Trade in Human Commodities

The Uruguay Round of talks began in 1986 and ended in 1994 with the Marrakesh Agreement.  This agreement established the World Trade Organization.  The World Trade Organization replaced the GATT Agreement in 1995.

"At the end of the Uruguay Round, it was agreed that negotiations to improve commitments on the Movement of Natural Persons would take place in the six months after the WTO came into force. The negotiations ended on 28 July 1995 and only achieved modest results."¹

A service equates to a job or a person so effectively the negotiators of the WTO-GATS agreement established a global system of legalized trade in human commodities in exchange for open market access for the corporations represented by the USCSI.  A human commodity for trade is a slave. qed.  

Excerpt from a report titled, “Behind GATS 2000: Corporate Power at Work (p6):

The US Coalition of Service Industries (USCSI) is undoubtedly the most influential services lobby group in the world. Its origins date back to the mid-1970s. At that time, US financial services companies American International Group (AIG), American Express and Citicorp wanted to improve their access to what were at that time heavily regulated markets outside the US. They considered the inclusion of ‘trade in services’ in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, the WTO precursor) as a good tool with which to force open these markets.

In 1981, the chief executive officers of AIG, American Express and Citicorp concluded that there was a need to form a broader business coalition to push the demand to include ‘trade in services’ in the GATT agenda. They mandated American Express Vice-President Harry Freeman to form a coalition of services industries that would reach well beyond New York financial circles. In 1982, the US Coalition of Service Industries (USCSI) was officially launched under Freeman’s chairmanship….

The conference also highlighted the shared objective of the US Department of Commerce and the USCSI to use the GATS 2000 talks to increase market access for US companies, not only through specific market access negotiations, but also by adding new disciplines on domestic regulatory reform to the GATS “in order to ensure that market access and national treatment commitments achieve their promised objectives”.10 This confirms GATS critics’ warnings that the GATS negotiations comprise a corporate deregulatory agenda that threatens to undermine democratic governments’ ability to regulate.

Because it would be entirely unacceptable to say to Americans that we are exporting your jobs and importing cheap labor to replace you in the labor market so that our financial services sector can have access to foreign markets, so they adopted a strategy developed by Harris Miller in the 1980’s, the centerpiece of which was a propaganda campaign of “shortages of workers” and “crops rotting in the fields” - none of which was true.  It was just a strategy to break Cesaer Chavez’s Farm Worker’s Union.  Miller succeeded in breaking the union by flooding the farm labor market with more farm workers from Mexico.  The strategy was so successful that the Information Technology Associates of America (ITAA) hired Harris Miller to become the CEO of ITAA and all we’ve heard since is that there is a “shortage of workers” in every profession - blue and white collar -  in America.

The problem for the USCSI was that for foreign workers to be imported to the United States, they needed visas H-1B, H-2B, L-1, etc. so the propaganda campaign of “shortages” was not enough.  They had to create an illusion equivalent to "crops rotting in the field".  For the tech industry, the illusion was an explosion of tech jobs and an expanding job market for tech workers.  Enter the dot.com tech boom.  The so-called tech boom began in the late 1990’s and was IPO driven.  These companies had no assets and no products.  All they had was a lot of marketing hype that drove the stock market.  The dot.com boom went to bust “coincidently” around the same time that the American Competitiveness Act of 2000 went into effect.  This Act expanded the number of visas for imported foreign workers: 

The following is a quote from a propaganda sheet produced by the Competitiveness Enterprise Institute - one of the multitudes of industry lobbying front groups spawned by the tech industry:

The quota for 1999 was filled three months before the end of the year, and 2000 reached capacity after only six months. After technology firms argued that shortages of workers cost them millions in lost productivity and innovation, the 106th Congress passed the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act. The act increases the number of visas to 195,000 per year for the years 2001 to 2003, and allows visa holders to change jobs without obtaining a new visa.3 The new law also allows H1-B workers whose six years have expired, and whose application for a green card has been pending for 181 days, to work for any US employer without jeopardizing their application. The job must be in a similar field, but the official title need not be identical.4

And the lobbying for more and more and more visas has continued in the years since.  And the tech industry front groups keep on "catapulting the propaganda" to perpetuate the scam.