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NEWS -Free Burma Members Join the D
Subject: NEWS -Free Burma Members Join the Demonstration in Seattle
Free Burma Members Join the Demonstration in Seattle
Rangoon Post - 29 November, 1999
About 10 Free Burma members from various groups and locations around
the United States are part of the thousands of demonstrators in Seattle
fighting the WTO one-sided practices that support business interests and
not human rights interests.
Someone once said, "It is o.k. to make santions against a country
when a company is economically vulnerable or intellectual property is
being stolen. But sanctions are blocked and illegal when dictators are
involved that hurt, attack and imprison their own people violating their
human rights."
----------------------------
WTO to Meet As Protesters Rally Forces Trade Talks to Open Without an
Agenda
By John Burgess
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 29, 1999; Page A01
SEATTLE, Nov. 28?Three-thousand trade
officials from more than 100 countries gather
here this week to try to accelerate a
half-century-old trend of tying the world ever
closer economically. They are expected to meet
against a noisy backdrop of street protests by
people who believe that the current global
trading system destroys jobs and harms the
environment.
The delegates to the four-day World Trade
Organization meeting, which starts Tuesday, are
hoping to begin a new round of negotiations
aimed at lowering barriers to the exchange of
goods and services between nations. Success
is by no means certain. Exploratory talks toward
an agenda for the meeting ended in failure last
week as officials tried to nudge other countries
to open their markets further, but defended their
own territories.
If the meeting does reach an agreement this
week, it would lead to the opening of the ninth
extended round of trade liberalization talks since
the end of World War II. Previous rounds have
opened up national borders to the point that the
world's countries sold each other more than
$5.5 trillion in goods and services in 1998, up
80 percent for the decade.
As the 20th century nears its close, political
leaders of every stripe and nationality have
praised trade as benefiting everyone because it
helps raise standards of living and employment.
Trade can "create for billions of people the
conditions that allow them to work and live, and
raise their families in dignity," President Clinton
said recently. He plans to sound that theme
again during an address Wednesday to the
WTO.
Yet a mood of anxiety hangs over the
conference. Trade barriers have historically
helped define nationhood by protecting local
companies, jobs, even ways of life. When
barriers come down, a bit of what binds people
together as a country can be lost.
For overt expression of these feelings,
delegates from the 135-country organization
would need only look to the streets of Seattle,
where thousands of people were expected to
turn out with protest banners. Protesters held a
parade Sunday in one Seattle neighborhood and
a large rally was planned for Tuesday. At least
four people already have been arrested for
protest activities.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney plans to lead
a march condemning the Geneva-based
agency, which enforces global trade
agreements, as a tool of corporations and
exporter of jobs; environmental militants who
think its decisions create dirty air and water
have vowed to "shut down" the meeting with civil
disobedience.
Among those expected to participate in the
protests was James P. Hoffa, Teamsters union
president. Hoffa, in an interview on "Fox Sunday
News," said the union should be part of any
trade talks. "We're going to put a human face on
the problems with the WTO," he said. "We're
going there--organized labor, the AFL-CIO,
religious leaders, environmentalists--to really
talk about what's wrong with the WTO: the fact
that they put corporate greed, corporate profits
above human rights."
The issue of human rights also struck a chord
with Reform Party presidential candidate Patrick
J. Buchanan, who yesterday on NBC's "Meet
the Press" criticized the United States for
recently agreeing to support China's efforts to
join the WTO. "The deal that was cut in Beijing
was a complete capitulation by the United
States," he said. "In return, we got nothing in the
way of human rights improvement, nothing in the
way that would build-down the missiles aimed at
Taiwan, nothing in the way of reduced
belligerence to this country."
Commerce Secretary William Daley, also on
"Meet the Press," defended U.S. efforts to bring
China into the WTO. "It is in our best interests if
we see a different China into the next century,"
he said. "A main way we can do that is to do
more trade with China."
These issues are part of the paradox of a single
world economy. Such an economy can generate
enormous wealth, as countries specialize in
products and sell to the planet at large. It can
also blur distinctive food, dress and lifestyles of
countries, push financial panics across borders
at fiber-optic speed, and move decisions once
made at home to faceless executives thousands
of miles away.
With all that very much in mind, the WTO
delegates were expected to press further
toward economic oneness. Among the subjects
posed for discussion: downsizing Europe's
programs that subsidize farm exports; further
opening trade in services; refining rules against
the illegal practice of "dumping," or selling
foreign goods at illegally low prices; keeping the
Internet tariff-free, and allowing public scrutiny
of WTO dispute proceedings, which now go on
in closed session.
If an agreement is reached, each country would,
in effect, have to trust its neighbors a bit more.
At the same time, the deal would be crafted in
such a way that each country would believe that
it had defended its sovereign uniqueness.
That won't be easy. Militaristic terminology can
slip in as trade discussions proceed. European
Union trade commissioner Pascal Lamy, for
example, is known to talk of his side's
"offensive" moves, or demands for market
opening, and "defensive" moves, or protection
of Europe's own.
Could France be France without picturesque
villages of farmers and grazing cows? No,
suggested the French agriculture and fisheries
minister, Jean-Andre Glavany, who spoke up for
subsidy programs that help keep the villages in
existence. "I reject the picture of France with
150,000 farmers" rather than the 700,000 it has
today, he told a Washington audience this
month. "I oppose the idea of vast empty tracts
of land."
For similar reasons of preserving something
about the home country, Canada reins in
American magazines, China limits the showing
of American movies and Japan restricts the
eating of American rice.
"There is a widespread view abroad that
globalization is being forced on the world by
American corporations, that globalization is
Americanization," said Clyde Prestowitz,
president of a Washington think tank called the
Economic Strategy Institute. "So there's a
banding together to protect the national
essence."
If there's a common theme to this ire, it's loss of
control. People all over East Asia were furious
in 1997 that their economies crashed because
far-away investors got worried and pulled their
money en masse from Asian financial markets.
Years of gains in living standards were wiped
out almost overnight by strangers.
The International Monetary Fund, the
Washington-based international agency that
made bail-out loans to many of the ailing
countries, added to feelings of loss of
sovereignty by putting conditions on its money:
cuts in government spending, drastic steps to
bring down inflation, ends to subsidies.
At times globalization has helped determine who
those countries' leaders are. The Asian financial
crisis rocked the Indonesian economy
sufficiently to trigger demonstrations that
brought down the 32-year rule of President
Suharto.
These feelings aren't limited to developing
countries. In the 1980s, Japan's battering of
bedrock U.S. industries such as cars and
semiconductors, followed by billion-dollar
purchases of U.S. buildings, securities and
companies, led to feelings that control was
passing beyond American borders. What would
happen, not a few talk-show pundits asked, if
Japanese investors pulled out of New York
markets? Today concern over Japan has waned
as its economy has slipped into recession.
For now the focus of skeptics, here and abroad,
is the WTO.
Ralph Nader, the abiding consumer activist, gets
visibly angry when he talks about the agency,
which he calls a "super-national autocratic
system . . . that runs courts that would be illegal
in this country." By treating trade as a virtue in
itself, WTO dispute decisions often stamp on
labor rights and environmental protection, he
argues. The United States and other countries
have been forced to soften their laws in these
fields to stay on the good side of the
organization, he contends.
U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky
dismisses talk of diminished sovereignty. The
United States is free to ignore any WTO ruling
with which it disagrees, though it would face
sanctions.
Barshefsky's office estimates that 10 percent of
America's jobs--12 million--depend on the
nation's exports. Thus corporate America is
much a part of the debate. The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and other business groups are
sending their own delegations to Seattle. The
Business Roundtable, a collection of large
companies, is releasing a series of reports
showing how important trade is in dollars and
jobs in 71 congressional districts, and
identifying small businesses, including
skateboard makers and artists, as beneficiaries
of global trade.
Similar fights play out in virtually every country.
But in the end, most countries have opened
their borders.
Sometimes it's because they're bullied by their
trading partners or the international community.
The United States has ridden herd on Japan for
decades to open its markets--its farmers once
campaigned for protection waving posters
showing a giant wall surrounding a peaceful and
productive Japan. Now rice imports, banned for
years, are legal, if still controlled.
At other times countries employ what Razeen
Sally, a lecturer at the London School of
Economics, called "the Nike strategy--just do it."
They make a calculated decision that they would
benefit from opening, even if there's pain up
front as local industries and farms get knocked
around. China's leaders seem to have accepted
this risk as they move to join the WTO.
There is a long history of this faith in open trade,
proponents say. The 13 American colonies, all
proud of their distinct identities, created a
historic experiment in democracy; they also
created one of the world's first free trade zones.
In the late 20th century, the movement has
gained force. Perhaps furthest down the road is
the European Union, which allows citizens to
work in whichever country and has introduced a
common currency in 11 countries. People gripe
and complain about EU regulations, but in the
end they learn to live with them.
The North American Free Trade Agreement
lowered barriers between the United States,
Canada and Mexico, despite concerns about
the same labor and environmental issues raised
in Seattle. Talks are underway for essentially
uniting the Americas from top to bottom in a
single free trade zone about five years from
now.
Perhaps it's because nations realize they can
prosper even if they give up some control. East
Asia's dramatic gains in living standards in the
last generation, though dented by the financial
crisis, stem largely from trading with other
nations.
The talks in Seattle are expected to be a new
test of this search for balance.
135 Nations Work Toward One Goal -- Better
Trade
Q. What is the World Trade Organization?
A. The WTO is an international agency that joins
135 countries for the stated goal of assuring the
freest possible flow of trade. With headquarters
on well-manicured grounds overlooking Lake
Geneva in Switzerland, it's been called the
ultimate capitalist club.
To get in, countries agree to follow broad
principles of openness in their economies and to
move away from things such as government
subsidies of their export industries. No country
has to be a member, but generally, nations fight
to get in, as the world economy is ever more
important to prosperity.
Where does the WTO's authority come from?
From the 51-year-old General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, a document that 23 countries
worked out in 1947 to liberalize trade after
World War II. Many more countries signed on to
it in later years. Administered with much talk, but
little authority, by a bureaucracy in Geneva for
decades, it was amended in 1994 to create the
WTO.
How does the agency resolve trade disputes?
When a country has a trade gripe against a
WTO member -- for example, a domestic law
that is blocking the sale of a nation's goods -- it
files a complaint in Geneva. The two countries
sit down to talk, but if that doesn't work the
agency convenes a "panel," essentially a
tribunal of trade experts, that hears arguments,
examines evidence, and considers domestic
laws and some of the trade agreements that
number 30,000 pages. It then issues a decision,
as a court does.
Are the decisions binding?
That's a politically sensitive question. Any
country can legally refuse to abide by a WTO
ruling against it, but that's not the end of it. The
country must negotiate compensation with the
aggrieved country or absorb trade sanctions
that it can levy with the WTO's approval.
This ability to say "no" allows member
governments to say their sovereignty is in no
way diminished. But the organization's critics
say that in the real world, countries tend to bend
to WTO rulings because they don't want to take
the financial pain.
What are these sessions called "rounds"?
About every decade, major nations meet to
agree on ways to further liberalize trade.
Typically this takes several years of
negotiations, a "round" of them, in which
countries generally try to win new access to
foreign markets while protecting their own
industries. There have been eight rounds since
the 1940s. Seattle is meant to be the starting
point for a ninth that would last at least three
years, provided an agenda can be agreed upon.
I've heard of the Tokyo Round and the Uruguay
Round. What's this one going to be called?
That's a sore point for the United States, which
wants it to be called the Seattle Round. But
some people, the Europeans, for instance, are
going with the name Millennium Round. In the
world of international trade, no decision is easy.
Trade Over Time
Milestones in the International Trading System
1944: An international conference of 44
countries at Bretton Woods, N.H., agrees on a
fixed-rate exchange system and lays the
groundwork for the International Monetary Fund,
World Bank and the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade.
1947: The General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade is born. Initially signed by 23 countries,
GATT's goal is to liberalize trade -- eliminating
tariffs, subsidies, import quotas and other forms
of protection.
1973-79: GATT's Tokyo Round of negotiations
involved about 100 countries and continued
efforts to reduce tariffs. Results included an
average one-third cut in customs duties in the
world's major industrial markets.
1974: The arrangement regarding international
trade in textiles, also known as the Multifibre
Arrangement, began in January. It sought to
expand and liberalize trade in textiles while
protecting some industries so as to avoid
disruptive effects in individual markets and
production lines.
1986-93: The Uruguay Round, possibly the most
ambitious set of multilateral trade-liberalization
provisions ever adopted by such diverse
nations, produced agreement among 125
countries to help boost global trade. The talks
included service industries as well as
agriculture, textiles, research subsidies and
intellectual property.
1995: Establishment of the World Trade
Organization to replace GATT as a more
powerful multilateral group with responsibility for
implementing new trade agreements and
enforcing existing pacts.
1997: WTO agreements by 40 countries on
cutting customs duties on information
technology products and by 69 governments on
liberalizing telecommunications services.
Seventy nations also agreed to open their
financial services sectors, coverning more than
95 percent of trade in banking, insurance,
securities and financial data.
1999: China, United States reach agreement to
allow China's membership in the WTO.
SOURCES: World Trade Organization,
Economic Strategy Institute, Facts on File
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
Company