Word: shrimps
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BEEF: WTO violates animal rights, e.g., sea turtles caught in shrimp-fishing nets STUNT: Armies in cardboard turtle costumes, human butterflies on stilts...
...Burma, now called Myanmar, which is one of Asia's most saw-toothed dictatorships. But the U.S. State Department sees such boycotts as a violation of federal sovereignty and free trade. Then there are the environmentalists. To protect sea turtles, an endangered species, they want an import ban on shrimp caught in nets that don't have escape hatches to let the turtles swim away. Congress has adopted such a ban, but the WTO forbids it; member nations can't block imports on the basis of the way they are produced. The organization may also eventually forbid American "antidumping" laws...
...from the fringe to the mainstream, raising concerns about democracy, labor rights and the environment. They reject the idea of having a non-elected body with the power to overrule democratically elected governments on issues of environmental protection and labor rights. For example, environmentally motivated U.S. restrictions on importing shrimp caught with nets that endanger sea turtles have been overruled by the WTO, while laws against dumping low-cost steel in the U.S. may also be eliminated by the international body. Some of the more radical environmentalist groups, as well as conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, who traditionally oppose international...
...shown by China's bid for admission last week, the organization seems about to extend its gospel of no-pain, no-gain capitalism across the planet. The WTO's 36,000 pages of regulations reach into far-flung crannies of human existence. Can Malaysian fishermen export their shrimp to the U.S. even if their nets lack escape hatches for endangered turtles? Yes. Can Massachusetts refuse to buy products from companies that do business in Myanmar? No. Do American corporations get an illegal export subsidy by setting up legal offshore tax shelters? Yes. Can the French block our hormone-fed beef...
Police have little to fear from the 240 Humane Society activists, dressed in turtle costumes, set to protest the WTO's shrimp-export decision. Nor are they worried about the human chain of hand-holding clergy and parishioners who will surround the delegates' reception Monday to plead for Third World debt relief. But scores of "radical jeerleaders" are practicing their choreographed cheers in church basements: "Smash the state/ Let's liberate!" Four Molotov cocktails were lobbed into an empty Gap store in downtown Seattle this month, Gap being a focus of antisweatshop protests. No wonder the city has budgeted...