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Trading Words
I do not, as a rule of thumb, have many regular readers I would consider "conservatives" - in whatever sense you'd like to interpret that phrase. I'm not especially conservative myself, and on some matters I am downright radical. But on the whole I like to think that I think the same way most of my friends do. Unfortunately, every now and then a watershed event pops up and my mailbag tells me, nope, I'm out on a limb - that no one else in my "community" shares my attitude. Either I am attacking an institution which everyone else wants to defend, or defending one that everyone else wants to attack.
These splits happen more often than I'd like, and they're fairly disturbing to me ... because when no one agrees with me, I figure it means I'm wrong.
I am often wrong, and that's fine, but I hate tripping over my facts in a public and spectacular matter. (On the other hand, if I didn't fire off my cranky opinions every which way, it wouldn't be half as entertaining to watch me, right?)
In the case of the recent World Trade Organization business, I have had all sorts of material sent to me to convince me that I spoke hastily, that some of my facts were incorrect, and that I am - in short - wrong. Well, I agree that I spoke hastily (I should have given the material the space it deserved, instead of squeezing it in with other topics), and that some of my facts were incorrect (but they weren't any of the important ones).
I'm not wrong.
That's a very brassy statement for me, one I wouldn't ordinarily make. Here, where I am opposing some of my heroes/heroines by saying it, it's even more obnoxious. And I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound smug, but for once I feel that my convictions are on solid ground.
But that's far from obvious if you read my previous comments on the WTO mess. I didn't sort out the issues, and that hurt my ideas. There are really four different topics lurking in this goulash, and it is perhaps best to discuss them separately (which is why this entry/essay is so freakin' long).
1. The protestors - questioning their motives and their tactics. Did the media misrepresent them?
2. Whether the WTO is being demonized by this protest and, if so, whether this is justified, even to make a political point.
3. The perils of free trade without conscience, and how to correct them.
4. The perceived and real perils of globalization.
Fasten your seatbelts, and make sure your seats are in the full and upright position. Here we go.
Not the Violence, But the Cause
At Woodstock, people were there to have a good time.
People are here to change the world.
Kristen Schmitz, protestor, age 20,
as quoted in the 13 Dec Newsweek
Beneath that quote, Newsweek printed a cartoon of a WTO protestor - wearing a pullover made in Malaysia, jeans made in Indonesia, shoes made in China, et cetera. We'll come to the inevitability of that cartoon protestor's wardrobe selections later, but for now just limit yourself to this: Were any protestors really being that naive?
Were people there to actually make a statement and change the world, or were they there because it seemed like a cool and trendy thing to do at the time, or were they there because they wanted an excuse to smash things?
The answer is: All of the above.
There were so many disparate coalitions and strange bedfellows marching around the streets of Seattle that it would be impossible for me to sort them all out here. The Teamsters were there, and so was Ralph Nader. The Lesbian Avengers were there, and so was the Sierra Club. And of course there were the anarchists - the handful of people who decided that the best way to express an essentially nihilist view was Fight Club-style.
Molly Ivins, among others, has pointed out that Big Media has given unbalanced coverage to this last group. In her usual scathing style (quoted at some length here because I know of no Ivins archives online - sorry, Molly) - she comments:
Here's the situation: 35,000 people go to Seattle to raise crucial issues concerning the World Trade Organization, an outfit that (just for starters) affects everyone on the planet and operates in complete secrecy.
Of those 35,000 people, fewer than 1,000 misbehave by trashing some local stores. How much more coverage do the 1,000 who misbehaved get than the 34,000 who didn't?
(A) 35 times as much.
(B) 34 times as much.
(C) Virtually all the coverage.
You are correct: "C" is the answer. Do the other 34,000 people get any coverage? Yes - they are referred to as "some people concerned about turtles."
Human rights (especially slave labor and child labor), workers' rights (especially health, safety and living wages) and the natural environment of the planet on which all our lives depend are "some people concerned about turtles."
Meanwhile, the violent protesters are interviewed on national television, identify themselves as anarchists and explain to us all that owning property is wrong and that none of the Earth should be in private hands.
Question: Next time a group wants to draw attention to its concerns by getting lots of media coverage, do you think they will:
(A) Peacefully rally, speak and march?
(B) Smash a lot of windows in downtown stores?
If civil disagreement and civil debate draw no attention from the media, what is the alternative?
Ivins has a point, as ever, but as I noted to Jette:
But, you know, a thousand unruly goons will ruin the message that the other 34,000 are trying to convey. That's the way it works. Ivins says, "So what are the chances a peaceful protest will succeed, given skewed coverage like that?" Well, guess what, Molly - if you had a thousand thugs smashing things, then you didn't really have a peaceful protest, now did you?
One bad apple sometimes does spoil the whole bunch.
Besides, I haven't noticed that the Big Media coverage has been particularly unbalanced - not in that way. The skew I have seen is the tendency to quote these young things, like the 20-year old above, who are very easy to mock - instead of quoting someone like Nader who, while a crabby old man (bless him), is much more likely to have something intelligent to say. I agree that Big Media is trying to write off this whole protest, to say "It wasn't important, it was just a bunch of young slacker radical wanna-bes looking for something to do."
Unfortunately, and as independently as I can form this opinion, I think that Big Media is mostly right. I think that most of those 34,000, no matter whose banner they marched under, were young, were probably there because they found out about it on the Web, and didn't really think too hard about what they were doing or what they were supporting.
I do not think this is the dawn of a new era of activism in this country. I think a lot of these kids were raised on tales of the mythical 1960's by their ex-hippie elders and are trying to recapture something that never really existed in the first place ... and they will never succeed, because they're way too immersed in the advertising culture to effect change that way. A street protestor wearing Reeboks just doesn't work.
The thing is, a protestor wearing Tevas or Birkenstocks doesn't work either, people. The old tactics of civil disobedience - blocking the gates, staging sit-ins, carrying signs - are now mostly useless no matter who uses them. It's too late for that kind of activism. It is a tool which no longer fits the causes. And it's a tool that the people in the glass offices haven't taken seriously for many years - but I'll come to that.
So yes, I do think the protestors were naive. But not all of them in the same way. The younger ones were naive about what they were doing there in the first place. The wise ones, like Nader, were merely naive about what good their presence was going to do.
WTO as Star Chamber
"That's the beauty of the WTO," says Stan Schultz, professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin. "It's the perfect foil for a nation that watches 'The X-Files' every week."
Newsweek, 13 Dec
"I really feel that the WTO is not a democratic institution ... Essentially, it values the market and values capitalism over the right of humans to make decisions about their world and their societies."
Sarah Bridger, jailed protestor, age 21,
as quoted in the 4 Dec Boston Globe
Oh, please.
The WTO is not a democratic institution. It wasn't supposed to be. The WTO is an arbitration panel, at its heart. It hands down judgments. Is the Supreme Court a democratic institution?
In fact, that's a useful comparison to make. Did you have a say on which of the Supremes got onto the bench? No. You voted for a political candidate to represent you, one who theoretically had a little say in the matter on your behalf. In practice, none of your elected officials - not even Clinton, since most of the appointments precede his tenure - has had much to do with the makeup of the current Supreme Court at all.
The Supreme Court's rulings, in this country, are effectively law from the moment they are handed down. They are not really subject to dispute. The Supremes often act in what seems like a capricious fashion. They are definitely not immune to political leanings and other interests. They have influenced the policies of this country far more than the rulings of the WTO ever have or ever will have.
Yet you don't see too many people in this country protesting the existence of the Supreme Court.
I know I'm in dangerous waters when I disagree with Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow). But his 13 Dec cartoon tells only half the story. He points out, correctly, that the WTO is not answerable to anyone. What he neglects to note is that the WTO has no teeth. Sure, they can hand down rulings - and those rulings are sometimes disobeyed. The US and the EU alike have had problems - and have expressed public discontent - with the decisions that the WTO reaches.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe that on the banana issue, at least one party is still acting in direct defiance of the WTO edicts. What are they going to do as a penalty? Prevent the country from trading? That's self-enforcing even without the WTO, since if another country doesn't like your policy, they'll generally refuse to do business with you.
Let's consider a few of the things the WTO hoped to get done at this meeting.
- The US has laws intended to protect the American steel industry from other nations "dumping" steel on our markets at prices the Americans can't match. Japan and Brazil want the US to dump its anti-dumping laws.
- The US wants Europe and Japan to cut farm subsidies. The EU in particular spends a huge chunk of its change on subsidizing farmers, and this should probably be stopped ... but the US is mostly against it so it can export more farm goods to Europe - wrong reason, by the EU's lights.
- The more wealthy nations want the poorer ones to clamp down on intellectual-property rights - preventing illicit foreign editions of books, pirate software, et cetera. The poorer countries insist they don't have the cash for this kind of enforcement and they have other, more important things to worry about ... but if the bigger fish would make it worth their while, they'd look into it.
All of these issues remain deadlocked. The WTO couldn't even fulfill its most basic Seattle agenda - deciding which issues would be the main items for trade talks over the next few years.
You see that the WTO barely manages to get countries to play nice together - its main goal. It hardly has the time, energy, or inclination to be a Trilateral Commission secretly pulling the world's strings. And if it were, the world governments (many of which distrust the WTO as much as you do) would simply refuse to play along.
Now, is the WTO less open about its operations than it could be? Certainly. Even Clinton thinks so - that was one of his agenda items in Seattle, to get the WTO to let a little more daylight into its meeting rooms. Unfortunately the WTO is not very inclined to listen to Clinton now, since the protests have shot his credibility. One of the several unconstructive ends achieved.
I'm sorry, but I just refuse to see the WTO as A Secret Conspiracy. It doesn't work for me. They're being used as a target by people who can't or won't or don't know how to attack the real evils.
The Decline of the Invisible Hand
Hitherto, it's been easy to insist that anyone opposed to "trade" was by definition a protectionist, happy to hide behind the walls of the nation-state. That simple equation no longer holds good; one of the most important lessons of Seattle is that there are now two visions of globalization on offer, one led by commerce, one by social activism.
Newsweek, 13 Dec
I agree with that quote. In fact, this is the section where I agree with the protestors, in general. The effects of Free Trade Without Conscience are bad. The corporations are despoiling the environment. Workers are being exploited. A lot of bad things are going on. In terms of consolidation of capital without controls, we are back at the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. We are back to children getting black-lung disease in British coal shafts, back to the nastiness of the Chicago meat-packing industry before Upton Sinclair got to it, back to the living conditions Jacob Riis wrote about, back to Andrew Carnegie and his steel mills - and Carnegie had more of a conscience than some of these soulless latter-day magnates.
And I agree that it is very easy for Americans to ignore these problems because, by and large, they are not happening within our borders.
In short, I agree that the invisible hand of the free market does not - quite - work, because it doesn't come with a conscience attached. And the only way to give corporations that conscience is through regulation, because conscience is an additional expense and corporations don't like to incur those. They have to be ordered to do it.
I only disagree on the methodology.
The WTO is not in the business of cracking the whip on unruly corporations. It isn't even in the business of getting governments to crack that whip. It only gets nations to talk to each other about their trade arrangements. That's all. And I don't think its purpose should change.
I believe, instead, that a Concerned Citizen should be lobbying the government directly, explaining that we feel this sort of corporate behavior is unacceptable. The government is the only thing that has the power to put down corporations within its borders - except, perhaps, for the boycott.
The boycott is one of the last traditional protest tools left, and even it is of limited use - because there are so many people in this country, with various concerns and degrees of apathy, that it's hard to reach critical mass with a boycott. A few tens of thousands of people refusing to buy a company's products is not enough people anymore to get the company to take notice.
As for tools like picketing, letter-writing campaigns, et cetera: As I've already indicated, they're going out the window. The street protest is a thing of the past - Seattle was its last gasp, and it was a spectacular failure given that its main target - the WTO - ignored it completely. The only thing the Seattle demonstration did to the WTO was make it difficult for the delegates to get to and from their hotels ... and convince the WTO never to meet there again.
You can still write letters to corporations and politicians (and you should), but the ease with which email or paper letters can be sent in bulk means that this medium is losing its steam - a strange phenomenon where, as the numbers of comments increase, their collective effect decreases. A senator may happen to read one letter from a disgruntled constituent and be moved by it; if he's got many hundreds of letters saying the same thing, he may not see any of them - his aides will just send form replies to them all, unable or unwilling to figure out which ones deserve the senator's attention.
Sort of a bleak outlook for the future of activism, I know. I'm taking all your tools away. Well, welcome to the world. This is why I cannot find it in my heart to fully disapprove of the eco-guerilla groups and others that cross the line between activism and terrorism. Sabotaging a factory is not a pleasant thing, and the message tends to get lost in the violence. Unfortunately it is a proven fact that the only way to hurt a corporation is in its wallet, and there are only so many ways to do that.
I should point out - since this is supposed to be the optimistic, agreeable section of this essay - that the Seattle protests did have one tangible effect, although not one that affects the WTO itself: Some of those strange bedfellows on the street will probably stay in bed together for a while. Labor and environmentalism, old enemies, got sight of each other in Seattle and decided that their common enemy was worse than the prospect of an alliance. It's always helpful for activism if everyone can agree to work together, at least for the duration of the protest.
Fighting Back the Inevitable
It's a familiar plea for the downtrodden of the world. There's just one problem: the downtrodden beg to differ. Representatives of developing nations at the meetings angrily pointed out that the demonstrators were seeking to protect the jobs and benefits of Western workers, who are rich and privileged by any standard. In fact, if the demonstrators' demands were met, the effect would be to crush the hopes of much poorer Third World workers - the original "indigenous people." Citizens of developing countries have only one possible path out of the horrifying levels of poverty, malnutrition, and disease in which they live: economic growth. And every country in history which has raised its living standards - including the United States - has done so by hitching its wagon to the world economy.
Fareed Zakaria, opinion piece, that same Newsweek
(what can I say - it had lots of good quotes)
This is going to hurt.
No, I don't mean you in particular. As a general statement: This is going to hurt, in several ways. But globalization is good. It is also inevitable. You might as well get used to it now.
Globalization, of the kind we are talking about here, is only considered a bad thing by the nations that have all the wealth. Unfortunately we are one of those nations. Got that? You are not one of the poor people. Not in this discussion. You may be working at McDonalds and reading this page from a free terminal at your library, but you're not poor, not by international standards. You are privileged, whether you know it or not.
And since "share the wealth" means "take it away from the privileged," I would not be surprised if globalization looks bad to you. If it doesn't look bad to you, it looks bad to your uncle or dad who worked on an assembly line and saw his job vanish overseas in the last ten years. Or it looks bad to your aunt whose little clothing store was run out of business by the big chain with the low prices on foreign-made sweatshirts.
But for each aunt and uncle you can produce there are now several thousand Third World workers who have a chance to make an income - any income at all. Are they being exploited? Sure, and they shouldn't be. I'm not defending Nike's working conditions here. But I believe you shouldn't overlook the fact that not everyone sees those factories the same way you do. Some people consider them a godsend.
Globalization will be painful. There is already very little left in the blue-collar trades in this country. Tell them goodbye. They're gone. The blue-collar fields are the hallmark of a nation on its way up, of a nation pulling itself into prosperity. We're past that. Like all the older, richer, nations, we will soon only have two thriving markets: Service and information. Brain, and unskilled brawn.
Just accept it now and have done.
That WTO agenda item I mentioned above, about the steel dumping? The US should probably repeal its protections. Sure, then the market will be flooded with foreign steel and the last of the American mills - already marginalized - will probably be shut down.
But to do it otherwise - to keep providing them with crutches and fences - is postponing the inevitable. And though they go out of business, we will all end up paying less money for steel.
But tell that to the steelworkers. I told you, it'll hurt.
It is inevitable that nations build from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy to a service economy. Along the way, they repeat in cycles where the people get exploited until they learn the ropes and learn how to fight back. Then, because the people have learned they have rights, it becomes more expensive to manufacture there, and the cycle repeats in the next nation over, which is cheaper.
Eventually we will run out of nations. What happens then should be very interesting to see. But you and I won't be alive to see it.
If you want to accelerate this cycle - by teaching exploited workers that they have rights, by insisting on the controls and regulations that otherwise wouldn't come until much later in the cycle - I can get behind that. After all, I don't like seeing anyone exploited, and presumably we have learned from our early industrial days. Right?
If you want to keep a close eye on this cycle - making sure that the corporations don't despoil the planet as they're busy spanning it - I can endorse that too. It's a fragile place, after all.
But stop trying to slow the cycle down. You can't and you shouldn't. The longer we try to hold onto our status quo, the longer someone else is stuck in theirs.
And now I believe I've said all I have to say. Hope to see you again tomorrow, when I will return to the usual diet of small, meaningless commentary about daily life. But if you're so annoyed by this that you don't show up, I'll understand.
The reality is that global trade is going to march on in any event; human ambition and the Internet are seeing to that. But it's also true that the process raises some tough questions, and any organization that tries to sort them out is bound to get a lot of people mad.
Newsweek
© Columbine
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