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WTO Protesters Were Right
I didn't live in Seattle a decade ago. From across the continent, my first reaction to the violence at the WTO Ministerial Conference was: Why would anyone smash up the downtown of my favorite American city?
Most of the nation likely reacted with similar distaste, or worse, confirmation that here was the weird left-coast being, well, weird and thuggish. That's too bad.
The peaceful majority of protesters represented issues that deserved a searching national debate. If they had gotten it, the country might have avoided many of today's calamities.
Or maybe not. Whatever the "battle" means to locals, historians should remember Seattle 1999. It is a hinge between eras, a shift long in the making and now heavily upon us with downsides and unintended consequences that can't be easily undone. The protesters can say, correctly, "You were warned."
It was 1999, after all. The nation was prosperous, mostly at peace, distracting itself with day trading and the dot-com fad. The federal government was headed toward its first surpluses in decades and the worry was about the future of Treasury securities with so little debt to sell.
Creative destruction ruled, but seemed benignly exciting unless one worked in boring blue-collar industries. Companies slashed jobs, but other jobs were waiting in abundance.
Even though more workers were losing traditional pensions, we were becoming a Shareholder Nation. The financial advantages once available only to the well-off, from stock ownership to deep wells of credit, were now available to average Americans.
It was the New Economy, where stuffy measures of corporate reality such as P/E ratios and net income were meaningless; levitating technology companies created their own value even if we couldn't understand how. Business cycles might be a thing of the past, we heard. America was the world's largest trading nation.
Part of this came crashing down in 2001, revealed as an artifice of corporate fraud, wishful accounting, "irrational exuberance" and an interest-rate bubble from the Federal Reserve.
It was followed by a long jobless recovery and a decade of stagnant wages. Then the great housing bubble and crash and here we are, with no more jobs than we had in 1999. Alas, the genuine strengths of that fateful year are gone, too.
The reality is that much of what was protested in Seattle not only became our fate, but it was being wheeled into place long before the Ministerial Conference.
For example, Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era banking law meant to prevent commercial banks from taking too much risk or gambling with investments, was being weakened as early as 1980.
It was completely repealed in 1999, a move backed by President Clinton. The "financial services" industry spent as much as $350 million on lobbying and campaign donations to make this happen.
Other deregulation ensured a light touch regarding derivatives, those securities of uncertain value, some pioneered by Michael Milken in the 1980s.
Most of the nation's leading economists endorsed these moves, downplaying potential risk. This was conveyed largely without skepticism, I am ashamed to say, by most of the nation's business media.
The commoditization of jobs was also not a threat but a reality. Most unions had long been slowly dying or becoming irrelevant, repeatedly weakened by law. Worker protections had been gradually eroding since the 1980s. With Clinton's health-care humiliation in 1993, America continued as the only advanced nation without universal coverage. The late 1990s boom concealed these rotting supports of the middle class.
Globalization was a major theme of the protests. Yet it was the world order created by the U.S. after World War II, on the premise that expanding trade would make war less likely and spread prosperity. It worked, at least to America's net benefit for more than half a century, with only isolated warning signs in the auto, steel and textile industries.
Most people supported "free trade" then, even though it was increasingly managed trade with many loopholes and the bomb ready to detonate under the American jobs machine.
This was a classic example of failing to prepare for discontinuity. Our net-winner status would quickly erode - beginning with China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, a rising power that would play by its own rules and become our stern banker.
Finally, long before the armies of the night gathered in Seattle, the post-Paul Volcker Federal Reserve had shown a willingness to keep credit cheap to maintain what proved to be fleeting gains. Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Ayn Rand, personified the worship of the "free market" that remains our guiding ideology yet it is actually a market of bubbles, costly bursts, a casino on Wall Street and America deep in the hole.
So it's an open question whether the most peaceful, articulate protests in Seattle would have made a difference. Americans didn't want to listen. Most of the media didn't care to tell such complicated stories. And the American hard left, as opposed to the still robust hard right, had been shrinking toward nothingness for years.
Now we must live in the post-Seattle 1999 world.
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10 Comments so far
Show AllOf course they were right.
Throughout the sweep of human history, the forces for greater justuce and compassion (also called "the left") have not only been "right" but thoroughly vindicated but the vast improvements in the human condition that their causes have wroght, again and again. Think of all the "radical" ideas of the past that are now taken entirely for granted as just human decency.
We lose, we lose, we lose, we win. They first ignore us, then laught at us, then they attack and kill us, then they accept our ideas as obvious, simple decency.
We still have a lot of work to do.
WHo knew that the hired "agents provocetuer's" were right?
It's such a frenchy term! I like it! So much more evocative than GOON.
Still it's a great new job description, i will look at craigs list.. hell I would break windows FOR FREE if I dont have to drive too far.
Sorry to douse this heartfelt essay with some cold water, but the protestors at Seattle were mistaken about most everything. Many of them were enviros who believed that the WTO was overturning laws enacted in sovereign countries -- but a GAO study in 2000 disproved that notion, and Dartmouth professor Douglas Irwin, in his book "Free Trade Under Fire," goes into detail as he demolishes the claims of the "anti-globalization" marchers. Read Philippe LeGrain's "Open World" for a take on the WTO that differs from the consensus-left view. Why is Cuba a member of the WTO? Why do all nations wish to join? What are the penalties for countries that defy WTO rulings? (Hint: the same penalties that occurred during the trade wars pre-WTO.) -- Can you think of one recent proposal to safeguard the environment that was stalled because of possible WTO opposition? I can't. The WTO is a toothless bogeyman, a mere symbol in the psychodrama of the left, a shaky organization whose meetings usually achieve nothing because it's run by consensus (far more democratic than the UN, by the way) and countries just don't want to give up their economic advantages. The protestors chanting in the streets are a media-driven sideshow that have nothing to do with the constant series of fiascos that constitute WTO minsterials.(By the way, I lived in a N. California town that sent many young people to Seattle, and I guarantee that they were hardly well-versed in international economics.)
From Public Citizen:
* Case 1: U.S. weakens the Clean Air Act to comply with Venezuela Gas WTO ruling. The U.S. implemented the WTO ruling by replacing U.S. gasoline cleanliness regulations with a policy that the U.S. government previously had estimated would produce a five percent to seven percent increase in annual emissions of nitrous oxide from imported gasoline.
* Case 2: U.S. dolphin protection laws undermined. After years of sustained trade law challenges, the Bush administration decided to quietly implement a change to a “dolphin safe” labeling policy which Mexico had demanded as necessary to implement a GATT ruling. (Mexico had threatened a new WTO case if their demands were not met). On New Years Eve 2002, when few Americans were focused on policy matters, the Bush administration announced that it would change the “Flipper-friendly” tuna policy to allow the “dolphin-safe” label to be used on tuna caught using deadly purse seine nets and dolphin encirclement. This regulation is now being challenged in federal court.
* Case 3: U.S. weakens sea turtle protections in the U.S. Endangered Species Act. When the WTO ruled against U.S. Endangered Species Act rules protecting sea turtles from getting killed in shrimpers’ nets, the U.S. complied with the WTO order by replacing the requirement that all countries seeking to sell shrimp in the U.S. had to ensure that their shrimpers used turtle exclusion devices. The new policy is based on an unenforceable rule that allows into the U.S. all shrimp carried by any ship with turtle protection technology, regardless of whether the ship had actually caught the shrimp.
Plus the boycotts that put pressure on apartheid South Africa would have been illegal impediments to trade if the WTO had been around in the 70s.
Yep, they were mistaken, all those jobs shipped overseas, and those high quality products sold at Walmart prove it. For me, the Seattle riots were puzzling. I thought at the time: "why are these people protesting?" Then I investigated it and understood. It came as no surprise when my wife's 3 different manufacturing jobs left the country for much cheaper labor. Sure they paid for her schooling to get those 'better' jobs, but they were shipped away as well. What you call 'international economics' translates to enriching a few and impoverishing the rest.
It's truly been a race to the bottom for a great number of people, environmentally destructive, and unsustainable to boot. You can save your fancy scholarly analysis for the pro free trade professors, who have the time and luxury to debate its merits. The rest of us just want decent paying jobs, like the ones that were taken from us to fatten short-term corporate profits. So I do not think you are really dousing anything at this site, save perhaps your own guilt. Most that post here understand--at least in human terms--EXACTLY what's going on.
Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses in 1517. Then followed 150 years of religious wars that almost emptied Europe of excess population. Some resemblance of order came only with the Treaty of Westphalia, which Bush Micro abolished so timely in 2003.
So, Martin Luther initiated the Change, not an absurdity of change perennially promised by politicians.
The self destruction of capitalism and especially its financial bastard, so well predicted by Karl Marx in 1848 and Vladimir Lenin in 1915, will bring the most profound change since development of class society started 6000 years ago, namely destruction of system of private distribution of wealth created by public production. That will be the Change, many would not like to see it coming in their life time but it will come nonetheless.
The Change will not come from " democratic" voting machines and it will not be pretty to live through it but live we will.
We live in the more or less ordered part of Universe and to deny order in History is very costly self delusion, the bloody costly decease.
The good sign of Change is coming is panic, in which Western rulers live. The very "democracy", with which power was taken from Kings and Emperors, is openly despised by rulers. For they cannot rule by old rules. The moment the new proletarians, people who run IT industry, communication systems, robots on the factories' floor etc, will recognise themselves as such and decide that they are fed with old rules, then... (see definition of Revolution, provided by Vladimir Lenin).
So, forget about Obama and any other American President, they are all too small a potato to fill the shoos of giants needed for the job.
Please,someone, tell me == prove to me! == that the Left is not brain-dead. This is day #2 on CommonDreams for me.I know that the Left is marginalized in this country, that Obama is really a centrist, and that the Left has been, historically, right about many things and wrong about a few. But please: are there real people out there who quote Lenin approvingly? Tell me(please!) that anyone who bows down before Lenin is actually a right-winger attempting to discredit the Left.I have trouble believing that a literate person, with some knowledge of 20th century history, could utter such claptrap. Bertrand Russell knew early on that Lenin was a tyrant, and his diagnosis never had to be emended. Is there a humane, intelligent Left out there? If so, let your voices be heard.
welcome th4377.you will find that yes we do exist. for most of we are
frustrated and we need to find a place or way that will put us all in
the same place. we also need less talk and more action but the days
ahead just might light the spark that makes it finally happen. with
obamas upcoming idiocy that might be the place in history that
finally puts us all together.
Now, this is the corporate assault which should incite Desistance, but none will call it RAPE!
Globalization, Climate Change, Environmental Destruction, Developing Nation Exploitation, Wall Street Collapse, Fascism, Unlimited War- Are all Related.
Globalization, Climate Change, Environmental Destruction, Developing Nation Exploitation, Wall Street Collapse, Fascism, Unlimited War. Listening to the news, it is all too easy to think of these things in isolation. Well meaning leaders such as Al Gore speak convincingly about the dangers of climate change and available solutions. Obama waxes eloquently and at times passionately about health care inequities, climate change and the need for financial regulatory reform. Sadly, his most significant mark may be to inflame the War of Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is as if each one of these crises exists in isolation and require a separate set of solutions.
But the truth is otherwise. The problems are systemic and so are the solutions.
For many years developing nations in Africa and Latin America have been exploited by the rich nations of the world. They have been chained to debt, while having their lands raped, their environment destroyed, their governments corrupted, their leaders assassinated and their men, woman and children left destitute or to die from disease or civil war. It is true that countries such as India and China have turned the tables- bringing their own people out of poverty by controlling globalization. Yet at the same time they have become increasingly like the developed world- crushing internal dissent and supporting reprehensible regimes that serve their commercial interests. In Latin America, leaders from countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador are trying to address the needs of the poor and indigenous communities, in part by gaining greater control over the multinationals that extract and export their oil and mineral wealth.
In this country, we used to think we were exempt- we could plunder Latin America and Africa, and our coffers would remain well stocked and our people prosperous. Yet quite the reverse is true. The distribution of wealth in both the United States and the developing world has grown more unequal- in favor of a very small elite class. This elite class provides nothing of value except the development of new speculative financial instruments and loans intended to control, restrict and crush the countries that are trapped by their "largess."
Wall Street, the WTO, IMF, the World Bank and others- together they seek to control and manipulate- effectively dictating the terms of existence to a populace that has no clue about the role they play. It is as if we have become marionettes, controlled by hidden forces that are malignant and of which we have no awareness.
The financial collapse triggered by Wall Street is no fluke. It is not merely due to greed, a housing bubble or credit derivative instruments. Wall Street is now consumed by nothing but profit and the accumulation of phantom (as opposed to real) wealth. It was able to dictate the terms of its rescue to a weak US government. What the US government in fact did was to rescue corporations that care nothing about the American people, care nothing about the air we breathe and the water we drink, the land we live on- companies who seek to do nothing more than amass wealth in a growing sea of poverty and inequality.
It is this system that is causing a collapse of the environment, a breakdown of the world's food and water supply, a rising tide of inequality in developing and rich nations alike and perpetual war.
Even in war, the transnational corporations prosper. However corrupt and underhanded their dealings- money is funneled into ever more costly, dangerous weapons systems. In turn the elites of the client countries wage war against their own people or other countries- typically poorer and weak. Men, woman and children die on both sides- but the elites prosper.
Ultimately corrupt power structures like the ones I described collapse. The problem is we don't have that much time left. Unless globalization is curtailed- restrained by global democracy- the challenges we face will grow exponentially. The economic bubble will become a tsunami and life on this planet unsustainable. It won't matter- the best solutions to our problems, the best technology- none of it will make a difference if we do not wrest control from the corporations and governments that control us and have their own agenda of exploitation, death and destruction. Economic globalization without global democracy is a recipe for disaster.