Good reason for hullabaloo in Seattle

The World Trade Organization summit in Seattle is over, but as the dust settles the significance of what happened there for many remains unclear.

An estimated 150,000 protesters of all different shapes and agendas converged on the city this week to show their opposition to everything and anything the WTO represents.

But what exactly the WTO, which is made up of members from 134 developed and developing countries, represents is also a little unclear.

If you ask the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation, they will tell you that WTO and its summit in Seattle represent the opening up of new markets and increased global trade, which is good for everybody.

“If we can open new markets for agriculture, services, and high technology, our economy will thrive for years to come,” says the chamber’s president, Thomas J. Donohue. “The protesters who have come to Seattle to fight free trade don’t understand that.”If you ask consumer advocate Ralph Nader, he would tell you that the WTO represents “the greatest relinquishment of power and sovereignty in US history.”Seattle’s summit inaugurates a new round of talks between the delegates, which will look at expanding free trade in agriculture, manufactured goods and service industries by eliminating tariffs and other trade barriers among nations.

Words like free trade and open markets certainly sound inviting. So what is all this rumpus?The impression in people’s minds about just what protesters stand for remains a little uncertain. This, I believe, is because the mainstream media has not done their job at explaining the issues and what exactly is at stake.

Many articles give protest statistics like it was a ball game: X number of protesters arrested , X number of trade bureaucrats blocked from convention hall by teeming crowd, X number of Starbucks and McDonalds windows broken, X number of millions of dollars in damage dealt to the city of Seattle.

In between the stats, there is enough distracting carnival-like color among the throngs of protesters to make readers go, ‘Hmmm’: A bale of turtle-costumed protesters, a number of bare breasted young women chanting slogans like “No BGH” (the artificial hormone used to stimulate cow milk production), groups of Tibetan monks, Canadian librarians, French farmers, Teamsters and a towering condom, with the legend reading “WTO: Practice safe trade.”This is all from the stand point of top-down reporting. Rarely did the journalists who were reporting on the WTO go among the crowds. Instead most journalists were with the foreign dignitaries and with the WTO director reporting on their disappointment at being inconvenienced by the crowds, and they were following the governor around, grilling him on how he would deal with the crisis.

But how does this help you understand why they are there, and why the WTO summit has sparked the largest political demonstration since the Vietnam era.

I didn’t get any solid answers perusing through the big mouthpieces of American media either. It wasn’t until I logged onto the Seattle Indy Media Center did I get much information on why so many people were so angry at the WTO.

The site explained WTO’s international rules governing this friend of everybody’s,free trade: The WTO does not allow one country to ban another country’s production the basis of how the product was produced or processed.

What does this mean?It means had the WTO and its rules been around in the ’80s when America was boycotting South African products on ethical grounds, the South African government could have gone to the WTO court and had the boycott overturned, thanks to its trade rules. This means we might have still had Apartheid and Nelson Mandela languishing in prison, thanks to the free-trade tenets of the WTO.

It means that U.S. environmental laws protecting sea turtles who get caught in nets of shrimp fishermen can be viewed —and was viewed by the WTO court — as barriers to trade. In other words, you can’t hinder the burgeoning shrimp trade with only a few dead turtles. Bad for business. Everybody wins with free trade, right, Mr. Donohue? Pointing to the unruly protests in the streets, our U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky apologized to the other delegates that “this doesn’t represent the views of the people of Seattle or the U.S.” It doesn’t?So where does the U.S. stand in all this?Here is a short list of the various U.S. positions in the WTO panel and court over the last five years of the organization’s existence, gleaned mostly from the left-leaning British daily, The Guardian:

The U.S. wants Europe to eliminate subsidies to agriculture,while Europe and Japan want the WTO to recognize that farming not only produces food but also keeps rural social life and the environment alive. This is why we have French farmers marching in Seattle.

When the European Union banned U.S. beef treated with growth hormones, the U.S. went to the WTO and had the ban overturned because the E.U. couldn’t show how the beef posed a public health concern. This is why we have people dressed as cows and the naked women chanting against artificial hormones.

In February, the U.S. objected to countries trying to block the import of genetically modified crops, which under WTO would be a violation of the trade rules. This is why farmers from India and other places worried about the purity of their domestic crops were upset at theWTO.

While E.U. and Japanese consumer groups wanted warning labels on U.S. exported products containing genetically modified organisms, the U.S. objected under the same WTO rule — that the labels would constitute a barrier to trade.

The U.S. is trying to ease China’s admission into the WTO. This is why the AFL-CIO and other union organizations were marching by the thousands in Seattle, saying that this is ignoring China’s bad human rights and labor record. A Star-Bulletin op-ed piece poo-pooed the unions for being overly protectionist, saying that all those violations would be addressed in the WTO.

Really? When the WTO sees labor and environmental laws as barriers totrade?

The U.S. is against European Union proposals to require computer manufactures to phase out the use of toxic chemicals and to implement recycling programs for its electrical components. Under WTO rules, it will win.

The U.S. is in favor of getting into the foreign public services market. Expansion of WTO over the next round of trade talks would apply WTO trade rules to things traditionally the purview of local government, i.e. health services and, yes,libraries. This is why the Canadian librarians are worried.

Do these policies espoused by our trade reps in the WTO then represent the people of Seattle and the U.S.?The people were in the streets because they had no other venue in an organization that makes its decisions —which are based solely on commercial, rather than environmental or humanitarian, interests—inclosed-doors meetings.

The WTO court, a non-governmental entity, can force a nation to change its local laws to conform to the free-trade laws and back up the order with trade sanctions if they don’t. What’s more, the court is overseen by three unelected trade bureaucrats. No wonder Nader calls the WTO system a relinquishment of power.

With all the hullabaloo in Seattle,officials in Hawai’i are probably thanking their lucky stars by now that they lost the bidding war to host the WTO summit.

After all, instead of150,000 protesters, we had the pleasure of 30,000 mild-mannered dentists who came for their annual convention and who brought in $80 million in revenue to the state.

Had the planners of the WTO event been more clever, they would have opted to come to Honolulu, where the remoteness to the Mainland and the state’s smaller base of activists would have protected the WTO from the level of tumult that occurred in Seattle.

More importantly to the trade bureaucrats who are used to making their world-shaping decisions without public scrutiny, having the summit in Honolulu would have kept their dirty little secrets safe from the glaring eye of the media, which is slowly waking up to this as an issue.

Now, the secrets are out. As one economics professor wrote on the sfgate.com’s bulletin board about the summit, “Shine the flashlight and let the cockroaches scatter.”