Yes Men
By Went to see Yes Men last night. If you haven’t heard, it’s a documentary about a couple of guys who end up maintaining the web address gatt.org, from which they operate a satirical anti-WTO website. Not paying sufficient attention, a fair amount of people mistake their website for the actual WTO website, and end up sending invitations to various speaking engagements around the world. Hilarity ensues as one of the gentlemen impersonates a WTO official and gives subversive presentations to oblivious organizations.
Best thing is, they never get caught. The guy appears on television with a made-up European sounding name to debate and anti-WTO activist, and the host never catches on. Dude goes to Finland to demonstrate a leisure suit that sports an enormous golden phallus, and the audience doesn’t even ask a question. Best of all, this guy goes to Australia and announces the actual dissolution of the WTO, and the assembled crowd, while surprised, is also credulous. Indeed, various figures of Australian trade and finance comment on-camera about the “surprising but positive” developments coming out of Geneva. Wonder how long it took them to figure it out.
The most impressive accomplishment here is demonstrating that authority, whether in the person of a WTO bureaucrat or some other form, can get away with just about anything. I’m uncertain of the politics; many of the problems associated with the WTO are not the fault of too much liberalization, but too little. Wealthy countries simply don’t play by the rules. The keep parts of their markets closed, they hold on to tariff and non-tariff barriers, and they subsidize industries that can’t compete with their Southern counterparts. Poor countries have lately been demanding more liberalization, not less, as all of these methods of protection serve to wipe out industry, agriculture, and economic growth in the global South. This doesn’t challenge the conclusion that the WTO benefits Northern corporate interests, but it does suggest that the anti-WTO coalition is less cohesive than we might wish; Michael Moore is hardly interested in seeing more liberalization and fewer subsidies to protect American workers. However, the protagonists make an excellent point about the need to make human welfare the goal and free market economics one of the means, rather than assert a free market as the highest goal and assume that everything else will fall into place.
Fighting “free trade” is not a long term winning strategy for the left, partially because of differences within the movement, and partially because free trade handled properly really does benefit everyone. The efforts of the left should be directed at the “handled properly” part; making sure that the WTO allows a sufficient degree of what John Gerard Ruggie calls “embedded liberalism”, and that it allows a reasonable latitude of state action within the economic sphere.