Assailing corporations for turning Washington into “accounts
receivable,” he called for the creation of a “taxpayer appreciation day”
when big business would give thanks for all the subsidies and giveaways it
has received from the public till.

And citing the ancient Greek physicians’ maxim that “a human body is more likely
to tolerate colliding against a flat, yielding surface than a sharp, cutting
edge,” he sarcastically chided General Motors for failing to conscientiously
design their cars; in particular, he pointed out that car makers took decades to install
seat-belts, even though they had been invented for pilots in World War I.

If this sounded as though Nader were a candidate for something, that’s
because he is, though precious few are in on his secret. But
Nader has assured close associates that he intends to run a serious
campaign for president next year, under the Green Party banner, and that he
will announce in January.

Throughout his Michigan speech (which had been taped live last summer),
Nader hammered away at his central message: that what America needs is a
renewal of civic culture to combat the now-dominant corporate culture.

“More and more, corporations are raising our kids,” he declared. Companies
now start marketing directly at children as early as age 2, he pointed out, and the average youngster watches 30 hours of television a week, with at least three pernicious effects: They learn that violence is a preferred solution to life’s problems; they are taught to value cheap sensuality in
everything from sex to self-image to food; and they become addicted to
entertainment that shortens their attention span.

“What is wrong with a society that allows its most precious resource to be
exploited?” he asked. “If there was a child molester in the neighborhood,
would it be enough to tell parents to lock the doors?”

When we “grow up corporate,” as Nader puts it, we never stop to think that
any of this could be different — that we could control the resources of
our commonwealth like the public airwaves and lands, that we could demand
safer and less-polluting products, that we could have public financing of
elections so money doesn’t nullify our votes, that labor could win
strengthened rights to organize, that consumers could band together to
challenge monopolistic practices and industries, that poverty among
children could be eliminated.

But despite all of this, Nader is the ultimate anti-cynic. “If you were in
a big lifeboat and the ship had just sunk and there’s a big storm coming
and you had to get to the island to save everybody in the lifeboat, and
here you are rowing away and you look back and there’s some guys who aren’t
rowing, they’re listening to some music on their radio, what do you think
you’d say?” He asked his Michigan audience. “Oh well, to each his own?
[Pause.] “You’d say, ‘Pick up those oars!’” The crowd cheered.

Life magazine has identified Nader as one of the 100 most influential
people of the 20th century, yet most citizens know him only as a consumer
advocate. In fact, his call for a revival of civic culture represents nothing less than a full-blown philosophy of life.

“This is truly one of life’s greatest gratifications, to work a democracy into a strengthened posture for the greatest good for the greatest number of people,” he says.

In this age of hyper-materialism and shallow politics, Nader’s message is
more relevant than ever. The question is whether his emerging 2000
presidential campaign will be relevant, too.

The official word from Nader, who got nearly 700,000 votes as the
Green Party’s 1996 candidate despite running a non-campaign that confused
and angered many of his supporters, is that he has not made up his mind about
running again and will not do so until January.

But when he spoke at a meeting of the Association of State Green Parties
last June in Connecticut, he promised that he wouldn’t limit his
fund-raising as severely this time around, and that he would make at least
three major appearances in every state where he is on the ballot before the
summer is through, with more selective targeting of key states in the fall
– “if,” he added, “I run.”

According to sources close to Nader — one a senior Green activist who met with
him at length last June, the other a close associate who is a former “Nader’s
Raider” — Nader is privately saying that he will indeed run.

“I’m not using the word ‘if’ because I’ve heard him be definitive,” says
the first source. “It’s not if but when. The question becomes what kind of
campaign because it takes two to tango. During our meeting, we addressed
some of the issues from ’96: Is he going to run an active campaign, and
will he work closely with the Greens on a daily basis? He said yes and yes.”

Two concrete indications of Nader’s intent: He allowed the California Green
Party to place his name on their March 2000 primary ballot (a decision that
had to be made by this November), and he convinced Native American activist
Winona LaDuke to again be his vice-presidential candidate, even though she
had earlier announced that she didn’t want to run again.

Nader’s goal next year will be to get at least 5 percent of the vote: the threshold that third parties have to reach in order to receive a proportional share of public funding for the next presidential campaign. The $12.6 million in federal funds coming to the Reform Party’s presidential candidate for the 2000 general election was triggered by Ross Perot’s 8 percent showing in 1996.

If Nader and the Greens succeed, it would guarantee the Green Party
millions in public funds for 2004, which would in turn be a huge boost for
lower-level Green candidates. It would also lift the party up to the same
level as the Reform Party in the national eye, at the least. And it’s not an unrealistic goal: Nader got just under 1 percent of the vote in 1996, when only one out seven voters was even aware that he was running.

Well in advance of Nader’s formal announcement, a core group is actively
laying the groundwork for Nader’s campaign. Members include Carol Miller,
co-chair of the New Mexico Green Party and recent congressional candidate;
Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy; and Mike Feinstein, a
Green member of the Santa Monica City Council. They’ve set up a National Committee to Draft Ralph
Nader for President, opened a bank account and set up a Web site to attract volunteers and raise money.

“What I want is to build a Green Party,” says Miller. “I don’t think we can
guarantee that he is going to win a four-way race,” she adds with a laugh,
“but if Bush implodes, anything is possible. I want someone who knows how
to build a movement — people’s movements, citizens’ movements, bringing
in young people. That’s worth a lot to me, to have something after the election.”

Does a Nader run make any sense? Of course. Nader is one of the few
progressives with enough public standing to enter the celebrity sweepstakes
of presidential politics. He is to backbone what most politicians are to
waffles. His message cuts across the simple labels of left and right,
capable of reaching conservative home-schoolers anxious about rampant
commercialism, small business people angry about special privileges for big
corporations, unionists upset about jobs disappearing overseas, and anybody who knows someone who’s life was saved by an airbag — as well as hardcore enviros, consumer
activists and other progressives. He retains a strong following among
seniors who have followed his whole career, and still draws a respectable
showing at his many campus speaking gigs.

Two months ago, I saw Nader speak to an active group of ex-Perotistas, at
the American Reform Party’s national convention in Washington. At the end, they gave him a standing ovation, with several people chanting,
“Run, Ralph, Run!”

The time for an independent progressive-populist campaign certainly
seems as ripe as ever. Three converging forces — the public’s continuing
dissatisfaction with the major parties, the growing power of
disaffected citizens to band together quickly via of the Internet and
our tabloidized media system’s 24-hour-a-day need for fresh
stories to tell — have combined to boost third-party politics closer to
the political mainstream.

That, plus the unexpected election of Jesse Ventura last fall, has made the impossible suddenly seem possible. Polls show anywhere between a third and a half of the public would like to see more choices on the ballot than just George W. Bush and Al Gore. And if all the reporting on Pat Buchanan’s and Donald Trump’s Reform Party machinations is any indication, Nader is certain to draw a good deal of free media attention as well.

In addition, Buchanan’s decision to seek the Reform Party’s nomination
may shake up the presidential election in unexpected ways. “The Reform
Party’s nomination of Buchanan would open up more space for a polar
opposite, like Ralph, to get engaged,” says Steve Cobble, the former
political director of the Rainbow Coalition.

If Buchanan is indeed the Reform nominee, siphoning hard-right votes
away from the Republican candidate, it takes some of the edge off the
argument that Nader would merely “spoil” the Democrats’ presidential hopes.
Also, an aggressive Nader campaign could offer a clearheaded alternative to
Buchanan’s xenophobic populism. For while the two men may agree about
who the villains are in the trade wars, they disagree about many of the
solutions; Nader could inject critically needed arguments into
the national debate, and his candidacy would inevitably put pressure on
Gore’s and Bradley’s instinctive centrism.

Finally, there is a pragmatic logic to a serious Nader candidacy that
could even appeal to some Democrats — at least the congressional branch of
the party. A strong progressive-populist campaign can reach very
effectively into the growing ranks of nonvoters, who are
disproportionately lower on the socioeconomic ladder, and bring them back
to the polls. That is the lesson of victories like U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s (D-Minn.) in 1990 and 1996 and U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) in 1990, and even of last year’s Washington state initiative to raise the minimum wage to the highest level in the country. In every case, voter turnout rose significantly.

Pollster John Zogby, who has built his reputation on figuring out who is likely to vote, says, “You will see an increase in those who call themselves liberal or progressive if there’s a credible Green Party candidate [in the race]. For example, that was seen in New York with Ralph Nader in 1996.”

And once those voters are in the polling booth, they are likely to
vote Democratic down-ballot. Indeed, Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of
New Mexico has credited his narrow 1994 re-election to the turnout boost
from the Greens’ gubernatorial candidate, Roberto Mondragon, who got 10
percent of the vote that year. For these reasons, Congressional Democrats
hoping to retake the House might think twice about attacking a Nader bid.

And yet, the first thing many people, including sympathetic activists, undoubtedly think when they hear that Nader is running for president is “Not again” — especially after his non-campaign of 1996.

Nader himself does not dodge the charge. “More people might have voted for
me last time but didn’t know if I was running,” he told me. “We weren’t on
the ballot in many states,” he adds. (Twenty-two, plus the District of
Columbia, to be precise). “And there wasn’t a campaign.”

The implication: This time will be different.

For starters, there won’t be any shyness about filing as a candidate with
the Federal Election Commission or raising money. While several decisions
have yet to be made — about whether to cap the size of contributions, à la
Jerry Brown’s $100 limit, or to make the effort to obtain matching funds
during the primary period — sources close to Nader say they hope to easily
“break through seven figures,” which would let them hire full-time regional
organizers and assist with ballot access.

A larger budget to pay for campaign ads is under consideration, though
Nader is very concerned not to let the fund-raising tail wag the dog. “I
want to see volunteer-hour-raisers, not just money-raisers,” he
told me. Nader also will still resist releasing his tax returns — a
voluntary step not required by law — arguing that the FEC’s financial
disclosure forms are more than sufficient and that income taxes ought
to remain private.

Not all Greens are united around Nader’s emerging campaign. One
criticism comes from those who question whether he is really their best
messenger. They remember his telling columnist William Safire that he
didn’t want to get into “gonadal politics,” and they complain that his
anticorporate focus gives short shrift to other parts of the Green
platform that affirm feminism and gay rights.

According to Steve Schmidt, chairman of the Greens’ platform committee,
when the issue of his statement to Safire came up last June at a national
meeting of Green state parties, Nader professed his commitment to the
continuing struggle against discrimination and for civil rights. But “whether that satisfies
some of the people who feel the Green candidate should go more into that
issue remains to be seen,” Schmidt says. “Some people think we should be
an amalgam of single issues writ large. But the Green Party national
platform, which Ralph is on record strongly supporting, is comprehensive. I think Ralph is right to focus on the core of the platform-reviving civic democracy, a broad-based political movement built from the grass roots and citizen participation.”

Still, with Nader focusing mainly on topping 5 percent, it’s likely he’ll
try to stick as much as possible to his civic vs. corporate agenda in
ways that some progressives will undoubtedly find alienating.

A second, more muted concern among some Greens is that Nader has waited
too long to announce his candidacy, limiting the potential
party-building effect of his running. “It’s a huge missed opportunity,”
says one activist who worked very hard on the 1996 campaign but is
sitting this one out. “The point is not Ralph or the presidential
campaign; the point is to build the Green Party — to bring in new people.
If you want to fundamentally change the landscape, you need people
coming in earlier who will raise funds, hold meetings and learn skills
so they will be in for the long haul. If he had announced two years
before the election, we would have had a great opportunity to build a
blossoming infrastructure. Instead, they’re going to have to hire
petitioners.”

On the other hand, people close to Nader point out that
the Greens can still build their own locals with or without his official
candidacy. In fact, while not a candidate, Nader has made several trips
to help Green candidates in locales ranging from New Jersey and
Connecticut to California and New Mexico.

Yet the concern over what his late entry means for the Greens is just
one symptom of a deeper complaint made by many veterans of progressive
politics about working with Nader: He’s a lone wolf, and he’s never
worked well in coalitions. “If you’re on his side, you’re in fine
shape,” says one top veteran of the antiglobalization movement. “If you
decide to put less emphasis on the campaign, for whatever reason, but
you still share his long-term goals, he can treat you like the enemy.”

This leader points to a serious break between Nader and the AFL-CIO over
how hard to fight the GATT treaty, and also questions whether Nader can
bring together blue-collar whites with African-Americans. Still, pressed
to say if Ralph should run or not, this person says yes. “We need a
progressive running. If it’s a choice between Ralph or nobody, a lot of
us who have reservations on other fronts will say, Hooray! But if he
doesn’t run hard, that could become very dispiriting.”

In the end, then, whether the emerging Nader campaign meets or exceeds
expectations this time around depends entirely on Ralph Nader himself. Even
though grass-roots volunteers can have a huge impact on the vitality of
his campaign, only he can decide how hard to push which issues, how hard
to fund-raise, how integrated with party-building his effort will be.

Campaigns, after all — even unconventional, alternative campaigns — are
still primarily driven from the center outward. And there is an
inexorable logic pushing Nader further into the electoral arena.
Thirty-five years after he essentially invented public-interest
activism, his non-electoral endeavors are frequently blocked by
corporate lobbying and trumped by big money’s domination of politics.

It therefore makes sense for him, as he reaches the pinnacle of his career, to
appeal directly to the same natural majority that he has indirectly
championed for so long, and to use the leverage built into the federal
election laws to launch yet one more institution of countervailing
citizen power — the Green Party — into permanent orbit.

The moment is his. And the chance may not come again.

Salon News spoke to four economic experts to clarify the issues at stake at the conference — both in the official proceedings and on the streets. On the one hand, there are the issues on the WTO’s table, and the conflicts the protests highlight: The future of global economy and its impact on national sovereignty, workers’ rights and the environment. On the other, there is the efficacy of the opposition’s tactics: Will the protest actually influence the WTO? And what about the violent tactics employed by the most radical of the groups in the streets of Seattle?

Peter Leyden is the co-author of “The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity” and director of the Long Boom Project.

The way the economy is rapidly globalizing is very disruptive to a lot of people. But in the long run, the globalizing of the economy is very positive for a lot of the developing regions and a lot of the marginalized peoples that have not been partaking in the economic booms of the 20th century. This kind of growth is something to be enhanced rather than thwarted. Some people are looking at the developments in a very limited vision of where the actual trajectory of this development is going.

The feelings and the values of the groups that are protesting are totally legitimate. But I see those values being realized in a very different way than the way people think [they're] going to be realized.

The way to actually deal with the pervasive environmental problems on the planet is to accelerate the economic growth, to transition more quickly to new technologies which are much more clean and much more benign on the environment, rather than kind of choking up the process of globalization and keeping these regional or national economies.

For example, if you do limit the trade and interactions between nations, you would have countries like China and India, which have 70 percent of their energy needs rooted in coal, probably the dirtiest energy source on the planet. If you don’t accelerate the technology transfer so they can transition to the new generation of technologies that the developed nations like the U.S. already enjoy, you’re actually going to damage the environment more severely in the long run.

Rapid global integration of the economy and rapid technology transfer across the world is the solution to the environmental problems — it is not causing the problem. To stop that process in its tracks now is in fact the exact opposite [of the] thing you want to be doing.

If you take the labor concerns, you have got to understand this in the big picture perspective. For example, a steel manufacturer in the U.S. is all worked up because he thinks somebody producing steel across the world is going to take his job away. Well, frankly, that may be true. His kind of job could be done better and cheaper in another part of the world. And from that lone steelworker’s perspective, that could be terrifying.

But from the perspective of the American economy, we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. We have sectors of the economy that are just screaming for labor and screaming for people to transition into those sectors. Of all the countries in the world right now, this country is the last one that needs to protect any sector of the economy. We could cede the entire global steel industry to developing Asian countries and it wouldn’t seriously affect the American economy.

I’m not going to completely defend the World Trade Organization as an organization, in terms of policy decisions or the bureaucrats who run it. There is a legitimate concern about having more people at the table, that should be a democratic process, an open process and a decentralized process.

That said, our technological infrastructure has already gone global. The entire economy is rapidly globalizing. Technology and the economy are now operating at this global scale. The thing that has to happen in the next 10 to 20 years is that we have to see forms of governance evolve to deal with the nature of that globalized technology and economy.

It’s in everybody’s interest to find a way that that works best, a form of global governance, or regulation, that can deal with the nature of this new, very potent, powerful global economy, one which doesn’t really fit, in this 20th century way that we regulate it, within national borders.

When people say, We don’t want a global organization that’s up to the task of working at that level, they’re totally shooting themselves in the foot. In fact, it’s impossible for national governments to deal with this creature, this global economy.

In other words, if you really were for the people’s perspective in this, if you wanted the average person to have some kind of leverage in what’s going to happening in the future here, you would be encouraging global organizations that are up to the task of wrestling with and structuring this global economy in ways that work for human beings and societies, rather than just for corporations.

To dismantle the WTO is just ludicrous — it’s about the only thing we have that’s even halfway up to the task. It’s a very recent organization, which is good. The IMF and the World Bank are trying to restructure or reformulate after they were created 50 years ago for an economy that was international, not global.

Although [the WTO] is far from perfect, in general it’s the right direction. We have to find ways to make it more democratic. We need to find other organizations to go beyond this that can help to craft this global society.

Gerald Meier is Konosuke Matsushita professor of international economics and policy analysis, emeritus, at Stanford University and author of “The International Environment of Business: Competition and Governance in the Global Economy.”

This is a hiccup. It’s a dramatic three-day thing. There’s solid concern and support for liberalizing trade and having some kind of governance over international trade, and some of these other issues do not belong with the WTO. Debt forgiveness has nothing to do with trade — it’s something for the advanced nations and the IMF. But I think the WTO will try to do something about that and make some statement. The latent general concern is about globalization and the global economy and increasing inequality and some getting so rich and the Internet, which is global, and suffering. Inequality and globalization are coming in here, along with concerns about global fairness, global justice.

The WTO is just not strong enough to take care of all that. All these other concerns are being put on the WTO and should be put elsewhere. The protestors have been physically effective in disrupting the meetings, but of course some of their demands would be considered without their protests — working parties were scheduled for labor and the environment. The protests are also counterproductive because they’ve been anticipated and the Clinton administration has been advocating some of [the issues].

Thomas Friedman had a good article [Wednesday] in the Times, [in which he wrote] that some of them are looking for a ’60s fix. Some of the arguments are nonsensical. Some of the protestors are inconsistent. Some groups would just as soon have the smoke stacks be in Bangladesh. Other groups worry about the rain forests in the developing countries — and don’t want exports from them. Others don’t want Weyerhauser to export lumber from Seattle to Indonesia because then they’re cutting down forests here. It gets all mixed up — whose environment and where? [In some cases, the protests are] disguised protectionism — [labor unions bring up] child labor, a humanitarian motive, but their real motive is to protect textiles and steel in the advanced countries.

You’re not going to get world government [with the WTO], but it is a step toward governance. It’s brought some rule of law and order to trade relations, and it has liberalized trade. Trade has increased more rapidly than world output. The increase in manufacturing goods from developing countries has been outstanding. That gives them a much higher rate of development. This meeting from the beginning was not going to be as constructive as you might think: It’s only the drafting of the agenda for the next round of trade negotiations, which take three to five years. But there is an interesting feature here: There is more concern about the role of developing countries in the global economy now.

The WTO emerged historically from the abortive International Trade Organization [ITO], based on the Havana charter, which was vetoed by Congress because it had provisions on international investment and restrictive business practices and international commodity agreements. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs was just the general agreement for the trade part of the ITO. The WTO was strengthened with its dispute resolution. It also moved in with concern to investment-related trade issues. Now those old issues that were rejected with ITO keep reemerging.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research in Washington.

I think that the protests have been tremendously effective. But I am concerned about the framing of the issues. I think that the proponents of the WTO are painting this as pro- or con-globalization. And that’s really not at all what the protests are about. It’s not that the protestors are against globalization and the people inside are about eliminating barriers. It’s simply deciding which barriers are going to remain. The real question is: What does globalization look like?

All the laws about copyright, those are protectionist. In a fully free market, if I want to go out into the marketplace and sell Microsoft Word to somebody, I can do it. But I can’t because Bill Gates will have me arrested. It’s not a bad thing, but that is a protection. The WTO [says it] wants to talk about the inexorable march towards eliminating barriers, but that’s not quite true. A lot of people who will point to [violence in the demonstrations] were not sympathetic to the protesters anyhow. I think that the people who look at it seriously will realize that [the rioters] were a tiny minority of the protestors. When you have 50,000 people, there will be a small number of them there to break some windows. The public will understand that this is a minority that has to be stopped, like the Seattle mayor Paul Schell did.

People are there for very different reasons and they’d like to see it go in different ways. But I suspect that probably the largest group of [protesters] are there over environmental concerns. Certainly the overturning of several U.S. laws that were ruled in violation of the WTO did upset many environmentalists. The WTO cannot actually overturn laws, but the prospect that any environmental law in the U.S. could be challenged — ruled a WTO violation — certainly is a great concern to the environmentalists who work to get laws changed. It all seems very futile.

There’s not much that can come out of this [meeting] that will be very good news for workers. Just about every economist agrees that there’s been a negative impact on the wages of less-skilled workers as a result of the direction that international trade has taken. The item that the AFL leadership has pushed forward — setting up a working group on labor standards in the WTO — is going to mean almost nothing any time in the foreseeable future, given the timeline: If they get a working group out of the Seattle session, that working group will report back. And if they report that labor standards are an appropriate item, then in the next session, seven years out, then it might be an item to negotiate; that round will run another seven years. Maybe in 2014 or 2015, they’ll talk about beginning some sort of labor standards. That doesn’t promise very much to the people who are out there.

In terms of the protesters’ agenda, the best thing that can happen is a stalemate — that you don’t see any movement forward on the ground at the WTO, you don’t see anything move forward on free trade. I think that’s the best they can hope for. As for what effect it will have on the [presidential] candidates, they might not be terribly anxious to come out and say, “Yes, let’s move forward on the agenda of the WTO.” What I get a kick out of is that people from the [Clinton] administration like [U.S. Trade Representative] Charlene Barshefsky say that these issues — labor standards and the environment — should get top priority. Two weeks ago, she’s in China, up until all hours of the night sitting down with the Chinese, working on this trade deal. Is there anyone who thinks that what she was talking about was labor standards or environmental standards? That’s laughable. She was talking about opening up China to our insurance companies and our banks. Those are [the administration's] agenda items.

When they want something, these people are smart, they’re energetic, they’re tough, they’re shrewd, they’re aggressive. When they want to open up China for the banks they get it; when they want to open up China to the insurance industry they get it. When they tell China that they have to enforce copyright laws, they get it. But with labor standards and the environment, they say, “Oh, yeah. We’re working on it.”

Dan Griswold is the associate director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.

I think that the protesters definitely got the attention of the news media and policy makers. Probably, their ability to disrupt the events there exceeded their expectations. I don’t think that anybody thought that Charlene Barshefsky would be trapped in her hotel room.

But on the other hand, I think it could backfire. It may just increase the determination of the negotiators to not be intimidated, and to make some success of it. I think from a public relations point of view, street protests and demonstrations have an honorable tradition in America and in a free society. But when you start getting acts of vandalism, when it just paralyzes the functioning of a city and an organization, I think Americans start asking some legitimate questions about whose interests are being served and whether the process can work.

In a way, the WTO has become a handy symbol for any group that has some grievance against the global trends.

These groups have been coming together ever since the NAFTA fight, which brought some of these groups out into the public arena in the trade issue. Every one of these groups in their own way are critics of the free market and of capitalism. And I think that they rightly perceive that the underlying trend is going against them as more nations turn to more open markets for goods and services and the U.S. economy continues to open up and become more integrated with the global economy.

I think one of the reasons these groups took to the streets is that they have not had the kind of influence that they would have liked to have on a national level.

Americans are uncomfortable with some of the results of globalization — some people losing their jobs, some industries contracting — but they also strongly reject the alternative. Anybody peddling old-fashioned protectionism just doesn’t get anywhere. Pat Buchanan basically got no traction with his protectionist message. So, on a presidential level, Americans continue to accept an open economy as in the national interest. I think these groups are finding that they don’t seem to be getting anywhere through the traditional channels of trying to elect a president, so in effect they’re attempting to do and end-run around the process.

It’s hard to find any evidence that expanding trade and expanding openness in the United States economy has in any way compromised environmental and health standards. We have the highest, most restrictive environmental laws of any country in the world. We also probably have the cleanest environment of any advanced country at a time when America has never traded more with the people of the rest of the world. So there’s no evidence on the ground that our environmental quality is deteriorating because of free trade. Quite the contrary.

Look at all the indicators. Concentrations of sulfur dioxide or carbon dioxide in the air, they’ve all improved. Water quality has improved. Life expectancy, all these measures of public health have improved in the last 10 or 20 years at a time when we’ve become increasingly open and integrated into the global economy.

Each country makes its own choices as to the trade-off of environmental regulations and the composition of its economy. And Americans are choosing to encourage less pollution-intensive industries through environmental regulation. Less-developed countries make different choices. They may choose to have less environmental regulation because they can’t afford American-style regulation. They just don’t have the economic resources to enact our Western standards. Secondly, when you are at a much lower level of development, those sort of things are less important relative to other considerations. When you’ve got a large part of your population on a subsistence level, they would prefer to have jobs and food and not immediately have Western living standards.

Generally, as countries grow economically and raise their living standards, they have the resources and increasingly the political will to raise their environmental standards, and that’s what’s happened. So in a way, to impose trade sanctions on developing countries because they don’t meet Western labor and environmental standards is to deny them the means of raising those standards.

One thing that people have to realize is that the large majority of WTO members are representing governments of one stripe or another. And those representatives out there either were elected or are representing elected governments. The question is, Who elected these 50,000 people out there, some of whom are committing direct violence, others of whom are just preventing people from getting where they need to go?

Dan Esty is a professor of environmental law at Yale University.

This will be a watershed for the WTO, an organization that has, until now, flown under the radar. The trade community hasn’t understood that, in a globalized world, what they’re doing is important and high-profile. At least one of the agendas of the protesters is to open up the WTO, make it more transparent.

There’s a second question about whether the environmental goals are going to be addressed. Attention has been drawn to the question of a linkage between trade policy and environmental policy, and I think that over time those values will be taken on board. But I don’t think you’re going to see — coming out of Seattle — a dramatic transformation of trade rules. But this issue may now get taken more seriously in the negotiations that follow.

This coalition [of labor and environmentalist protestors] is doing a terrible disservice to the environmental goals, because the real obstacle to getting environmental sensitivity built in to the world trading system is the developing countries, who fear that the environmental agenda is a hidden way of advancing protectionism and obstructing them from getting into the European and the U.S. markets. And that fear is being corroborated by this coalition.

The developing countries have a real interest in economic growth, spurred by opportunities for expanded trade. Some of those protesting are insisting that we not allow goods from developing countries into the U.S. market, and would set up barriers to those goods entering the U.S. markets, which legitimizes the developing nations’ concerns. Does that mean that we shouldn’t have a clearer set of environmental sensitivities built into the trading system? No. But it has allowed the developing countries, folks who are fearful of this protectionist-environmentalist alliance, to take some comfort that they were correct.

“We shall build on the strong collaboration between our three organizations to enhance the capacity of developing countries — to foster their economic and social development,” a joint statement released Tuesday declared, “and we will continue to work together closely, under our Cooperation Agreements, to help them increase the coherence of economic policy-making.”

Drafted in the flowery form of understatement that is the lingua franca of trade negotiators, the Seattle statement obscures its functional significance. Confidential memoranda distributed within the World Bank and leaked by the Center for Economic and Policy Research provide a far more revealing view of the institutions’ shared interests.

A 1998 report states: “The globalization of economic activity has made it useful to put the existing structures of cooperation on a more formal basis.” A 1999 paper concludes: “The intertwining of the development and trade agendas provides important opportunities to cement our shared commitment to making the international trade regime an effective path to development and poverty alleviation.”

WTO Director-General Mike Moore flatly denies all accusations that the organization is forging any world order. The former prime minister of New Zealand asserted: “The WTO is not a world government, a global policeman, or an agent for corporate interests.”

But critics of the powerful institutions see New World Disorder in the making.

“The IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization are in the process of creating an international iron cage,” says Walden Bello, an economist who heads Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank. Bello fears the fund and the bank will become de facto enforcers of WTO policy.

Under current provisions, when two member countries can’t settle a trade dispute, they take their quarrel to a WTO dispute settlement panel in Geneva. Many of the WTO’s 134 member nations complain that the dispute system is already rigged in favor of big countries, especially the United States, since it allows the victor to impose trade sanctions against the other country. While a U.S. trade sanction could smash a small nation’s exports, the same sanction applied by a developing country wouldn’t make a dent in the massive Western economy.

Bello and other critics fear that in the near future, this inequality would be widened through cooperation among the three institutions. In addition to punitive sanctions, small nations that dare to defy the U.S. or the European Union could be denied loans by the World Bank or could become the victims of endless structural adjustments imposed by the IMF.

IMF spokesman William Murray accused Bello and others of blowing the so-called “cohesion” agreements out of proportion, saying that coordination is both benign and necessary.

“You don’t want competition among the institutions,” Murray said. “Otherwise, if a country doesn’t like what the World Bank or the IMF says, it would simply go to the other institution — like a child shopping for favors between his parents.”

Stanford University economics professor Gerald Meier said such collaboration is inevitable. “The World Bank and IMF are working much more closely together with the WTO now. Many of their financial problems have a trade component, so it’s only natural,” Meier said.

The bank and the fund — both created at the close of World War II as part of an effort to rebuild Europe — have coordinated their efforts for decades. Developing nations rarely receive loans from the World Bank without satisfying the fund’s strict demands for fiscal discipline. A maze of tariff and trade agreements was also forged at the 1944 summit at Bretton Woods, N.H.. But there was no central institution to enforce those deals, and therefore no organization with which the bank or the fund could coordinate their policies, until the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs was replaced by the WTO in 1995.

The bank and the fund embraced their new sibling at the 1996 WTO ministerial meeting in Singapore, and the three have cooperated unofficially — by sharing information and policy advice — ever since.

With this week’s agreement, the three horsemen of Bretton Woods come closer to riding in step.

Meanwhile, criticism of each group in the alliance is mounting. A growing number of economists blame IMF policies for both causing the Asian financial crisis. Discord rages within the World Bank in the wake of the resignation of chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, who has concluded that much of what the bank does is not helping the world’s poor.

“All three of these institutions have suffered a degrading of their image,” says Mark Weisbrot, an economist who co-directs the Washington nonprofit that leaked the World Bank memos.

“There is a real divide within the bank over whether to band together in defense of their traditional agenda of trade and investment liberalization, or whether to admit that mistakes have been made,” Weisbrot said.

But what they won’t do is turn back the economic and
technological forces that are gradually
creating a global society. Even if that goal were truly desirable, it is simply far too late to rebuild the old barriers that have been torn down. Humanity’s increasing capacity to move people, goods, services, wealth and ideas across old borders cannot be shouted down or argued away.

Yet the questions raised by the Seattle protesters are not only pertinent but utterly fundamental. And no satisfactory answers have been heard so far from the self-satisfied proponents of free trade, whose policies have caused one disaster after another. How can market forces and technological progress be directed to serve humanity, instead of enslaving humanity to markets and technologies? How will democracies function if their most important laws are subject to an unelected international bureaucracy? Why are the rights of investors granted precedence over the rights of workers and the preservation of the natural environment?

Although the Clinton administration has promised more than once to give those issues the prominence they deserve, the results to date have been worse than disappointing. In nearly every round of international trade negotiations, American diplomats have achieved “success” by relegating the interests of workers and the environment to secondary status. So far, the rise of social democratic governments across Europe has made little difference in this discouraging pattern.

Indeed, Western pretensions of concern about the rights of labor have been openly mocked by the autocratic governments of countries such as China and Mexico, which have obstinately refused even to establish a “working group” on that touchy topic. If the United States and its allies in Europe were truly determined to achieve even that minor concession — as determined as they were to protect copyrights, for example — it is hard to imagine that they would have failed so completely.

So it is even more difficult to imagine that the World Trade Organization could someday become a tribunal for the rights of the world’s workers and the protection of the global environment — but that is the feat of imagination that the future requires.

Consider the actual history of economic expansion in the century that is about to pass. As democratic nations improved the social and environmental conditions in their societies, corporate investors fled whenever possible to other, less developed countries where their managers could profit from child labor, shoot union organizers and despoil the air and water at will.

In the United States, workers who organized for better wages and hours were likely to see their plants shut down and moved someplace where unions are outlawed. Communities that tried to punish polluters were threatened with the loss of jobs and tax revenues. In short, capital has been mobile for decades, evading and often defeating attempts to control the social costs of industrial production.

But with their demand for the complete opening of formerly closed societies to new investment and trade, the corporate elites may ironically be shutting off their own escape from responsibility. Since the founding of the WTO in 1995, the ideologues of free trade have established a worldwide forum in which disputes over tariffs and other commercial barriers can be adjudicated. They have never explained why that forum should be dedicated solely to the narrow concerns of investors and managers. And there is no reason why it should. The logic of an international trade regime is that one country shouldn’t be permitted to boost exports and restrain imports by unfair means.

Critics of free trade have traditionally warned that the inevitable result will be the erosion of the social contract that governs most of the developed world, bringing everyone down to the level of the most impoverished and oppressed. But that outcome will ultimately depend on the definitions of what is and is not fair in the global marketplace. And those definitions are subject to the political will of the WTO’s member nations.

Obviously, “fairness” and “freedom” are terms that lend themselves to many interpretations. Isn’t the violent suppression of labor unions by Indonesia an unfair trading practice, when South Korea lives by a more democratic standard? And isn’t the incineration of the Amazon rainforest an unfair practice by Brazil, when the rest of the planet must suffer the consequences? Those are issues that should rightfully be brought before the WTO — an organization that now devotes much of its energy to determining how much cheese France can send to the United States and whether India is infringing on pharmaceutical patents.

In a political system as dominated by corporate interests and ideology as ours, it may seem rather naive to think that American leaders would ever use this country’s international power to improve labor and environmental standards. And that may never happen, unless the labor movement and its allies develop a sophisticated global strategy to reform the WTO. The only thing that is even less likely to occur is a return to the good old days.

The WTO is under wide-ranging attack for sins of omission and commission — from
neglecting poor countries and worker rights to endangering old forests and
sea turtles and trampling on democracy. But there’s serious disagreement on a wide range of issues among WTO member countries themselves. Despite months of talks at the WTO’s sedate headquarters in Geneva, leaders could not agree on a pre-conference statement of intentions for a new round of negotiations to reduce tariffs and change trading rules, for instance. Now even this new round of talks — which the big economic powers all endorse in some form — is in jeopardy.

If the upcoming negotiations collapse, it would be a serious blow to President Clinton, who has been unable to persuade
other leading heads of government to join him in Seattle to revive prospects for a new round of talks. It could, as a result, indirectly tarnish Vice President Al Gore. But Gore — who is staying far away from Seattle — might lose more if a new round is launched, because it would probably ignite more protest from labor, environmentalists and other constituencies that he needs.

How the WTO took center stage, igniting international protest and even influencing the American presidential elections, is a story in itself. For most of the past 50 years, international trade debates drew a yawn from the average citizen, as governments bit by bit reduced tariffs and other restrictions on international trade. But in the United
States, a variety of trade-related issues — swelling trade deficits, job losses blamed on global trade and investment, a wave of transnational corporate mergers, hot-button
controversies over NAFTA and China’s trading status, and anxieties about
the environmental effects of free trade decisions — have made more
people edgily aware that the decisions of trade bureaucrats can hit home in
surprising ways. Still other Americans look to global production and
marketing as the engine of a new American century, and want the global body to rebuff the demands for restraint coming from international protesters today.

Internationally, of course, Europe, Canada and Japan hope the WTO can boost their prosperity — and at the same time offer some protection for their national cultures against the United States’ global media and entertainment empire. Developing countries have still other interests: Most feel they gained too little from past negotiations, and that the rich countries have resisted opening up their markets rapidly enough to imports of the clothes, shoes, textiles and other goods the poorer nations produce. And many, but not all, view attempts to expand Western standards of labor rights and environmentalism as a new imperialism that will retard their economic growth.

Whatever side you’re on, it’s clear that the rules written at the WTO are driven by strong national interests, which in turn reflect important blocs of voters and even more powerful corporate interests. The United States, for example, has given top priority to trying to keep Internet businesses as free of taxes and regulations as possible, reflecting the desire of
government negotiators to protect the worldwide dominance of U.S. Internet businesses.

And while the United States purports to be a force for greater environmental sensitivity in the global trade body — standing up for dolphins in the tuna trade debate, for instance — the U.S. trade representative is lobbying against European Union proposals requiring manufacturers of computers and other electronic equipment sold in Europe to phase out the use of toxic chemicals and to take back discarded components for recycling. In fact, the
American Electronics Association wants the United States to file a complaint about such demands under WTO.

Another big issue that will likely divide the WTO this week is agriculture. The
United States and a group of leading agricultural exporting countries want Europe to eliminate massive subsidies to agriculture, and hope Japan will abandon its various means of protecting farmers. But Europe and Japan, with some support from developing countries, want the WTO to recognize farming as “multifunctional” — producing food and fiber but also securing rural social life and the environment. Europeans are also up in arms over genetically altered food.

One issue the United States and European Union tend to agree on is the need to do more to protect worker rights. The Clinton government has long argued for some modest links between expanding trade and workers’ rights, and this year the European Union — whose members have tilted more to the center-left in recent elections — also supports such moves. These leaders are driven more by political necessity than conviction: Increasingly they think that the global trading system as a whole will lose popular support in developed countries if it is seen as leading to third-world sweatshops and rising inequality around the world.

But many developing nations object to introducing questions about workers’ rights or the environment into trade talks, saying such issues will be used by rich countries to block their exports. If China enters the WTO, it will add its substantial weight to the bloc of
countries — including Mexico, Egypt, India and Pakistan — that already strenuously object to discussing labor rights.

There are still other divisions. Where the U.S. negotiators are focused on a few core
issues such as agriculture and the Internet, the European Union wants the upcoming “millennial round” of negotiations to be more expansive, providing opportunities for wheeling and dealing on a wide range of issues, and potentially expanding WTO jurisdiction further over rules governing the rights of investors. The United States has shied away from a comprehensive discussion of investment policies, since negotiations on a
multilateral agreement on investment failed last year even among the world’s rich countries.

Developing nations want the next round to include an assessment of the impact of WTO
rules, especially in areas such as the protection of intellectual property. While the richer countries see such rules as protection of their inventions and copyrights, the poor countries often see them as disrupting traditional agriculture (as more plants and animals are patented, for example) or interfering with efforts to provide cheap medicine (such as drugs to
control AIDS in South Africa).

WTO critics on the outside are divided on strategy, even as they
agree about the trade body’s shortcomings. Some, including most of the big U.S.
environmental and labor groups, hope to reform WTO rules to protect
consumers, workers, the environment and national sovereignty. These “fair traders” argue that unrestricted free trade leads to a race to the bottom, with countries competing to reduce regulations that protect the environment or hold down wages and restrict unions in order to
compete.

They want the WTO to give priority to national and international
environmental laws and to use its powers to enforce internationally
recognized workers’ rights. For example, while most countries have committed
themselves to certain core labor rights — preventing child labor, forced
labor and discrimination, and guaranteeing the right of workers to organize –
the WTO could actually penalize countries that don’t adhere to such standards.

In a Nov. 19 speech at the National Press Club, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney said that organized labor would not support a new round of negotiations if it did not incorporate
protection of workers’ rights, the environment and consumers, give citizens more of a voice at the WTO, protect public health and environment laws from WTO rulings, and ensure that governments could protect against surges of imports or dumping of products below cost. “The real debate is not over whether to be part of the global economy, but over what are the rules for that economy and who makes them,” Sweeney said.

Other critics think that the WTO is fatally flawed — too undemocratic,
too pro-corporate, too biased in favor of trade above everything, and too
dominated by the rich countries. They want to roll back or eliminate the
WTO, and don’t trust it to do anything worthwhile — even on behalf of their
causes, whether it’s protecting arctic forests or the right of Indonesian workers to organize unions.

“I don’t believe the WTO as it is can be reformed,” argues Steelworkers union president George Becker. “The whole thing needs to be scrapped and started all over.” Even if worker rights are protected, he argues, it will take many decades for workers in poor
countries to improve their wages and social welfare laws.

These critics point to the track record of the WTO panels charged with settling disputes that come before the organization when one member country challenges laws of
another as unfairly impeding trade. So far, according to a report by Lori Wallach and Michelle Sforza of Public Citizen, the watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader, “no democratically achieved environmental, health, food safety or environmental law challenged at the WTO has ever been upheld. All have been declared barriers to trade.”

The WTO overturned U.S. regulations promoting cleaner gasoline, for example, and ruled that Europe could not ban American beef grown with artificial hormones. In many cases,
governments have dropped or watered down regulations simply because of the threat of a WTO challenge; subjects of such challenges have included Guatemalan rules to discourage misleading promotion of infant formula, Korean food safety laws and a bill before the Maryland legislature to boycott goods from Nigeria because of the country’s human rights violations.

While leaders of developing nations oppose expanding worker rights and environmental protections, union organizers and democracy advocates in these poorer countries
are trying to link up with Western labor and environmental groups, arguing that their own leaders rely on suppressing unions and keeping down wages as a way of attracting international investment and keeping democracy at bay. Some Western unions claim these tactics should be treated as an illegal subsidy to business under WTO rules, and that the international body should penalize the offending countries.

Going into this week’s WTO meetings, it appears that the protesters have American
public opinion on their side. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland showed that 93 percent of Americans thought that “countries that are part of international trade agreements should be required to
maintain minimum standards for working conditions.” The survey showed
that while Americans are open to free trade and globalization, they think that corporations rather than working people have benefited most from these trends; respondents say they are willing to slow down trade — and even pay somewhat higher prices — to protect American jobs, support worker rights around the world and preserve the environment.

Increasingly, it seems, the divisions at the WTO are not the kind of questions that can be settled by trading tariff reductions in a lawyer-filled back room. More fundamental issues about the nature of the new global economy are coming to the fore and spilling into the streets of Seattle.