World Trade Organization

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August 7, 2012 | 2:27 PM | By  | 

Seattle activists seek to make TPP as well-known – and infamous – as WTO | 

It’s usually not a good idea to have two acronyms in a headline, or anywhere near each other.

Bear with me.

Wikimedia

WTO protests in Seattle November 30 1999

Boring acronyms — like WTO — sometimes represent and often disguise hugely political and complex issues of great importance.

Most of us know that jargon and acronyms are standard tools used by politicians, bureaucrats and corporations to obfuscate, discourage public scrutiny or cause your brain to seize up.

Here’s a new one of those potential brain-freezers: TPP, aka the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

It’s about almost everything and anything that can be bought or sold. What it will cost, where it will be made, who benefits. As one writer in Slate noted, it’s being done mostly in secret.

So the activist community, especially some of the old Seattle WTO protest gang, is now gearing up to ‘raise awareness’ of the TPP.

You probably haven’t heard of the TPP and would prefer not to hear more. But if you want to know why your prescription drugs could cost more, what a global “corporate tribunal” will be or at least sound smart and cool within the activist set, read on ….

Wordle

WTO used to be obscure and wonky, too. Before 1999, few in the public were aware of WTO, the World Trade Organization, an international organization that sets (or tries to set) the rules for international commerce.

After the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, which spawned massive street protests, many if not most people today (certainly in Seattle) have at least some idea of what the organization does and why it can be controversial.

The Battle in Seattle was billed, simplistically, as the culmination of the American ‘anti-globalization’ movement. It sounds stupid today to be anti-global. The protests weren’t really against globalization, I would argue, so much as they were for things like fair trade, environmental protection, corporate transparency, human and worker rights and so on.

A big point of the protests was about the poor world’s outrage at exploitative trade practices mostly benefiting the wealthy nations.

Lori Wallach of Public Citizen

“The way to think of TPP is that it’s WTO on crack,” said Lori Wallach, an activist with Public Citizen. Wallach was in Seattle Monday night to speak at a gathering of global do-gooders, fair-traders and WTO protest veterans gathered at, of all places, the Queen Anne office of an investment management firm.

At first glance, the gathering at Newground Social Investment might prompt some snide remark about wine & cheese Seattle liberals. They did have a lot of wine and cheese and, presumably, liberals. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Justice, Politics, Lori Wallach, Public Citizen, trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Washington Fair Trade Coalition, World Trade Organization
April 26, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By  | 

Guardian: The lost spirit of Seattle | 

Flickr, djbones

WTO Seattle riots

Remember the Battle in Seattle? Not the movie, but the real event — the 1999 Seattle WTO riots.

Remember what it was all about?

The Guardian’s Latoya Peterson wants to know.

Peterson writes that she ran into an inflatable palm tree in Washington D.C. last weekend, which apparently meant something to a group of protesters demonstrating — to little media attention — against the international trade policies promulgated by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization (WTO).

In a word, globalization. Says Peterson:

Twelve years ago, the nation was captivated by the Battle in Seattle, an anti-globalisation protest so vast that it brought the city to a standstill. The 1999 protests were marked by widespread media coverage, which sparked conversations about the role of the three largest global trade governing bodies – and illuminated how violence can be leveraged by activists seeking publicity.

The arguments back then — I helped cover them and got a dose of tear gas — were based on the complaint by many organizations that multi-national corporations were exercising too much power over poor nations through unfair trade agreements.

The protests were followed by the so-called Doha talks — or, more accurately, the Doha Development Round — aimed at reducing international trade barriers and getting rid of national subsidies (e.g. for agricultural products) that many felt undermined the economies of poorer nations.

As another Guardian journalist recently noted in mystery novel fashion, 10 years on nothing much as happened and the Doha talks appear to be on life support.

Peterson wonders, in print, if the protesters and the media just lost interest:

The discussion of Doha has been largely confined to financial media – a far cry from the public conversation once hoped for by those who took to the streets in Seattle, which they hoped would encourage the barons of international trade to put people first in their policies. And the effects of the debate being marginalised are all too evident: as the small procession continued up the street, most people continued about their daily lives, knowing that the protest, like so many in DC, would fail to create any measurable change.

FILED UNDER: Justice, Battle in Seattle, Doha, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, WTO