede the Reagan years, when the questions are not even worth posing.

Another approach is to investigate the relation between the source of atrocities and the reaction to them. There is extensive work on that topic, again with sharp and consistent results: the atrocities of official enemies arouse great anguish and indignation, vast coverage, and often shameless lying to portray them as even worse than they are; the treatment is the opposite in all respects when responsibility lies closer to home. (Atrocities that do not bear on domestic power interests are generally ignored.) Without comparable inquiry, we know that exactly the same was true of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. The importance of the finding is greatly heightened by the fact, which commissars on all sides labor to obscure, that on elementary moral grounds, abuses cry out for attention insofar as we can do something about them; primarily our own, and those of our clients.

There have also been numerous case studies of the close match between policy and Kennan's advice on “unreal objectives such as human rights” when wealth and power are at stake.
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None of the facts have the slightest impact on the Higher Truths. But that makes sense too. As in the case of Democracy and the Market, the factual record merely deals with Hegel's “negative, worthless existence,” not “God's plan” and “the pure light of this divine Idea.” The point has sometimes been made explicit by contemporary scholars, notably Hans Morgenthau, a founder of the realist school, who urged that to adduce the factual record is “to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality itself is the “transcendent purpose” of the nation, which is indeed noble; the abuse of reality is the irrelevant factual record.
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The record is misleading if it keeps to the support for horrendous atrocities and fails to reveal the welcome accorded them when they are seen to be in a good cause, a leading feature of the 500-year conquest. The reaction to the US-directed atrocities in Central America in the past decade is one well-studied example. To illustrate how firmly this pillar of the traditional culture is in place, it would only be fitting to consider the earliest Asian outpost of European colonialism, the Dutch East Indies, during the era of US global management.

2. Securing the Anchor

“The problem of Indonesia” is “the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin,” Kennan wrote in 1948. “Indonesia is the anchor in that chain of islands stretching from Hokkaido to Sumatra which we should develop as a politico-economic counter-force to communism” and a “base area” for possible military action beyond. A Communist Indonesia, he warned, would be an “infection” that “would sweep westward” through all of South Asia. Resource-rich Indonesia was also designated to be a critical part of the “Empire toward the South” that the US intended to recreate for Japan, now within the US-dominated system.

In accord with standard reasoning, “ultra-nationalism” in Indonesia would prevent Southeast Asia from “fulfilling its main function” as a service area for the core industrial powers. Accordingly, the US urged the former Dutch rulers to grant independence, but under Dutch tutelage, an outcome critical to “Western Europe's economic rehabilitation, and to America's strategic well-being,” Leffler observes, and to Japan's reconstruction as well. The principled antagonism to independent nationalism that animates US foreign policy took on particular significance in this case.
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