Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

And then there were four ...
Ralph Nader will announce his campaign for president on the Green Party ticket in January, joining those on the Republican, Democrat and Reform tickets in next year's race for the White House.
By Micah L.Sifry
[12/02/99]

"Tear gas sucks"
I was minding my own business when the Seattle cops gassed me.
By Zach Works
[12/02/99]

A no-win situation
Nonviolent protesters get hit from both sides at the WTO conference in Seattle.
By L.A. Kauffman
[12/02/99]

If he can make it here ...
Arizona Sen. John McCain's toughest opponent in the New York primary is not George W. Bush, but the state's Byzantine process for qualifying for the ballot.
By Andrea Bernstein
[12/02/99]

Senator from the fourth estate
Adored by the national media, criticized at home, John McCain has turned his reputation for candor into political capital.
By Anthony York
[12/02/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

This is a hiccup. It's a dramatic three-day thing. There's solid concern and support for liberalizing trade and having some kind of governance over international trade, and some of these other issues do not belong with the WTO. Debt forgiveness has nothing to do with trade -- it's something for the advanced nations and the IMF. But I think the WTO will try to do something about that and make some statement. The latent general concern is about globalization and the global economy and increasing inequality and some getting so rich and the Internet, which is global, and suffering. Inequality and globalization are coming in here, along with concerns about global fairness, global justice.

The WTO is just not strong enough to take care of all that. All these other concerns are being put on the WTO and should be put elsewhere. The protestors have been physically effective in disrupting the meetings, but of course some of their demands would be considered without their protests -- working parties were scheduled for labor and the environment. The protests are also counterproductive because they've been anticipated and the Clinton administration has been advocating some of [the issues].

Thomas Friedman had a good article [Wednesday] in the Times, [in which he wrote] that some of them are looking for a '60s fix. Some of the arguments are nonsensical. Some of the protestors are inconsistent. Some groups would just as soon have the smoke stacks be in Bangladesh. Other groups worry about the rain forests in the developing countries -- and don't want exports from them. Others don't want Weyerhauser to export lumber from Seattle to Indonesia because then they're cutting down forests here. It gets all mixed up -- whose environment and where? [In some cases, the protests are] disguised protectionism -- [labor unions bring up] child labor, a humanitarian motive, but their real motive is to protect textiles and steel in the advanced countries.

You're not going to get world government [with the WTO], but it is a step toward governance. It's brought some rule of law and order to trade relations, and it has liberalized trade. Trade has increased more rapidly than world output. The increase in manufacturing goods from developing countries has been outstanding. That gives them a much higher rate of development. This meeting from the beginning was not going to be as constructive as you might think: It's only the drafting of the agenda for the next round of trade negotiations, which take three to five years. But there is an interesting feature here: There is more concern about the role of developing countries in the global economy now.

The WTO emerged historically from the abortive International Trade Organization [ITO], based on the Havana charter, which was vetoed by Congress because it had provisions on international investment and restrictive business practices and international commodity agreements. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs was just the general agreement for the trade part of the ITO. The WTO was strengthened with its dispute resolution. It also moved in with concern to investment-related trade issues. Now those old issues that were rejected with ITO keep reemerging.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research in Washington.

I think that the protests have been tremendously effective. But I am concerned about the framing of the issues. I think that the proponents of the WTO are painting this as pro- or con-globalization. And that's really not at all what the protests are about. It's not that the protestors are against globalization and the people inside are about eliminating barriers. It's simply deciding which barriers are going to remain. The real question is: What does globalization look like?

All the laws about copyright, those are protectionist. In a fully free market, if I want to go out into the marketplace and sell Microsoft Word to somebody, I can do it. But I can't because Bill Gates will have me arrested. It's not a bad thing, but that is a protection. The WTO [says it] wants to talk about the inexorable march towards eliminating barriers, but that's not quite true. A lot of people who will point to [violence in the demonstrations] were not sympathetic to the protesters anyhow. I think that the people who look at it seriously will realize that [the rioters] were a tiny minority of the protestors. When you have 50,000 people, there will be a small number of them there to break some windows. The public will understand that this is a minority that has to be stopped, like the Seattle mayor Paul Schell did.

People are there for very different reasons and they'd like to see it go in different ways. But I suspect that probably the largest group of [protesters] are there over environmental concerns. Certainly the overturning of several U.S. laws that were ruled in violation of the WTO did upset many environmentalists. The WTO cannot actually overturn laws, but the prospect that any environmental law in the U.S. could be challenged -- ruled a WTO violation -- certainly is a great concern to the environmentalists who work to get laws changed. It all seems very futile.

There's not much that can come out of this [meeting] that will be very good news for workers. Just about every economist agrees that there's been a negative impact on the wages of less-skilled workers as a result of the direction that international trade has taken. The item that the AFL leadership has pushed forward -- setting up a working group on labor standards in the WTO -- is going to mean almost nothing any time in the foreseeable future, given the timeline: If they get a working group out of the Seattle session, that working group will report back. And if they report that labor standards are an appropriate item, then in the next session, seven years out, then it might be an item to negotiate; that round will run another seven years. Maybe in 2014 or 2015, they'll talk about beginning some sort of labor standards. That doesn't promise very much to the people who are out there.

In terms of the protesters' agenda, the best thing that can happen is a stalemate -- that you don't see any movement forward on the ground at the WTO, you don't see anything move forward on free trade. I think that's the best they can hope for. As for what effect it will have on the [presidential] candidates, they might not be terribly anxious to come out and say, "Yes, let's move forward on the agenda of the WTO." What I get a kick out of is that people from the [Clinton] administration like [U.S. Trade Representative] Charlene Barshefsky say that these issues -- labor standards and the environment -- should get top priority. Two weeks ago, she's in China, up until all hours of the night sitting down with the Chinese, working on this trade deal. Is there anyone who thinks that what she was talking about was labor standards or environmental standards? That's laughable. She was talking about opening up China to our insurance companies and our banks. Those are [the administration's] agenda items.

When they want something, these people are smart, they're energetic, they're tough, they're shrewd, they're aggressive. When they want to open up China for the banks they get it; when they want to open up China to the insurance industry they get it. When they tell China that they have to enforce copyright laws, they get it. But with labor standards and the environment, they say, "Oh, yeah. We're working on it."

Next page | "Who elected these 50,000 people out there?"