Beyond Genoa: An alternative approach

["Stephen Diamond" <sdiamond@xxxxxxx>]

While I do not agree with everything that Public Citizen and Lori Wallach do - particularly their weak kneed support for enforceable international labor rights and their near silence in the battle against PNTR, their work against fast track (now called, in doublespeak, "Trade Promotion Authority") is admirable and indicates the political potential of democratic organizing and solid arguments about the international economy.  The results are certainly more tangible than throwing bricks through windows.

Steve Diamond

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Peace-loving activist at war with fast-track hell: Anti-globalisation protesters do not all seek confrontation, finds Nancy Dunne

Financial Times, Aug 3, 2001
By NANCY DUNNE

Lori Wallach, anti-global-isation campaigner, is preparing for "fast-track hell". She sleeps for 12 hours two nights in a row. She prunes back her garden "severely", knowing she will have no time to return to the task for weeks. Then she descends into the basement of a beauty salon for a massage - "to work out the residual stress to make room for new stress".

She is thus armoured for a return to the fray - her fifth fight against passage of a provision of US law once known as "fast track", now called "trade promotion authority", or TPA. The measure is essentially a congressional promise not to amend trade pacts after they have been negotiated by the administration and sent to Capitol Hill for approval.

Global Trade Watch, which Ms Wallach directs, is a division of Public Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader, the consumer crusader. Supported by foundation and member contributions and by sales of its books, the group deploys a comparatively meagre annual budget of about Dollars 800,000 (Pounds 563,000) and an 11-member staff in its battle against "corporate-dominated" globalisaion.

Its fight is on two levels. In Washington the objective is to deny President George W. Bush the opportunity to negotiate new trade pacts, which, the group believes, do not protect the environment, labour, human rights and food safety standards. It also plays a big role in mobilising non-violent protests at international trade meetings.

On a typical day in fast-track hell, Ms Wallach meets other "public interest" lobbyists to prepare for the congressional recess. While legislators who are undecided about fast track are home for a break, they will receive visits from community leaders, co-ordinated by this loose coalition.

Ms Wallach is the most visible activist in a group that opposes what she calls "the one-size-fits-all model" of trade pacts. She - and thousands of others who marched peacefully during the Group of Eight summit in Genoa - believe that the principal purpose for trade deals is to facilitate worldwide corporate investment and profits in the name of efficiency.

While big companies and US presidents have argued that expanded trade opens markets to US products, brings cheaper goods into the domestic economy and raises living standards around the world, Ms Wallach says trade deals are "ruining the lives of gazillions of people" who cannot compete against them.

The coalition often meets at the headquarters of the AFL-CIO, labour's umbrella organisation, which provides much of the financing and manpower for campaigns. The group exchanges intelligence on how congressmen are leaning, plots strategy and rehearses its arguments.

Ms Wallach likes to create slogans and images - the inspiration usually comes in her dreams, she says. "She even spins in her sleep," says an ally.

This year labour is providing a special toll-free telephone number to connect voters with their representatives' offices in Washington so they can complain about TPA. The callers are also provided with background information and talking points. TPA supporters argue that labour's principal interet is in protecting jobs at home; in fact, before imports began to flood US markets unions supported liberalised trade.

Dan Seligman, trade co-ordinator for the Sierra Club, an environmental group, met Ms Wallach during a fast-track fight eight years ago, when she struck him and others as "fiery and ferocious". Their two organisations work closely; he has 15 regional volunteers who co- ordinate activists at state level and arrange meetings.

Although most of the groups are left of centre, they are also joined on trade issues by the US Business and Economic Council, a group of economic nationalists. Alan Tonelson, the council's researcher, provides some of the intellectual ammunition for the campaign, putting out reports that conclude that trade deals have "very negative effects" on US living standards. The council repre sents small and medium-sized businesses which, because they are less able to withstand the competition, are openly protectionist.

Part of the game plan in this year's TPA fight is to portray it as an attempt to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to 31 more countries.

Nafta is deeply unpopular, Ms Wallach says. "In the early 1990s no one knew what Nafta was. They thought it was a new laundry detergent." Since then many companies have moved production south of the border; thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost. Nafta's defenders say Mexican labour helps to keep the lid on inflation.

While she has one team of staffers working on fast track, the other is organising for the next WTO ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, in November. "By simply going to a place that forbids free speech, (the ministers) will not get a free ride, I promise," she says. She insists that the protesters will be there.

The yearly fight against fast track begins to grow tedious, but Ms Wallach thinks the anti-globalisation movement is gaining ground. "We had to create the political space to make the possibility of change real. We've done that. We've stopped the momentum ofthe 'unstoppable, inevitable' move to globalisation."

This concludes our series on non-governmental organisations Copyright: The Financial Times Limited