Seattle WTO Collapsed 14 Years Ago: Lessons For Today

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/03



Seattle WTO Collapsed 14 Years Ago: Lessons For Today
by David Solnit
Published on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 by PopularResistance.org

December 3, 2013 – Today government officials and corporate lobbyists will meet for the 9th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial. It is exactly 14 years after the global 1%’s “plan A” to use the WTO further concentrate their power in wealth collapsed on Dec 3, 1999 amidst a “state of emergency” suspending basic rights, teargas in and National Gaurd troops in the streets and jails full of hundreds of people (and surrounded by hundreds more supporters) from North Americas emerging global justice movement.

The WTO negotiations had collapsed in failure as a result of the combination of a week of a mass direct action shutdown of the entire opening day of the WTO on November 30 and continued street heat through the week together with the refusal of government officials from poorer global South countries–under pressure from strong movements at home–to submit with the manipulation of the rich countries. Two years later and their every-two-year meeting in the “no-protest” dictatorship of Quatar, the rich elites did mange to take a first step toward their dystopian corporate ruled world with the with the “Doha Round,” but in the 12 years since then they have failed to move it forward. Because social movements defeated the global 1%’s “Plan A” of the using the WTO to impose their policies on the entire world, they have had to resort to a piecemeal “Plan B” of bilateral (nation to nation) and regional trade pacts, like the US-Colombia trade Agreement and the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership)

Deborah James of the global civil society Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network, wrote last week that, “WTO talks towards an agreement [in Geneva] in advance of the 9th Ministerial [in Bali] ended in an impasse today.” in a statement signed by hundreds of organizations, Our World is Not for Sale network critiqued the policies that the WTO seeks to further:

"After more than three decades of experience with a corporate-led model of globalization, it is clear that this particular model of globalization has failed workers, farmers, and the environment, while facilitating the vast enrichment of a privileged few. The emergence of the global financial and economic crises of the last five years have exposed many negative impacts of policies, such as: deregulation of the financial sector resulting in financial collapse and job loss; commodification of the agricultural markets resulting in food price volatility and hunger; ’race to the bottom’ liberalization policies for production leading to deadly calamites, such as the collapse of the factory in Bangladesh where more than 1000 textile workers perished; intellectual property monopolies limiting global access to life-saving medicines; and corporate-trade-expansion (rather than trade-for-development) policies exacerbating the climate crisis. Despite this incredible harm, these liberalization, deregulation, and corporate monopolization policies form the backbone of the current global trade system, consolidated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) since 1995.”

[Demeter]

1. And yet, the greed and the bad idea lives on

Wasn't 1776 supposed to have solved this? What are we doing on the wrong side of this issue?