WTO: SEATTLE AND BEYOND--Congressman Sherrod Brown, 1999

[Kolesar]

http://www.house.gov/sherrodbrown/citywtod.htm

Friday, December 3, 1999, The City Club of Cleveland
U.S. Congressman Sherrod Brown
13th Congressional District, Ohio
No issue in front of the American public gets more one-sided coverage from the nation's media than trade. All serious-minded people, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times tell us, support free trade. It's hardly debatable, especially since the loudest cheerleaders are former presidents and secretaries of state, academics and editorial writers, and almost all of America's CEOs.

They tell us the best way to promote democracy and increase the standard of living around the world is to engage in free trade and unregulated global commerce. The new captains of industry assure us that if they can operate without interference from governments, environmentalists and labor groups, they will provide the capital and jobs to create a sort of utopia for individuals the world over. Just trust us, they say. Trade will generate great wealth. Some of it will trickle down.

Yet, even in the face of unrelenting media and elite support for global commerce with no democratic controls, the American public still has major reservations about United States trade policy. For years, trade policy had been made by a handful of members of Congress, select people at the Departments of State and Commerce, several prominent Washington attorneys, and Wall Street bankers. Congress simply ratified these arcane agreements.

But in the last half dozen years, things have changed. In 1993, an engaged public almost convinced Congress to defeat the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then in 1995, Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress presented us with their "Contract with America," a blueprint to deregulate our economy, roll back environmental laws, depress wages, weaken worker safety standards, and eviscerate food safety protections. And what was the response from the American people? They overwhelmingly rejected turning our economy and our way of life over to this country's largest corporations.

Shortly after, President Clinton appealed to Congress for Fast Track legislation -- a global Contract, if you will, with America -- a blue print for unregulated global commerce that ensured depressed wages, dismissed worker protections, and ignored food safety standards. Once again, the American public weighed in. If trickle down economics wouldn't work in the United States, why should it be exported to the rest of the world?

The table was set for the Fast Track vote. The stakes were high. The White House predicted economic disaster. Mainstream economists warned of a stock market crash. House Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich told us there would be a recession. Yet Congress defeated fast track, not once, but twice. It was the first major defeat of a White House trade initiative since the end of the second world war. And it was the first bit of blue sky that workers in the United States and Latin America had seen in U.S. trade policy in many years. And our economy has continued to be strong.

We are seeing the same thing over and over again with trade proposals. The bills and agreements are drafted by bankers, corporate lawyers, and free trade experts who believe in unregulated global commerce with no democratic controls. Congress balks. The corporate-written trade bill for sub-Saharan Africa was shelved twice. The Multilateral Investment Agreement was put to bed, perhaps permanently. The Caribbean Basin Initiative was defeated.

And then Seattle.

The American public and people all over the world are insisting there be rules in the global economy. They want trade agreements that act as if people matter -- they want a meaningful social contract that protects our health and labor laws, protects our working conditions, and protects our environment.

So, what did the protestors at Seattle accomplish? More than any time in our history, the American public is paying attention to trade. The more they know about U.S. trade policy, the less they like it. They are finding out that our clean air laws were weakened when the WTO sided with Venezuelan oil company's contention that our regulations against gasoline contaminants were too stringent. They are learning that our endangered species and animal protection laws were compromised when foreign tuna and shrimp interests brought actions against the U.S. in the World Trade Organization. They are hearing that our Great Lakes water may one day be treated as any other commodity and be available for sale to any country wanting water. And they now suspect that our anti-dumping laws may be legally challenged in the WTO. In short, the American public has been shown that the promises made to us about trade are not being kept.

And the world has watched and has learned as well. Across the Atlantic, some of the European Union's most important food safety laws were challenged on behalf of the beef industry and overturned by our government and the WTO. The Canadian government, at the behest of Canada's asbestos industry, recently filed a WTO action against France and nine other countries in the EU that banned the use of asbestos, which is one of the most recognized carcinogens in the world.
These are public health laws erected by democratically elected governments to protect the well-being of their citizens. Yet, under the rules and guidelines of the World Trade Organization, these laws are all considered non-tariff barriers to trade. In fact, the World Trade Organization has ruled against every single democratically achieved environmental or health law it has reviewed, judging them all to be illegal trade barriers that must be eliminated or changed.

By its very nature, the World Trade Organization is an undemocratic organization that is staffed exclusively by unelected bureaucrats.

Its three judge dispute resolution panels -- the ones that in every instance have classified environmental and health standards as illegal barriers to trade -- come to their decisions without having to reveal the process surrounding the outcome. These panels typically consist of trade lawyers, not scientists, not physicians, not public health advocates, not elected officials who are accountable to the public. All appeals have been decided in secret by this group of trade lawyers. Our clean air and water regulations and our food safety laws are increasingly subject to the whims of the unelected and unaccountable trade lawyers in Geneva.

That's why Seattle. 30,000. 40,000. Perhaps 50,000, mostly middle-aged men and women, walked through the streets of Seattle. Peacefully and passionately. They believe that if trade laws protect intellectual property rights, they should also protect the environment. They believe that if our trade laws protect patents, they should protect our food safety. And they believe that if our trade laws protect Hollywood movies, they should protect worker rights. The delegates inside and the public outside the meetings -- and I was part of both -- heard the depth of passion and the breadth of support for enforceable standards to help workers and to protect the environment, and support a trade policy as interested in American values of fairness as in corporate profits.

I met with religious groups that were opposed to the way China persecutes its Muslims and Christians and condones forced abortions. I marched with men and women in labor unions who were competing against a flood of imports made by children in factories with pad-locked doors and by political prisoners in labor camps. I shared a cup of coffee with some veterans who don't want our nation to trade with a country like China that organizes riots against our embassy and steals our nuclear secrets. And I met with the Malaysian trade minister and listened to his fears that low-wage workers in neighboring Indonesia would rob his country of desperately needed investment.

The real debate is not whether we want to be part of the global economy. The real debate is over what rules we want for that global economy and who makes these rules. The WTO represents a replay of the struggle we had in this country: a massive shift of power from democratically elected governments to private interests. The American people -- as played out in Upton Sinclair's 1906 book The Jungle -- fought for food safety laws against large food processing companies and their allies in government. And the American people won. We now have the world's safest food supply.

The American people -- many suffering from the violence inflicted upon them by Pinkertons -- fought for the right to organize and to be paid a livable wage. And the American people won. We now have solid worker rights, safer workplaces, and a strong middle class.

The American people -- played out in our lifetimes -- fought for strong environmental laws against powerful American industrialists who wanted no part of government regulation. And the American people won. Just look at Lake Erie, and the Cuyahoga River, and the air over northeast Ohio to see how far we have come.

But the rules of international trade -- NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, every single trade agreement in front of the U.S. Congress -- shift power dramatically from elected governments to private interests.

One WTO bureaucrat told the Financial Times, "The World Trade Organization is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups."

And former Director-General of the World Trade Organization Renato Ruggiero said, "Environmental standards could only damage the global trading system."

And, it could get worse. Especially if the World Trade Organization moves in the direction of NAFTA, which to my knowledge is the only trade agreement in history that allows private corporations to sue foreign governments if they feel a state or national law is a barrier to trade.

The governor of California -- with the overwhelming support of the state legislature -- has banned the gasoline additive MTBE because it's leaking into the drinking water, causing it to taste like paint thinner. MTBE has also been found to cause cancer in certain lab animals. The Canadian corporation that makes MTBE is using NAFTA to sue the United States for nearly one billion dollars because it believes the ban of this chemical constitutes a trade barrier. Think about that. A foreign corporation is asking American taxpayers to give it one billion dollars because the democratically elected governor and legislature banned a chemical that scientists believe is a carcinogen.

And it works in both directions. The Ethyl Corporation of Richmond, Virginia, manufactures MMT, a manganese compound that is added to gasoline to enhance performance. Although banned in most of the United States for many years, the Canadian government only recently enacted a ban on MMT. Ethyl claimed this ban cost them profits -- in essence, a legal takings -- and was therefore a non-tariff barrier to trade, which is illegal under NAFTA. Ethyl sued the Canadian government. Before the NAFTA three-country tribunal heard the case, the Canadian government, figuring they would lose under NAFTA rules, repealed their public health ban, and paid the Ethyl corporation $13 million Canadian tax dollars.

Why should a private company in one country be able to overturn a public health law enacted by an elected, democratic body in another country?

This is why it is so important to get worker and environmental standards at the core of the World Trade Organization. The GATT agreement passed by Congress in 1994, which created the WTO the following year, does not even mention the word "environment" in its mandate. Because WTO rules protecting worker rights, the environment, and food safety are as yet unwritten, permitting China to accede to WTO now is a grave mistake. China is a nation of 1.2 billion people ruled by an authoritarian government with a demonstrated aversion to environmental and labor standards, and human rights. Letting China join the WTO amidst the negotiations for worker rights and the environment will only pull down the standards that we hope we can convince the WTO to adopt.

Currently, the Clinton Administration is touting the creation of its working group on labor and the environment as a major breakthrough for the World Trade Organization. It is envisioned that in the next decade the group will finalize a set of recommendations on how best to incorporate things like clean air, food safety standards, and labor rights. Given the snail-like pace of reform inherent in large bureaucracies, the fight to incorporate real standards will be a difficult one.

This fight will require a President and a Congress determined to extend the same protections to the rest of the world that we have in this country. Think about how much more difficult that fight will be when the dictatorship that rules the People's Republic of China threatens to devalue its currency and dump hundreds of billions of dollars of goods into our market if the WTO even attempts to negotiate tough provisions.

Trade, like capitalism, can create great wealth for the world's people. The economic benefits of trade, unfortunately, haven't trickled down to the world's poorest people. The massive wealth that has been generated by trade hasn't enabled them to afford or receive medical care. It hasn't provided them a decent education or the chance to actually earn enough money to buy any of our exports. In 1960, before globalization, the most affluent 20 percent of the world's population were thirty times richer than the poorest 20 percent. In 1997, at the height of globalization, the most fortunate were 74 times richer than the world's poorest. The combined fortunes of the 400 richest people in the world equals more than the annual income of the poorest 50% of the world's people.

The sad reality is that there is no real mechanism in our trade laws to help the developing countries share the wealth that is being generated by trade. Last year, Nike paid Michael Jordan as much ($25 million) to endorse its shoes as Nike Corporation paid 35,000 Vietnamese to make them. They do not share in the wealth they are helping to create, and people should have that opportunity.

Since the end of the second world war, successive Administrations have pressured other countries to accept our ideas on intellectual property rights, the deregulation of financial markets, and the privatization of state-run services. Why should we not try to sell and promote around the world our whole economic package -- a package that includes labor, environment and human rights? If we protect intellectual property rights, Hollywood movies, patents, and CD ROMS, why not protect the environment, worker rights, and food safety?

We need to protect basic human rights for workers around the world: freedom from child labor, forced labor, and discrimination; freedom to join together with others in a union to have a voice at work. We are so proud of our success at exporting our products around the world. Let us work with equal pride in exporting our democratic values human rights, labor rights and environmental standards. After all, a global economy that fails to lift the standard of living honor the values of working men and women -- those who help create the world's wealth -- will not work for working people. If it does not work for those who work with their hands and if it does not work for those who create the world's products and the world's wealth, then it will not work at all.

[cherryperry]

1. Great article and I say

AMEN! Seattle was a turning point for me because I thought no one really cared until that demonstration. Michael Moore's 'Roger & Me' also helped. As the daughter of a union organizer, I was so proud to see people in the streets again and so very sad to see the media coverage (liberal media, my ass!). This is one of the reasons Clinton should have been excoriated, not the BJ's in his oval office!

[ikojo]

2. I was in Seattle

At the time I had a lot of hope that people were finally seeing corporate America for what they are. I had hope that it was only the beginning of change and then along came the chimp.