abolish wto

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10 Reasons to Dismantle the WTO

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

1. The WTO prioritizes trade and commercial considerations over all

other values.

2. The WTO undermines democracy.

3. The WTO does not just regulate, it actively promotes, global trade.

4. The WTO hurts the Third World.

5. The WTO eviscerates the Precautionary Principle.

6. The WTO squashes diversity.

7. The WTO operates in secrecy

8. The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollar

for human rights, environmental, worker rights and othernon-commercial purposes.

9. The WTO disallows bans on imports of goods made with child labor.

10. The WTO legitimizes life patents.

Add a new community to the long list of World Trade Organization (WTO)

critics which already includes consumers, labor, environmentalists, human

rights activists, fair trade groups, AIDS activists and animal protectionorganizations, those concerned with Third World development, religious

communities, and women’s organizations. The latest set of critics includes WTO

backers and even the WTO itself.

As the WTO faces crystallized global opposition -- to be manifested in

massive street demonstrations and colorful protests in Seattle, where theWTO will hold its Third Ministerial meeting from November 30 to December 3

-- the global trade agency and its strongest proponents veer between a

shrill defensiveness and the much more effective strategy of admittingshortcomings and trumpeting the need for reform.

WTO critics now face a dangerous moment. They must not be distracted by

misleading or cosmetic reform proposals, nor by even more substantive

proposals for changing the WTO -- should they ever emerge from theinstitution or its powerful rich country members. Instead, they should

unite around an uncompromising demand to dismantle the WTO and itscorporate-created rules.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1. The WTO prioritizes trade and commercial considerations over all

other values;

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The WTO prioritizes trade and commercial considerations over all other

values. WTO rules generally require domestic laws, rules and regulations

designed to further worker, consumer, environmental, health, safety, humanrights, animal protection or other non-commercial interests to be

undertaken in the "least trade restrictive" fashion possible -- almost

never is trade subordinated to these noncommercial concerns.

2. The WTO destabilize democracy: The WTO undermines democracy. Its rules drastically shrink the choices

available to democratically controlled governments, with violations

potentially punished with harsh penalties. The WTO actually pushes thisdominating of domestic decisions about how economies should be organized

and corporations controlled. "Under WTO rules, once a commitment has been

made to liberalize a sector of trade, it is difficult to reverse," the WTOsays in a paper on the benefits of the organization which is published on

its web site. "Quite often, governments use the WTO as a welcome external

constraint on their policies: 'we can't do this because it would violatethe WTO agreements.'"

3. The WTO does not just regulate, it actively promotes, global trade:

The WTO does not just regulate, it actively promotes, global trade. Its

rules are biased to facilitate global commerce at the expense of effortsto promote local economic development and policies that move communities,

countries and regions in the direction of greater self-reliance.

4. The WTO hurts the Third World:

The WTO hurts the Third World. WTO rules force Third World countries to

open their markets to rich country multinationals, and abandon efforts to protect infant domestic industries. In agriculture, the opening to foreign

imports, soon to be imposed on developing countries, will catalyze a

massive social dislocation of many millions of rural people.

5. The WTO removes the spirit from the Precautionary Principle:

The WTO eviscerates the Precautionary Principle. WTO rules generally

block countries from acting in response to potential risk -- requiring a

probability before governments can move to resolve harms to human healthor the environment.

6. The WTO crushes diversity:

The WTO crushes diversity. WTO rules establish international health,

environmental and other standards as a global ceiling through a process of "harmonization;" countries or even states and cities can only exceed them

by overcoming high hurdles.

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7. The WTO operates in secrecy:

The WTO operates in secrecy. Its panel rule on the "legality" of

nations' laws, but carry out their work behind closed doors.

8. The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollar

for human rights, environmental, worker rights and othernon-commercial purposes:

The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollar for human rights, environmental, worker rights and other non-commercial

purposes. In general, WTO rules state that governments can make purchases

based only on quality and cost considerations.

9. The WTO disallows bans on imports of goods made with child labor.

The WTO disallows bans on imports of goods made with child labor. In

general, WTO rules do not allow countries to treat products differently

based on how they were produced -- irrespective of whether made with

brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxics or with no regardfor species protection.

10. The WTO legitimizes life patents:

The WTO legitimizes life patents. WTO rules permit and in some casesrequire patents or similar exclusive protections for life forms.

Some of these problems, such as the WTO's weaknesses for secrecy, could potentially be fixed, but the core problems -- prioritization of

commercial over other values, the constraints on democratic

decision-making and the bias against local economies -- cannot, for they

are inherent in the WTO itself.

Because of these unfixable problems, the World Trade Organization should

be shut down, sooner rather than later.

That doesn't mean interim steps shouldn't be taken. It does mean that

beneficial reforms will focus not on adding new areas of competence to theWTO or enhancing its authority, even if the new areas appear desirable

(such as labor rights or competition). Instead, the reforms to pursue are

those that reduce or limit the WTO's power -- for example, by denying itthe authority to invalidate laws passed pursuant to international

environmental agreements, limiting application of WTO agricultural rules

in the Third World, or eliminating certain subject matters (such asessential medicines or life forms) from coverage under the WTO's

intellectual property agreement. These measures are necessary and desirable in their own right,

and they would help generate momentum to close down the WTO.

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While the World Trade Organization meets in Seattle, demonstrators in the street have plenty to protest: WTO policies are devastating for the vast majority of the globe’s inhabitants and for the

planet itself. The WTO is a weapon of transnational corporations and giant banks against all the

world’s workers as well as a weapon of the richest countries against the poorest. It is one of thekey enforcement agencies of “neo-liberalism”: the push for deregulation, privatization, and wide-

open markets that devastated Asian economies in 1997 and has widened inequality everywhere.

In the name of free trade, WTO officials have the authority to override local and federal laws

with impunity. And what legislation do they overturn? The labor standards and health, consumer,and environmental protections won during the last century by the blood and sweat of unionists,

radicals, and social reformers.

Given that the whole point of the WTO is to maximize profits by increasing exploitation, it

cannot be reformed. But because those who benefit from the WTO are only a tiny minority, andthose it is used against are the overwhelming majority, it can be stopped! Let’s make

internationalism work for workers!

Free trade: the freedom to plunder (steal):

The WTO is only four years old. But it is a direct descendant of an earlier trade agency, theGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), formed under United Nations auspices after

World War II.

Although 134 countries are members, WTO is in practice dominated by the capitalist

heavyweights — the European Union, Japan, and above all the U.S. Under the slogan of freetrade, the reality of WTO is trade carefully managed to benefit the corporations and countries

already on top. And while the WTO itself may be young, its basic methodology — capitalist

growth through global trade, theft, and exploitation — is as old as the profit system itself.Throughout its rise and development, capitalism has based itself on international and ever-

expanding markets for resources, labor, and consumers.

Globalization is capitalism’s natural and inevitable tendency because in order to survive, each

enterprise must grow. The system’s competitive nature demands it. To stay afloat, all businessesare constantly trying to produce more goods more cheaply.

But this leads inevitably to a crisis of overproduction — a tsunami of commodities that workers,

who have been laid off or whose real wages have been eroded in order to keep profits high,

cannot possibly afford. This dilemma was the underpinning to the international economic crisisthat started in Asia two years ago.

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Capitalism, with all its internal contradictions, is a bomb threatening to detonate. The job of the

WTO is to referee global chaos, guarantee the endangered profits of the very rich, and attempt to

postpone the disaster.

The Seattle Round: accelerating the race to the bottom:

In its function as referee, the WTO settles disputes between members. When a country

challenges another nation’s regulation or policy as a restraint on trade, the WTO appoints a panel

of trade bureaucrats to deliberate in secret and issue a ruling. If the panel finds that an unfair trade barrier exists, the country responsible must change its practice or be punished with fines or

sanctions. So far, the WTO has upheld every complaint against environmental protections or

public health laws that it has heard. Thus, Venezuelan oil companies brought about lower clean-

air standards in the U.S., while the U.S. won a ruling forcing the European Union to buy beef laced with growth hormones or pay stiff penalties.

In Seattle, some of the most influential WTO members will be campaigning to make their

monster even stronger. They will try to extend its already existing authority over agriculture,intellectual property (patents, copyrights, and trademarks), and services (including education).

Moreover, they plan to lobby for new pacts that would < prevent governments from regulating

currency speculation and foreign investment — even though a storm of international protest

recently halted progress on the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), which wasdesigned to have the same effect.

A world of hurt and women suffer the most:

In the drive to make the rich richer, the damage falls on those who create the products and

generate the wealth. Workers are left with layoffs, diminishing wages, toxic air, and poisonedfood. And when they cross borders in search of decent employment, they are hounded as “illegal

aliens” — while big business claims the freedom to make its obscene profit anywhere.

As always, women are hit the hardest. In 200 export-processing “free” economic zones in 50

countries, 80 percent of the workers are young women. What they earn is only half of the low

wages paid to men in the same areas. In the maquiladoras of Mexico, women labor 12-14 hours aday for six to seven days a week, a throwback to the grotesque English factories of Dickens’

time.

But the super-exploitation of women also spurs them to become fierce opponents of the deadlystatus quo. From South Korea, where the Korean Women’s Trade Union formed to fight for jobsecurity, better wages, and childcare, to Mexico, where Native women in Chiapas were leaders in

the protest against NAFTA that reverberated around the world, the resistance of women is

shaping up to become capitalism’s worst nightmare.

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The myth of fair trade:

Can the WTO be made kinder and gentler? If labor gets a seat at its table, as the AFL-CIO is

pushing for, can the WTO be persuaded to incorporate “fair trade” provisions that will protectworkers and the environment?

Not a chance. As a New Zealand anti-WTO activist put it, “Expecting the WTO to reform itself

is like expecting a tiger to turn into a vegetarian.” The fundamental purpose of the WTO is to

make and enforce rules that guarantee trade that is neither truly free nor fair, but is rigged infavor of the mega-capitalists.

Moreover, an acute danger of promoting fair trade is how easily this “alternative” becomes a

banner for whipping up national chauvinism. Politicians in both parties and misleaders in the

labor movement do the dirty work of the bosses: they encourage workers to think that their problems aren’t caused by homegrown profiteers or the system in general, but by unscrupulous

foreigners.

If fair trade is impossibility under the current system, does that mean that economic globalization

is inherently evil? Should we be insisting on the building of self-contained local economies, assome WTO critics propose?

No. As technology continues to advance and to increase the ability of people on opposite sides of

the planet to interact with each other in a proliferating number of ways, there is no turning back

from globalization.

And why should we want to? The problem is not that people all over the world can

communicate, work, and exchange with one another. This is marvelous! The problem is that

capitalism uses this development to increase the wealth of the few and the misery of the many,rather than to make sure that the world’s bounty is shared among all its citizens. A case in pointis Cuba, where the U.S. is using a decades-long trade embargo to try to kill a society where

wealth is social, not private. But even though the very existence of Cuba as a workers state is

antithetical to everything the WTO stands for, the island country must remain inside theorganization because of WTO’s power in the global economy. Cuba uses its membership in the

WTO as a vehicle for opposing the U.S. blockade and for trying to find desperately needed

trading partners.

In China, on the other hand, a section of the bureaucracy is trying to win entry into the WTO as amaneuver against the Chinese people. These officials want to use WTO regulations as an excuse

to dismantle the state-owned enterprises that provide millions of people with their livelihoods, pensions, education, and medical care. This is insupportable. At the same time, however, theWTO — a club dominated by the world’s largest legal gangsters and pirates — has no right nor

grounds to exclude the world’s most populous country.

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Fight corporate rule with working-class power:

For globalization of trade to benefit humanity, it must be directed by workers, not corporate

CEOs. And that means that the response to the WTO should be the creation of the WLO — aWorld Labor Organization. The WLO would need to be independent from the bosses and all

their agencies to be effective — in contrast to the current International Labor Organization(ILO), a toothless U.N. entity that includes representatives from government and business.

The program of the WLO could include demands like these:

• Dismantle the WTO!

• Raise — not lower — labor, health, education, and environmental

standards everywhere. Expand civil rights for women, people of color,

immigrants, queers, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Strengthen Native sovereignty.

• Cancel the entire debts owed by post-colonial and poor nations to

imperialist countries, banks and institutions. No interference by the

advanced capitalist countries with the trade and investment policies of less

developed nations.

• Open the financial books of all corporations and trade agencies;nationalize the banks an organization such as the WLO can become

reality. But it will be up to socialists, who have a firm understanding of the

power of the world working class, to initiate it. Organizing against theWTO provides a perfect opportunity for the fractured international Left to

work together to provide leadership in this crucial struggle.

• At the dawn of the 21st century, harmony and liberation can and

must prevail over the destructive, uncontrollable competitiveness of the

current global economy. To make this happen, the people who do the work must take over and transform the system, setting new priorities dedicated

not to creating profits but to unleashing human potential, fulfilling human

needs, and preserving the planet. This is called socialism, and if humanityis to survive through the next millennium, it’s the only way to go.

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REFERENCES:

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime

Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based

Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The

Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Common Courage Press,http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Issued by: Freedom Socialist Party & Radical Women

November 1999

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