Open Letter on the Reeducation of Bill Clinton

Dear President Clinton,

What a change for you and your administration! When your administration five years ago rammed the WTO agreement through Congress in a lame duck session in 1994, it was already clear how the trade agreements would adversely affect labor, consumer and environmental standards, and basic democratic values.

Critics explained how the agreement would pull down vital environmental protections. Countries would challenge other nations’ toxic reduction, animal welfare and many other environmental safeguards as non-tariff trade barriers, the critics said, and force their repeal or payment of trade sanctions.

Critics said WTO rules would block adoption of national laws banning the import of goods made with brutalized child labor. Even the Congressional Research Service agreed.

Critics pointed out that signing on to the WTO agreement would subject the United States to secretive, kangaroo courts. Media scholars objected to sidestepping the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. You and your top aides not only refused to listen to these concerns, you aggressively denied they had any legitimacy. Would that you had read, at least, the 500 page GATT agreement before sending it to Congress!

Five years of WTO-corporate rule has demonstrated, beyond any serious dispute, that the critics were right. But since the arguments have remained the same, it seems unlikely that this is the reason you and your top aides have suddenly become sensitive to the WTO concerns of the poor, labor, and the environment, as you say.

It is hard to believe that it is the arguments that have led you to suggest that the WTO should not be the private corporate government of CEOs.

Because what has changed is not the WTO’s rules, but the political climate. And no one doubts that you are a master of sniffing the political winds.

The coming together of tens of thousands of labor unionists, environmentalists, consumer rights advocates, farmers, human rights activists, students, concerned religious people and many, many others in Seattle in opposition to the WTO’s regime of corporate globalization signals the coalescing of many groups that do not usually march together—and a potent political coalition, a majoritarian coalition, that is challenging the overweening corporate dominance over our political economy.

"Fixing" the WTO, as you and your aides have said you hope to do, cannot be done by the very modest measures you have so far suggested. A little bit more "openness," a dash of "participation," a small study group on labor or the environment—none of these measures begin to fix the fundamental autocratic flaws of the WTO and its trade uber alles mandate.

"Fixing" the WTO would require subordinating commercial imperatives to the humane values of worker and consumer protection, health and safety, ecological protection and so on—a complete reversal of the current WTO structure.

"Fixing" the WTO would require elevating the Precautionary Principle, without any nullfying caveats about "sound science" (code for corporate science). The whole point of the precautionary principle is to allow governments to act to protect human health and the environment in the midst of scientific uncertainty or unknowns. WTO rules would need to be completely reversed.

"Fixing" the WTO would require permitting countries to treat goods differently based on how they are produced—whether with brutalized child labor, unsustainable harvesting techniques, highly polluting technologies or factory farms. That would be a 180-degree turn from current WTO rules and practice.

These and many other necessary changes would entail a wholesale transformation of the WTO. Are you ready to pursue such measures?

If not, and there is little evidence that you intend anything more than soothsaying by your recent nods to WTO protesters and critics, you will find a growing coalition of Americans and citizens of other nations radiating out from the streets and meeting rooms of Seattle to demand that the WTO be scrapped, and that a new set of international trade rules be devised—rules that permit and foster measures to promote local economic and sustainable development, initiatives that pioneer a healthier society, democratic governance and balanced relations among rich and poor nations.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

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