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Sleepless About Seattle
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Business New Haven
12/13/1999
By: BNH
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On page 1 of the Business New Haven bible it says we are supposed to be all for free trade and global enterprise. We've even been known to get down on our knees and sing, "Ye rising tide lifteth all boats" at the drop of a hat. (Maybe you've noticed.)
Imagine our distress when 40,000 of our fellow Americans traveled to the Land of Junior Griffey and Bill Gates to question one of our holiest of principles. This being the season of good will, however, we will for a moment forgive them their trespasses and take a closer look.
Many of us are old enough to remember the protests and riots attending the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and that they didn't really make an immediate dent on American radar screens back then, either. We also learned that fringe political activists can sometimes be like software geeks in their garages, creating or discovering the next new thing.
From a marketing perspective, at least, the Seattle protests seem like a winner. Where else have the "black helicopter" folks gotten together with the tree-huggers, and the "anarchists from Oregon," as oh-so-liberal Seattle Mayor called them.
We've been listening to the Sunday morning squawk shows and searching the editorial pages for some insight. The trouble is, just as in 1968, the only thing we hear is what people want to believe - or, worse yet, what people want us to believe.
We've heard that the demonstrators just don't understand that we're in a global economy.
We've heard our brethren in the chorus sing, as in a recent rendition performed by the Citizens For a Sound Economic Foundation, "Trade barriers such as environment and labor provisions attached to trade agreements make Americans poorer by limiting their ability to trade."
We've heard that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a shadow world government created to subjugate the Third World.
We've heard that the WTO is a shadow world government, designed to subjugate the First World (hey - that's us!).
We've heard that the WTO is a tool of corporate America.
We've heard that imposing middle class American environmental and labor views on emerging nations is a violation of their sovereignty.
Whew. Well, in the spirit of giving, and in spite of the presence of a national media that increasingly is controlled by a handful of global enterprises, we decided to add our own small voice.
o First, virtually everyone is acting as if they agree that it is and should be a global economy. The question really is: What are the rules - and who makes them?
Paradoxically, the movement to impose rules to protect American values and impose environmental and labor restrictions on trading partners moves us closer to world governance. On the other hand, the nuclear reactor disaster in Japan earlier this fall might not have happened if American nuclear safety standards had prevailed.
o We can't make rules for China, but we don't have to accept sneakers made by child or prison laborers just to save a few bucks. After all, who says that lowest price has to be the most enduring American value?
It was fashionable through much of the last decade for many of the world's elites to crow that capitalism didn't need democracy. These voices cited authoritarian Asian success stories such as Malaysia, Indonesia and China. Democracy, apparently, did not agree, as regimes have come crashing down in Malaysia and Indonesia, and China has yet to figure out how to create the benefits of open trade in a closed society.
o Advocates of so-called free trade claim that they are in favor of "market forces." So are we. But what is being passed off as free trade is only marginally about market forces. What we have is brokered trade: agreements crafted by governments for individual industries, even individual companies. These trade "winners" are chosen not by the marketplace; they're chosen oftentimes as a result of a faulty campaign process in this country, and an even more corrupt process in many developing nations, to get the agreements they need.
It may be easy for some to dismiss the protesters in Seattle, and there are clearly no easy solutions to a fair and free trade model for the world.
But what we need to remember is that capitalism works within a framework established by democracy - and not the other way around.
If the growth in the world's economy in the past ten years has taught anything, it is that ideas can trump capital.
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