Ten years ago, on 11 December 2001, China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). From that point onwards the word “globalisation” has been a harsh reality for everyone. The WTO is the umpteenth organisation over which the citizen has no control, but which decides his future. A handful of bureaucrats, with the collaboration of lobbies and multinationals, dictate the rules of world commerce. Its Director-General is Pascal Lamy, an illustrious unknown person for most people. Who elected him? A medium sized business in Vicenza or in Forlì could close down because of one of his decisions. The WTO includes 153 States, for the others there’s nothing else but an embargo. The WTO was created to favour the free circulation of goods and services, but in fact it has favoured the free circulation of investment capital. The multinationals have shifted production to where it costs less. In countries where the term “trade union” is not even in the vocabulary, where there are no rules against pollution of the environment by factories, where dignified wages and protection of the workers are a chimera, but where there’s a supply of labour at low and very low cost. Even child labour if you want. International competition can happen where there are the same rules and rights for the workers, otherwise it becomes a hunting reserve for unscrupulous entrepreneurs. How can you compete against those who have no rights? To think that is madness or is just a way of pulling our leg. Sack people in your home country, continue production at a few euro with new slaves and then go into the TV studios and explain the economy. What a marvellous and shitty world the WTO has created! Those with capital have in one go got two results: controlling wages and demands from the workers for a better life and increasing their own profits. It’s the continuation in another form of the slave ships that transported the free forced labour to the cotton plantations. From the creation of the WTO in 1995, production has shifted where capital gets the best return, and it gets the best return where the human conditions are the worst. Meanwhile in the countries that have lost tens of thousands of companies and millions of jobs because of globalisation, like Italy, unemployment has exploded (what a surprise!). Basically capital has been globalised and losses and unemployment have been nationalised. In the future, unless we stop this trend, the creation of the global slave will become a reality. Eat, produce, die!