arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)
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appeal by Gerard de Selys Monday, Jun. 05, 2000 at 4:20 PM |
"All services to the community, notably those related to education, health, social security, transport and communications, are being privatised. With private companies controlling the expanding health, education and insurance industries, budget constraints on the public sector should decrease, leading to a fall in interest rates and thus a lighter financial burden on private investors." (OECD nov 1999)
Six months after Seattle, the largest European federation of employers, Unice, will be organising a "European Business summit" which is to bring together some 1,500 leading businessmen, politicians, hundreds of journalists, and EU commissioners in Brussels from the 9th to the 11th of June 2000. The aim of the operation is to kick-start at a European level the negotiations that were thwarted at Seattle by an unprecedented international mobilisation.
Among Unice's guests on this occasion we find no less than some ten EU Commissioners, Micke Morre, president of the WTO, Morris Tabakblat, president of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), OECD directors and top industrialists such as Steve Ballmer, chairman of Microsoft, Pascal Brandy, chairman of Genset (GMO) and Etienne Davignon, who did away with over 300,000 jobs in the European steel industry.
The world business community intends to stage a high profile show aimed at refuelling the process of global privatisation which enforces the lawlessness of an unrestrained market economy. It will forcefully reassert that activist pressure groups which claim to represent the interests of large sectors in the civil society will have to be restrained.
The Brussels summit is thus not only intended to restart a stalled process but also to launch a direct attack against citizens' organisations that stand up against the globalisation of exploitation and poverty everywhere in the world.
We oppose this summit and call upon the citizens of Europe and of the world to summon all possible democratic means to thwart its purpose. We must repeat the victory we achieved at Seattle.