Today's Stories

December 12 / 14, 2008

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
December 12 / 14, 2008

Development For Whom?

The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

By RAJ PATEL

Just when the WTO's Doha Round had faded into the back pages of specialized trade publications, the G-20 has given it the kiss of life, heralding it as the way out of the current global economic crisis. Talks that had been given the last rites in July are today alive and rosy-cheeked and, if some of the rumors from Geneva are to be believed, close to completion. It sounds improbable that July's diplomatic failure, reported as an unmitigated disaster, should so quickly have been mitigated. Yet it appears to be true.

To get beneath appearances, it's worth having a look at a chronicle of a previous WTO round collapse. Stuart Townsend's recently released film, Battle in Seattle, tells the tale of the glorious week at the end of November 1999 when the World Trade Organization held its ministerial summit in the United States, and offers some helpful, if unintended, lessons.

Townsend's is a film that has its heart in the right place. It follows, with a great deal of sympathy, five days of fireworks in the streets of Seattle. The film didn't do too shabby a job at capturing a couple of key moments. I was part of the Zimbabwean NGO delegation inside the meetings, and got to see the protests from both sides of the barricades. One of the Ministerial's many diplomatic low points happened when the African delegation was turfed out of a meeting room, because the U.S. conference organizers decided they needed the room for something else. That's how it went down, and the film got it dead right. The movie's coverage from outside the Ministerial was convincing too. The re-enactment shots of the protests and the clouds of teargas and smoke billowing through the streets were eerily accurate.

But ultimately the film was disappointing, and the reason it fails is the reason we shouldn't be surprised at the resurrection of the Doha talks. Townsend had to make some tough choices to make the story fit the constraints of Hollywood and celluloid. With a red carpet full of celebrities, his tale needed to be driven by good or bad characters, each going through their own narrative arc over the five days. Real life doesn't work like that, and trade agreements certainly don't. The narratives that best explain what happens in politics aren't usually the ones that fit 90 minutes and a PG-13 rating.

Crisscrossing Storylines

Part of the problem, in other words, lies in the stories that get told about the WTO. Attractive though they are, the narratives of epic struggle and eventual defeat don't really help describe the reality of how trade diplomacy works. Trade diplomacy is more about shifting interests, mendacity, and perpetually uncertain outcomes.

With this in mind, it's useful to revisit why the Doha round collapsed most recently. You can go easy on yourself if you can't quite recall. Even the Financial Times now reports on the collapse of the Doha round as a summer fixture as routine as "beach holidays, barbecues, and Wimbledon fortnight."

There was, among progressive economists, a fair degree of consensus in the talks' post mortem that the failure of July's negotiations was due in part to the U.S. government's inability to wield the hegemonic power that it took for granted when it set up the WTO in the first place. The United States sought to impose conditions on developing countries that it was unable, through either coercion or consent, to get away with.

The most unpalatable of these conditions for developing countries were the provisions around "Special Safeguard Mechanisms" (SSMs). These clauses in trade negotiations allow countries to raise tariffs, suspending WTO standards, but only in emergencies. The point of SSMs is to allow countries to provide some modicum of shelter to their economies when the winds of free trade blow through.

Such protections are necessary to counter "import surges," which happen when a domestic industry is overwhelmed by cheaper imports. Depending on how you measure them, according to the FAO, there were between 7,132 and 12,167 such surges from 1980 to 2003. They're not rare occurrences, which is why it's prudent for developing countries to negotiate a way to counter their worst effects. Special safeguard mechanisms are the rip-cord that national governments can pull in order to prevent an import surge from destroying domestic industries beyond all hope of recovery.

During the Doha negotiations, the dispute around SSMs seemed to be merely over the threshold at which SSMs would kick in. But a debate about thresholds is also, inevitably, one about policy. To declare that a domestic industry is being overwhelmed by imports is a political, not an economic, judgment call. One person's "industry in death throes" is another's "industry adjusting to the realities of the global market."

The debate about SSMs was, then, about the extent to which governments should be allowed to prioritize domestic concerns over promises they made under WTO policy. Should SSMs be allowed at levels at which they could reasonably be expected to be used as a standard tool of development policy? Or should the threshold be so high that their inclusion in the negotiations is, at best, cosmetic—an insurance policy that would require catastrophe in order to start paying out? The United States demanded a 150% trigger before SSMs could kick in, that is, a 50% import surge before developing countries could start imposing tariff hikes.

This was unacceptable to many countries. India, in particular, took a belligerent stand around agriculture. The Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath chided the United States for its approach to agricultural trade liberalization. In the wake of the failure, he's reported as saying, "Unfortunately one member is unable to make any effective reduction in trade distorting subsidies, but at the same time is insisting that developing countries open up their markets to provide access to their subsidized products. We cannot accept opening of our markets for subsidized agriculture products."

The story, then, wasn't just about failing U.S. hegemony—it was also one in which India headed a crew of developing countries unwilling to open their agriculture sectors to the subsidized predations of U.S. agribusiness. This, at least, is the story.

There's certainly a grain of truth here. India is heading into an election year, and engaging in the kinds of stunts that are part of election season in the world's largest democracy. These include the Doha position and a debt-relief program for farmers that, while promising an end to the catastrophe of farmer suicides, ultimately does little to prevent them because it excludes informal sector loans and farmers who do not own their own land (invariably women). Both are part of the many ways in which Indian politicians signal their temporary interest in their poorest rural citizens. Their interest is soon displaced after the votes are counted, but in the months before ballots are cast, it means that Indian politicians tend to take more pro-poor postures.

Indian agricultural policy analyst and journalist Devinder Sharma adds a wrinkle to this story. He argues that everyone was ready to sign on the dotted line, including India, and that Nath's fulminations on the rights of Indian farmers shouldn't be taken at face value. Sharma suggests that in the hours before the talks collapsed, it looked as if the parties around the table were nearing an agreement, if only the U.S. negotiators would agree to tamp down agricultural subsidies in cotton. The United States refused, and the talks collapsed. I don't doubt this would have been a sticking point, though I think it's hasty to discount the importance of election cycles on the negotiating process and to lay the entire blame for the talk's collapse on a single issue.

But Sharma is right to poke a hole in the idea that Nath represented a knight in shining armor for the benighted people of the world. Nath, like his peers around the negotiating table, is not an agriculturalist. His allegiances lie with the elites of his country and, after the election is over in India, his rhetoric will return to match his actions in discriminating against the small farmers.

While the world was gripped by the U.S. election fever, Nath was in meetings with Celso Amorim, Brazil's minister of external relations, and they seemed, according to some reports, to have found common ground. This makes it a little less surprising that the Doha talks are rolling again.

They've also been encouraged through the G-20 summit, dubbed the Bretton Woods II conference, which happened in November 2008 in Washington, DC. Here's what the statement from the G-20 Summit says in the section entitled "Commitment to an Open Economy":

"... we shall strive to reach agreement this year on modalities that lead to a successful conclusion to the WTO's Doha Development Agenda with an ambitious and balanced outcome. We instruct our trade ministers to achieve this objective and stand ready to assist directly, as necessary. We also agree that our countries have the largest stake in the global trading system and therefore each must make the positive contributions necessary to achieve such an outcome."

With the economic situation deteriorating, finance ministers and heads of state from the world's largest economies are keen to prevent a crisis with its origins in the United States from spreading, and eager to avoid policies that hamper the economic freedom of the corporations that they represent. The G-20 declaration is part of a strategy to shore up the freedom of capital in these, the largest capitalist countries.

Remember that this is a statement drafted by finance ministers, whose portfolio is precisely the expansion of trade and finance. They can see that a lame-duck Bush administration is much more likely to be supportive of their agenda than an Obama one. Throughout his campaign Obama surrounded himself with trade hawks, and one ought not to expect too drastic a change in U.S. trade policy direction during his presidency. But it's hard to imagine that his administration would be quite as gung-ho as that of his predecessor. The G-20 declaration is a way for a bloc of leaders to secure diplomatic space and to push for an agreement before Jan. 19, 2009, when Bush leaves office. In this way, they seek to gain ground in the long war against all other kinds of international economic arrangements. The neoliberal refrain of "there is no alternative" reverberates throughout the G20 text.

Development for Whom?

Of course, Doha is far from a path to salvation for the world economic system. The rules of the trade game are skewed in favor of large corporations, across a range of developing and developed countries. As heterodox economists Ha Joon Chang and Walden Bello have noted, the practice of "free trade" has been one in which the most powerful states have achieved dominance not by trade liberalization, but by prolonged investment in their biggest industries. This is as true of the U.S. car industry as it is of the Brazilian soy industry. In both cases, states have invested heavily to promote local industries behind tariff walls, pulling down those walls only when the industries were ready to do battle in the rest of the world.

This helps explain the G-20's position. Having graduated into the big league, the large developing countries want to save their own economies by expanding export markets for their own favored industries, and this means pulling the ladder up on the rest of the Global South.

They're plumping for a model of development that, inevitably, aligns them more profoundly with the Global North, than with the rest of the Global South or with the poor in their own countries. The lack of a path to development that involves government investment hurts society's weakest the most: those with the least education, training, and resources, invariably people in rural areas and women.

The full title of the WTO talks is "The Doha Development Round" but it is not the poorest who will be developed by the negotiations. The G-20 declaration signals that the world's richest governments are keener to support their big industries as we head into a global recession, than to think terribly hard about their poorest citizens.

The Doha round of talks isn't quite healthy and robust. But it never died either. The language of life and death obscures what the negotiations represent. The talks themselves are a battle-line in the long diplomatic trench warfare of economic powerplay between newer and older capitalist nations, where different blocs win and lose ground, but the poor are consistently marginalized, consistently the victims.

While the battle-lines may shift a little, and occasional lulls may occur in the fighting, the talks can never die as long as the WTO exists. So next time you read a report that the WTO trade talks are dead, just remember: there's always a sequel.

Raj Patel's most recent book is Stuffed and Starved. He blogs at http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/blog/1 and is an analyst for the Americas Policy Program.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont