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Feature
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World
Trade
Keep Away ...
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©1999
Gary Huck |
World
Trade Organization
Causes a World of Trouble
Amid dark wood paneling and leather chairs in
a chateau-like building on the edge of Switzerland’s Lake
Geneva, a few hundred lawyers with fat salaries are working
quietly away, setting the terms of world trade. It’s the
headquarters of the World Trade Organization, that global
entity whose mission is to make the world safe for unhindered
corporate investment and trade. Critics describe the WTO as
one of the most undemocratic and secretive organizations
around. And yet the policies it sets affect almost everyone.
The setting won’t be nearly so placid in
Seattle in late November, when the WTO starts its much
anticipated "Ministerial Meeting." Although the
gathering will have many supporters, including almost every
leading Democrat and Republican in the nation (with a personal
welcome by President Clinton), thousands of protesters will be
there to greet the WTO — everyone from the AFL-CIO to farmer
and environmental groups and people from every part of the
globe. The Seattle meeting gives those who are hurt by the WTO’s
policies a rare chance to make their voices heard — even if
it’s through a bullhorn on the street outside.
In fact, Seattle itself has sounded a warning
note about the WTO’s "free trade" mission. When
the King County Council, the Seattle area’s county
government body, was asked to pass a resolution welcoming the
WTO, the councillors rankled. They voted to strike any
endorsement of free trade from the resolution, and then added
this line: "trade laws should be used to empower workers
and consumers, protect the environment, reinforce sovereignty
and foster sustainable, broad-based economic
development."
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39%
of the increase in income inequality in the U.S. from
1973 to 1993 can be attributed to trade
according to William R. Kline, a
prominent economist at the pro-WTO Institute on
International Economics |
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The WTO was created in 1995 to enforce global
trade rules and open up world markets. The new agency
incorporated and expanded the reach of the old General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: the WTO regulates not only
taxes and quotas, but other "barriers to trade,"
including food safety laws, product standards, rules on the
use of tax dollars, and other domestic laws that affect trade.
One hundred thirty four nations are members of the WTO; 33
others have official observer status. But much of the agency’s
power lies with the developed countries, especially the U.S.,
European Union, Japan, and Canada.
Opposition to the WTO centers in part on its
power to punish countries for domestic laws that hinder trade.
If a WTO nation feels another country’s domestic laws
violate WTO provisions, it can challenge those laws through
the WTO. A three-person panel of trade bureaucrats hears the
complaint. And since its founding, activists say, that
three-person panel has ruled against the public interest every
time: every public health or environmental law that has been
challenged under the WTO has been found illegal. (See:
"WTO vs. the People.") A nation found in
violation can either get rid of the offending law, pay
permanent fines to the complaining country, or face trade
sanctions.
UNDERMINING ...
EVERYTHING
Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global
Trade Watch (Global
Trade Watch website) a leading organizer against the abuses of the WTO,
summed up the agency’s record in congressional testimony
last spring. The agency, she charged, "has undermined
health, safety and environmental standards, human rights
advocacy efforts, and democratic accountability in
policy-making in the U.S. and worldwide. At the same time,
vaunted economic benefits promised...have yet to
materialize."
Since the WTO’s creation, social and
economic inequality around the globe has only increased, and
the Asian economies have fallen into crisis. Wallach and
others blame this state of affairs on the galloping global
trade liberalization mandated by the likes of the WTO and
International Monetary Fund. Through these entities,
corporations and their allies are increasingly able to force
pro-corporate policies down the throats of the world’s
nations. The message is: Open up your borders, drop your
domestic restrictions and protections, privatize your
industries and services, cut your social benefits, or else be
excluded from world trade. Poorer nations are pressured to
focus like a laser beam on exports — although this path has
brought pain to both exporting countries and importing
countries saddled with gluts of cheap products.
"Clearly if the East Asian financial
crisis has taught us anything, it is to avoid rapid financial
liberalization," Wallach testified. "The U.S. has
served as the importer of last resort for countries whose
economies have been destroyed by currency speculators and
irresponsible private lenders. This role is played at the
expense of American workers — like those numbering in the
tens of thousands in the steel industry — who have lost
their jobs as the U.S. trade deficit has surged. Thus workers
on both sides of the world paid the price for rapid financial
liberalization, while private lenders were bailed out by the
International Monetary Fund."
THEY WANT MORE
Corporate interests are now driving for even
more liberalization, and the vehicle they hope will take them
there is the WTO. At the Seattle meeting, representatives from
European Union countries are expected to argue for a new round
of trade negotiations (which they’d like to call the
"Millennium Round") to forge WTO agreements in three
new areas: investment rules, competition policy, and
government procurement. Many of the world’s less developed
nations are opposed to the whole idea of a new round, since
they are suffering so badly from the last one. Labor and other
activists see the new round, especially the proposed
discussion of investment rules, as a way for corporations to
sneak some of the provisions of the notorious Multilateral
Agreement on Investment into the WTO (see
"There is Hope").
President Clinton has said he is for having a
Millennium Round, but doesn’t want the round to address
those new issues at the moment. (After all, we are approaching
an election year, and a recent Wall Street Journal poll found
that 58 percent of Americans believe foreign trade is bad for
the economy.) However, the U.S. very much wants to revise WTO
agreements in some existing areas (including services,
agriculture, and intellectual property rights) to open up even
more market opportunities for U.S. corporations.
Opponents of corporate domination of trade
have lots of ideas about new global policies that would serve
the interests of citizens, workers, farmers, and the
environment. Global Trade Watch and others are calling on the
WTO to institute a thoroughgoing review of its existing
policies and their disastrous effects before any new talks
begin. In addition, GTW and almost every other popular
organization is demanding that the WTO be reformed to make it
a much more open and democratic institution.
Many argue that any global trade agreement
should establish and enforce labor and environmental
standards. While the Clinton administration has said it
supports this idea and has even raised the issue at previous
WTO gatherings, it hasn’t been very insistent about it. In
fact, the U.S. is considered a global laggard when it comes to
defending labor standards.
"The international community must develop
an effective and enforceable way of ensuring that all the
world’s trading partners respect the International Labor
Organization’s core labor standards," argues the
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in a
statement about the Seattle meeting. The ICFTU also calls for
a range of reforms to protect the environment and address some
of the trade issues facing less developed nations.
THE U.S. LAGS BEHIND
An array of union leaders and activists from
around the globe who are organizing for an "Open World
Conference in Defense of Trade Union Independence and
Democratic Rights" took up the issue of ILO standards in
an open letter to heads of state attending the WTO summit. In
it, the unionists, including Farm Labor Organizing Committee
president and Labor Party co-chair Baldemar Velasquez, call on
every government to ratify, implement, and fully enforce the
176 conventions of the ILO. They also point out that while the
U.S. government "claims to be a staunch defender of
workers’ rights," the U.S. has ratified only one of the
ILO’s seven core labor standards — one of the worst
ratification records in the world.
A wide range of citizen, labor, environmental,
and farm groups are planning to make their voices heard at the
WTO gathering, including:
[More:
WTO vs. the People] ->
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