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Send in the clowns
George W. Bush's presidential debate debut turns into a genuine snoozefest.
By Jake Tapper
[12/03/99]

The great straddler
Free trader President Clinton veers left in Seattle. But will his finesse be enough to keep Al Gore's Democratic Party intact?
By Todd Gitlin
[12/03/99]

The three horsemen of globalization
Critics fear increased cooperation between the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund will spawn an 800-pound gorilla.
By Monte Paulsen
[12/02/99]

What's really at stake in Seattle
Economists speak out on the issues behind the World Trade Organization summit and the street protests.
By Alicia Montgomery, Daryl Lindsey and Fiona Morgan
[12/02/99]

And then there were four ...
Ralph Nader will announce his campaign for president on the Green Party ticket in January, joining those on the Republican, Democrat and Reform tickets in next year's race for the White House.
By Micah L.Sifry
[12/02/99]

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The crowd cheered loudly and clapped. But, with a painful feeling in my gut, I sat on my hands. My mind wandered back to a couple of years I spent living in southern Africa in the early '90s. I thought about poor people I had met who packed their unbelievably small huts and houses with heavy Western furniture and any other sign of modernity they could get their hands on. I thought about parents in newly independent countries who protested when schools tried to replace academic curricula with the agricultural, bewildering those who believed that their kids had a right to read Shakespeare and learn skills that would give them the comfortable lifestyle of their colonizers. Who was I to tell them, as Norberg-Hodge implied, that subsistence farming was a superior existence?

Much as I abhor wasteful consumerism and corporate greed, I want to see the Third World get the chance to develop. My confusion, which has caused me intense agony in a week of physical and ideological clashes, lies in whether the WTO and globalization will help or hinder that process. Judging by the reaction to this week’s events in the developing world, the protestors are a bit confused about that too.

As riot police took over city streets and WTO meetings got shakily off the ground mid-week, one Indian participant stopped in a hotel corridor to argue that protestors who believe they are fighting for the rights of exploited workers in developing countries have inadvertently become "like Marie Antoinette, saying let them have cake."

What they don’t understand, said the Indian whose job does not allow him to comment on the record, is that the labor and environmental standards that the U.S. government is pushing to appease protestors will hurt small-time fishermen, carpet makers and others in India who cannot possibly keep up with the standards of the West. "If you deprive people of their bread and butter," he warned, "we’ll have millions of protestors instead of thousands."

Indeed, many Indians believe so strongly that the protests are against their interests that there is a widespread belief among them that the whole affair was, in the words of Times of India economics editor Priya Ranjan Dash, "being stage-managed by the Clinton administration."

So in the eyes of much of the developing world, the protests -- or at least how they are being used by the White House in an election year -- have become a symbol of the very kind of Western domination they are fighting against.

That is not to say that everyone in the developing world is thrilled with the WTO and the free trade system it represents. Many developing countries believe they got shafted in the last round of negotiations. Delegates from developing countries came to Seattle prepared to fight for more open markets in the kind of products they make, such as agricultural goods and textiles. They also wanted longer transition periods for opening up their markets to Western goods, a toughening up of measures that call upon Western powers to share technology with developing countries in which they do business and the reform of intellectual property rules that prevent them from making cheap drugs to combat AIDS and other epidemics.

For that to happen, though, what was supposed to be the WTO’s "development round" had to come off. When it did, and labor and environmental issues took center stage instead of their issues, delegates found themselves confronting what they perceived as yet more barriers set by the West. Hence the stage was set for the Seattle battle within the WTO.

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