The WTO was only four years old in 1999, when protest in the streets with violence unmatched since the civil rights riots of the '60s stigmatized its conference in Seattle. Up to that time, few Americans had any idea there was a problem with "free" trade. The anger evident in those protests is illuminated by these interview excerpts:
BILL MOYERS (9/5/03 on PBS): "What do you mean by globalization?"
DR. VANDANA SHIVA: "It is rules written into the World Trade Organization. It is rules that say you cannot decide the agriculture policy. You cannot decide your tariff structures. You cannot decide to make sure your people have food. You cannot decide that people in your country have jobs. The market will decide it and the market will be favored on the basis of unfair asymmetric rules of trade."
BILL MOYERS: "Who writes those rules?"
DR. VANDANA SHIVA: "Unfortunately, it wasn't governments even though they're the members of the WTO. The rules of WTO were written by corporations. There were four new areas brought into trade (in 1995) that never belonged to trade: agriculture, intellectual property, services and investment. Now, each of these four areas had a treaty in the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs in the Uruguay Round. Every one of those treaties was driven by a particular group of companies. The agricultural agreement driven by Agri-Business. The Trade Related Intellectual Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement (was) driven by the pharmaceutical industry, the biotech industry and the entertainment industry. The services agreement (was) driven by the financial interests, the banks; and now increasingly driven by the water companies which want to treat trade in water as a trade in services."
In that 2003 interview Dr Shiva was angry about the WTO and her words fairly represent the feelings and opinions of hundreds of millions of ordinary people in India and other underdeveloped countries. Here in the US it took another seven years for the consequences of globalization to provoke a comparable level of anger, manifested by the rise of the Tea Party in the election of 2010. Those of us who are interested in global solutions may doubt that typical Tea Party-goers have the slightest notion of what the WTO is, but their fundamental complaints parallel Dr. Shiva's. What it comes down to is the government is working against ordinary people: allowing jobs to flow abroad while shutting down factories and hollowing out local economies; allowing agribusiness to push farmers into bankruptcy; allowing Fannie and Freddie, both quasi-government agencies, to facilitate a real estate bubble significantly financed by foreign capital; and by allowing special interests, especially foreign special interests, to so corupt federal elections that "Washington" has become their synonym for "evil."
The Tea Party (unwittingly) and Dr Siva together share anger at the effects of globalization, distrust of government, and outrage at whoever keeps us tied to an international institution that has the power to compel national institutions like the US Congress to get in line. Here's more from the same Bill Moyer interview:
DR. VANDANA SHIVA: "...the Coca-Colas of the world, the Cargills of the world, the Monsantos of the world, the Suez-Vivendis of the world... rest on local elites who also benefit out of destroying the livelihoods of their own people. It is not the case that Indian elites don't join with the global elites. Globalization in my view is a partnership of elites to exploit the people of the world against the… will of people."
BILL MOYERS: "It was just a coincidence that earlier this week I happened to read a report by a company here in New York saying that corruption in India is at an all-time high. That in some (Indian) states, in fact, less than 1/3 of the development money reaches its intended goals... That 40 percent of famine relief stock is sold on the black market..."
DR. VANDANA SHIVA: "And it's been made worse by the kind of money that global corporations bring in. Two decades ago, every politician of India had to go house to house, (to) ask for funding. (You can be) sure that the financial base of elections was (& is) the political base of governance. You know, kick-backs is the name given to corporate bribes. In the case of Enron, I mean, its corrupt factors here were known. But very little is known about the fact that Enron came into India along with Bechtel to set up a plant. And they had an entire budget item called 'political education' that through the court hearings in India was revealed to be corruption money." (Here in the US, instead of calling it "political education", we call it "campaign financing". Whatever you call it, the result is the same.)
The straight jacket invented at the Uruguay round is fiendishly seductive. Membership in the WTO bestows "most favored nation" status, meaning in part that other member countries can not discriminate against a member when it comes to tariffs. This is a compelling incentive to join, and those who don't suffer penalties at the customs house.
But when a country does join, it becomes subject to rules about agri-business; intellectual property; banking, finance; and rules that open any privatization of public services to global competition. In addition, it turns out that such rules impose unexpected restrictions on national regulatory policy. Here are some examples of WTO rules at work:
• "The WTO ruled that the U.S. must rewrite parts of its Clean Air Act to permit imports of less pure gasoline; the result may be more air pollution and lung disease."
• "The European Union was told it cannot ban imports of beef products (from the U.S.) that had been treated with potentially cancer-causing hormones."
• "And, after a challenge by the U.S., Europe was told to stop favoring bananas grown in the Caribbean by small independent farmers over Chiquita Bananas grown by corporate, plantationstyle, agriculture." (from bss.sfsu.edu)
Coercive intrusions like these are obviously off the radar for tea baggers; what concerns them is the incomprehensible fact that the capitalist dogma they believe in isn't working for America any more. The irony is, since the end of WWII our government has never wavered in its zeal for capitalist dogma and for free trade as its essential principle. Guided by corporate interests, the US was a prime mover behind the creation of the WTO. But as it has turned out, by assiduously implementing corporate interests in the rules of the WTO, we have undermined our larger national interests. Manufacturing employment dropped 31% during the "W" years, and take-home pay for middle America took a hit. But credit cards and home equity loans filled the income gap, leading to mass-produced lending and a general lowering of underwriting standards. Low standards and the underwriting fraud that it encouraged fueled a real estate bubble. The collapse of the bubble, followed by the stock market crash in '08, punctured middle class prosperity, thereby triggering massive service industry job losses. Taken together, these setbacks set off a plunge in tax revenues and a scramble to cut jobs in local governments.
Tea baggers are cheering the state and municipal blood letting, while impotent centrists in Washington, facing comparable fiscal shortfalls, are going down the same road with budget cuts that will dramatically shrink federally supported employment. Meanwhile, the asymmetric benefit/penalty mix of "free trade," and WTO subversion of democratic selfdetermination are causing a diverse backlash, hardening antagonisms between corporate globalists and people concerned with climate change, the environment, sustainability, and a long list of social issues.
Regardless of backlash, economic globalization is not going away; not so long as we have jumbo jets, giant container ships, the internet, cell phones and relative peace among nations. So, instead of lapsing into Tea Party-like irrationality, fair minded people everywhere will have to face up to the challenge of finding a way to regulate the global economy so that in addition to tweaking trade into sustainable equilibrium among nations, such regulation will also promote human and environmental values. If we don't get busy and do this, we may wake up to notice that the WTO has become a de-facto world government that is utterly undemocratic and concerned only with the well being of the elite.
