A WTO Celebration Faces People Power

This week’s World Trade Organization ministerial meeting won’t be placid. President Bill Clinton will host 6,000 delegates from 135 nations who will be welcomed by a great trading city’s financial elite, transported by limousines and shielded by legions of police, Secret Service and national guardsmen. They will be surrounded by democracy’s cacophony--thousands of consumers, environmental and human rights activists participating in giant rallies, a tractor cavalcade, a steel-dumping party, mass prayer meetings and candle-waving chains--and greeted by the workers of a great union city.

WTO delegates aim to celebrate the blessings of the global market, agree on some kind of agenda for a new round of trade negotiations and get out of town in one piece. The demonstrators have many demands, but one message: No more business as usual.

The WTO is an appropriate arena for what is essentially a struggle to define the future. It represents the culmination of the effort to forge a global market safe for multinational corporations and banks, the central project of the conservative era that began when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl took office two decades ago and launched a drive for privatization, deregulation, financial liberalization and free trade.

As former Thatcher advisor John Gray has written, it is a utopian project of breathtaking ambition. Markets are naturally embedded in societies. They inevitably reflect social values, whether religious strictures on usury at the dawn of capitalism, or environmental concerns of the modern age. To rip the marketplace--even a global marketplace--free of these restraints requires a resolute exercise of state power that is divorced from democratic accountability.

The WTO is designed to enforce trading accords, essentially deals among large private interests, over the laws of national and local governments in private tribunals run by panels of trade experts, mostly corporate lawyers.

On Seattle’s streets, the demonstrators disagree about many things, but all agree on one thing: They oppose the conservative project and the WTO’s claim to enforce it.

As an alternative, demonstrators offer a blizzard of often-incompatible ideas. One of their demands is to reform the WTO to protect worker rights and the environment, as well as property rights and investment. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney has called for a “new internationalism” that enforces labor rights and environmental standards through the WTO, development banks and the International Monetary Fund. He supports measures to curb financial speculation and backs debt relief and greater development aid for impoverished nations. In Seattle, 200 union leaders from more than 100 countries will demand that the WTO enforce core worker rights as part of the global rules.

Many environmental and consumer activists, led by Ralph Nader, would rather disembowel the WTO than reform it. Walden Bello, director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, wants the WTO abolished altogether, because it enforces the economic advantage the U.S. and countries north of the equator already enjoy and gives too much power to multinationals.

Environmentalists contend that the “global commons”--water, seeds, genetic structures of life, culture--should be off limits to global corporations. A major revolt is brewing against agribusiness, with many official delegates resisting negotiations that would force elimination of farm subsidies. They argue that countries should be free to protect local producers and pursue food security nationally.

Differences over tactics, strategies and even objectives create bitter disputes and lots of name-calling, but they shouldn’t be exaggerated. All protesters agree that the WTO’s current course cannot be sustained. All agree that the conservative corporate project must be frustrated before any real debate can take place. All concur that international institutions have to be opened up, made more democratic and tuned to serve the many and not simply the few. All agree that global rules should set floors, not ceilings, on social regulation. If countries or localities want to set higher standards, no global institution should be empowered to stop them. Almost all agree on the need for global institutions to help protect the environment, fight disease and defend human rights.

Collectively, the demonstrators are trying to take back the power of the state, at whatever level, from the corporate agenda. Here, the WTO is a direct affront. Increasingly, its enforcement panels are challenging local and national environmental, consumer and social regulations as illegal restraints on trade. The French are told that they can’t ban asbestos, even though 2,000 French workers die each year from asbestos poisoning. The U.S. is forced to revise its Clean Air Act. The Europeans find that their ban on hormone-laced beef violates the WTO. The Massachusetts Legislature learns that banning contracts with companies doing business with slave-labor Myanmar runs afoul of the WTO. Georgetown University Law Center reports that 95 laws are potentially WTO-illegal in California.

The demonstrations in Seattle are only a marker of the rising tide of protest against the WTO and what the demonstrators call corporate-managed trade. The real struggles come later. The next president will find it difficult to gain support for fast-track negotiating authority for any trade accords that do not include labor rights and environmental protections. Local challenges to the WTO are about to multiply as well. In the wake of the China deal, Sweeney vowed a campaign to get state and local governments to pass prohibitions on public contracting with companies that violate core labor standards. The WTO will have to explain to liberals in New York City why they can’t boycott companies employing slave labor in Myanmar, or to creationists in Kansas why they must traffic with countries like China that harass Christian missionaries and lock up spiritual groups.

A century ago, the great trusts and combines growing out of the Industrial Revolution forged a national market in the U.S. Laissez-faire and Social Darwinism captured the talking classes. The Gilded Age featured great fortunes and great misery, sweatshops and child labor, uprooted farmers and immigrant labor. Corporations enlisted the courts to strike down attempts to regulate them and the police and troops to suppress any attempt to organize against them.

The protest against the new order took many forms. Populist farmers formed cooperatives and campaigned for free silver. The Industrial Workers of the World called for one big union. Middle-class women’s groups campaigned against child labor. Militants denounced reformers as sellouts and class collaborators. Eventually, the government had to respond. Teddy Roosevelt, surrounded by advisors of the largest corporations, put forth a New Nationalism, a reform program that included a minimum wage, the right to organize, a 40-hour workweek, food and drug regulation, antitrust and banking laws. It took decades, two world wars and a Great Depression to enact the reforms he laid out, but eventually the excesses of the market were curbed, the blessings shared and the great American middle class created.

What Seattle marks is the earliest stage of a similar struggle. Once again, great corporations have enlisted the state to forge a new market. Once again, the extremes of sweatshops and mansions, child labor and industrial barons are present. Once again, the opposition takes many forms. But once again, the call for reform, for enforcing values other than those of profit, will surely advance. In Seattle, the future is more likely to be forged from the passions on the streets than from the powerful meetings in the suites. *