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Tuesday, December 7, 1999
The University Daily Kansan
Section A · Page 9
Local activists fight WTO
By Todd Halstead
writer@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
: Activists in Lawrence are joining other protesters in a battle against the World Trade Organization, which met last week in Seattle.
Brian Ireland, Lawrence graduate, spent the afternoon at Wescoe beach protesting the WTO as part of the Kansas Fair Trade Alliance. He had petitions for President Bill Clinton and Congressman Dennis Moore requesting that they stand up against the WTO.
The WTO can dismantle local and national ordinances on environmental protection, human
rights and labor safety," Ireland said. "It's essentially the next generation of corporate imperialism throughout the world — it's not a very nice organization."
The WTO is a global commerce agency that promotes free global
Richard Morantz, Lawrence resident, joined the protests in Seattle while visiting friends.
trade. During the meetings last week in Seattle, protesters drew national attention to the organization.
"I think that Americans had no idea there was such a powerful organization that was making decisions that everybody in the world had to abide by." Morantz said. "And I think that now they are going to know."
Burdett Loomis, professor of political science, said the world was moving toward an era of free trade, and the question was how to enter this new era.
"There was a lot of valuable speech and a lot of junk." Loomis said. "Making the WTO into a booje man is a bad idea. The protests made the WTO more visible, but it will be down the line before we have an effective debate."
Morantz said the protests in Seattle were positive and would have been more effective if it had not been for a small group of troublemakers.
"It was frustrating that the violence of a small handful of people who weren't associated with our demonstration ended up being the major news story." Morantz said. "They were wearing all black with anarchy symbols. They were there to cause trouble, and they did."
Morantz said Seattle resembled a Third World country where people had no rights.
"There were hundreds of policemen in the streets dressed in full riot gear — they acted like storm troopers," he said. "They sealed off a huge area of downtown and called it the 'no protest zone.' I personally would call it the 'no Bill of Rights zone.' You couldn't assemble or speak."
Edited by Kelly Clasen
Trade negotiations fail in Seattle
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON—The head of the nation's largest labor federation welcomed the collapse of
ton welcomed the collapse of World Trade Organization talks in Seattle and the failure to agree on a new round of negotiations. "No deal is better than a bad deal," AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney said Sunday. Commerce Secretary William Daley said that President Clinton held the same opinion and that the administration never would have signed a deal that did not benefit the collapse.
"We think that what was done in Seattle, as far as some progress on issues, was positive," Daley said, who followed Sweeney on CBS' Face the Nation. "We were not going to do a bad deal."
The four-day WTO session was to have started development of an agenda for worldwide talks on trade relations, but it broke up early Saturday in disarray.
Raucous, sometimes violent, demonstrations and stern police reactions kept Seattle in turmoil
during the conference. But the lack of success inside meeting rooms was attributed to squabbling among negotiators unwilling to compromise on tightly held positions.
Many delegates, especially those from poor countries, objected to suggestions by Clinton that the WTO should set labor and environmental conditions and punish countries that ignore them.
"We had 40,000 workers and their families gathered in Seattle peacefully protesting and trying to set a focus on worker rights, human rights, and environmental protection," Sweeney said. "No deal is better than a bad deal. We all support trade, and we all recognize globalization, but it's about time that the WTO took into consideration worker rights."
Labor received support from New York developer Donald Trump, who is considering a Reform Party bid for president.
"The World Trade Organization is not necessarily fair to
America," Trump said on ABC's This Week.
Trump also went after a regular target, the administration's team of trade negotiators. "We don't have our best and our smartest and our brightest," said Trump, who has declared that, if elected, he would appoint himself as his administration's trade representative.
"If you look at other countries, they have their smartest, their toughest, their best negotiators. And we're not going to beat them unless we get ours."
Trump said that he didn't think that U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and Daley, commerce secretary, did not know how to negotiate.
Daley insisted the failure of the Seattle session does not end possibilities for eventual agreement.
"These negotiations have taken twice before in Montreal and also in Brussels, once before," he said. "In trade negotiations, every time there is an attempt to launch a round, it isn't always successful. But eventually they will be successful, and we will have the chance to sell more products."
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