Trickle-down democracy? Thank you, no, WTO!
Ohio State, Columbus, Saturday, December 4,1999
Greetings to the students and faculty of Ohio State. Thank you for the great honor of speaking to you.
It has been an interesting week in the news. Tens of thousands of people have traveled to Seattle to protest the policies of the World Trade Organization. They particularly demand that trade policies should not be allowed to sidestep or gut our environmental laws, should not be allowed to work mischief upon the already dire condition of workers and children around the world, and that the organization should end its practice of secret meetings. These demands are clearly reasonable and hardly debatable. It is remarkable that these thousands of people should have had to suffer the expense and personal risks associated with this protest movement.
What the WTO is rapidly becoming, of course, is the commercial version of the United Nations, but one without open, democratic processes or a balanced view. It is dominated by the interests of multinational corporations who achieve their place at the table, to our exclusion, through the corruption of politics with corporate money in this and other nations. In our country, that corruption extends to the highest officers of the land, who have become the handmaidens of corporate interests at the expense of human rights, of our environment, and of the stability of our middle class.
There is no question that an open world is better than a world of walls. The challenge before us is to open the world in a humane, intelligent and fair way. The commercial interests and their political puppets now driving the process have no such intentions, and can only promise us a brand of trickle-down environmental protection, trickle-down human rights, trickle-down working standards, and trickle-down democracy. That is a fiction and a fraud, for what is really happening is a leaching-up of environmental degradation, a leaching-up of worker exploitation, and a leaching-up of the secrecies and exclusionary practices that are the antithesis of democracy.
The protests this week are a part of the struggle between the human scale and the monstrous scale of overlarge commercial enterprises and their hired governments. In the 20th century, we can trace this battle of scale back to Gandhi's struggle against English industrial oppression of India, and we can trace it through the frightening fundamentalist uprisings in the Mideast and elsewhere, which are, at heart, a rejection of commercial values where they threaten traditional, local values and identities.
We see the people of Chiapas, Mexico revolting against the commercial forces that the North American Free Trade Agreement has set against them. And now, in Seattle, and in the food rebellions in Europe, we see the spirit of Chiapas spreading.
It is an extension of the old battle that Theodore Roosevelt fought and lost at the beginning of the 20th century. He fought against over-large businesses enterprises. He defended the family farm and the small business against those damaging monopolies and trusts. The Republican Party was split between the small business and big business factions within its own ranks. The big business element won the day, and Teddy Roosevelt's brand of politics went underground, poking up from time to time in various populist uprisings. It reemerges now at the end of the century, demanding satisfaction if it can get it.
It reemerges at a time when large scale commercial institutions rule the earth like aliens in some science fiction story. The little people may not have a chance. The commercial monsters may have sucked the souls out of their leaders and sent the people into a time of discouragement an despair.
Seattle may be the end of that discouragement and the beginning of action. I think the new century, by necessity, will be a time of human values, of the reassertion of the human scale in all things, and a time when large organizations cannot hold together against the forces of decentralization introduced by new technologies and renewed human concerns.
If the small scale wins out against the large scale too completely, the resulting anarchy will be as harmful as the present domination by large scale institutions. We do need a balance. We cannot survive without large institutions, just as we cannot be free without small ones. Large institutions can be our tools for fairness and peace and productivity. The larger the institution, however, the more it must be rounded by the participation of a wide range of people and issues. The breaking of that simple law is what makes multinational corporations and organizations like the World Trade Organization so dangerous. The keeping of that law is what makes our constitutional government and organizations like the United Nations so valuable and so worth our efforts to preserve and improve.
For those of us who find fault with large organizations that are too narrowly cast, let us resolve to help those worthy institutions that are properly devised. Let us continue our work to clean corporate money out of our elections, so that our democratic institutions can effectively represent the values of the American people, whose deepest values are indeed sound. Let us improve the United Nations so that it will be known one day for its efficient and intelligent reach into the problems of the world, including trade policies for an open and free world.
The present deficiencies of the United Nations have created a vacuum that has enabled less democratically balanced institutions, such as the WTO and NATO, to fill the gaps with dangerous possibilities for our future.
As a planet, and as a biological system, we can no longer afford an ineffective United Nations, any more than we can afford a U.S. Congress owned by commercial interests with short term, selfish goals.
The opening of this new century --this new millennium-- will be a wonderful time for each of us to do what we can to improve and advance our human institutions. We must all take our part in the shaping of a more just, more democratic, more peaceful, and more sensible new era. To this work, so worth our time and our toil, we must each make a resolution and, more than that, a sacred promise to our children.
Thank you.