FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1999

CORPORATIONS OWN THE NATION
U.S. NEEDS TO RESHAPE OR RENOUNCE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION

LOCAL VIEW

by Terry Stone

It's 11 a.m. Wednesday, and I'm back in bed, in the guest room at my friend's house in Seattle, pondering. I have been in Seattle since Saturday to protest the policies of the World Trade Organization. For two days I have marched up and down every street in this town, untill my feet are raw and my muscles ache. "W-T-O has got to go!" But today I lie in a dark room, too exhausted to move, pondering. Tuesday was a huge day of protest, mostly peaceful, united and sincere. I marched with the labor unions, the Free Tibet movement and a farmer from Michigan. The mood was happy and proud. And we cheered when we heard that the opening ceremonies of the WTO had been shut down. I felt our statement had been made. We had achieved the desired effect, and it had been a good day's work, even though a very few had managed to draw the attention from the core issues and hog the media with their petty rampaging. But today is a whole different story in downtown Seattle. The police are out in force, the National Guard has been called out, and I do not want to go to jail. So I'm in bed pondering. Why am I here? Why have I taken a week off of work, paid for a round-trip ticket, imposed myself on friends to house me and worn my feet to a frazzle? What is so important about the WTO? What brought me here in the first place, a 53-year-old mother, way past my protesting years? I guess it's because I'm a 53-year-old mother who has been trying to figure out how the world works. Now it finally all falls into place. And now it the time to act, before it's too late to have any input at all. Haven't we all known, since we were old enough to think, that money makes the world go around? He who has the gold makes the rules. Politics is ruled by money. The purpose of business is to make money - period. We shouldn't be surprised that money has finally taken over. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, that men gather in back rooms and cackle while rubbing their hands together and planning to dominate the world. Rather, that's just the way it turned out. It's the logical progression of history. With no brakes on profit, it was inevitable. Inevitable, not evil. I don't think the new powers that be even realize what they have become. I think they just have a very narrow focus: profit. That is their reason for existing. However, they have taken trumped every other aspect of human existence, down to the very meaning of life on the planet. We need to take control of the people who have taken control. When did we go from being citizens to being consumers? When did we start to deserve only the best materialy, while the rest of the world deserves what's left? When did profits start to justify absolutely any kind of behavior? When did exports become more important than human rights? When did "I want" become more important than "I give"? And when did the stewardship of our world transfer from national governments to transnational corporations? And it has. This change has been going on for quite some time, and we have been like that sleepy frog in the frying pan. But now is the time to wake up and look at the whole picture, not just our pocketbooks, and jump out of the pan. We are paying a very high price for the very low prices we are paying for goods and food in this country, thanks in part to the WTO. We are giving up our sovereignty. And we have given it to the transnational corporations. Two hundred years ago our founders designed our government to protect the rights of the individual, to secure the blessings of liberty and prosperity for all. These are not the mandates of the WTO. The WTO was developed as a way to keep national governments from getting in the way of trade, to protect the right to profit for the few. And whether you like it or not, believe it or not, the WTO has become the de facto world government. We now need to either try to rest power from the WTO and give it back to national governments, or we need rewrite the WTO mandates to include the human values that we all hold dear. If the WTO is to continue to rule the world it need to take all aspects of life on this planet into consideration. We can not allow this disconnect between the rights to profit and the rights of man to continue. The problems of the world are much too complicated to be decided solely by merchants. There is so much more to life than just getting a good price on a pair of shoes because they were made by child labor. We can be better than that. We are better than that. We must be better than that. And so I ponder.

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