Word: globalizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization, the bureaucrats may not have accomplished all that much last week. The chaos that surrounded them did. In this moment of triumphant capitalism, of planetary cash flows and a priapic Dow, all the second thoughts and outright furies about the global economy collected on the streets of downtown Seattle and crashed through the windows of NikeTown. After two days of uproar scented with tear gas and pepper spray, Americans may never again think the same way about free trade and what it costs...
...objection to the WTO may stand out any better than it has before. But from now on, every objection will be illuminated by the fires of last week. The WTO trade ministers and other delegates had come to Seattle to draw up an agenda for a new round of global trade talks, which are scheduled to last about three years and take up issues like European farm subsidies--of huge importance to U.S. and Canadian agricultural exporters--and whether to tax sales on the Internet...
...late Friday night, negotiations to get agreement on an agenda for a new round of global-trade negotiations collapsed. Exhausted WTO delegates said they would try again next year in Geneva to bridge huge differences...
...meeting in Seattle because the WTO is an astonishing consolidation of corporate power. It has the power to override and do away with any labor, human rights and environmental standards with any democratic notions and with any transparency or responsibility that interferes with corporate profits. The rise of global sweatshops is just one effect of the rise of corporate power and of its globalizing reach. The WTO's kind of trade--trade that pretends to have no consequences--pits workers from El Salvador against workers from China in a race to see who can be the most exploited...
...need not oppose the idea of a global economy to oppose the WTO's agenda; one need only despise the erosion of democracy that comes from putting corporate profits before human rights...