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June 14, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear
Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the Bush Adminstration Buried
Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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June 14,
2002
US Trade Policy
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
by Mark Weisbrot
"Do as we say, not as we do,"
is the advice from the United States to the low- and middle-income
countries of the world when it comes to trade. Lately the press
has taken aim at this aspect of modern colonialism. They have
pointed out the hypocrisy of the US and other rich countries
subsidizing their agriculture or protecting their steel or textile
industries, while demanding that countries as poor as Ghana
open their markets to goods and services from the North.
This allows the punditry to fancy itself
the champion of the world's poor, joining hands in righteous
indignation with the leaders of the world's most powerful economic
institutions: the International
Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.
The same rules should apply equally to all, they proclaim.
Or as Anatole France once said, "The
law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread."
But how much will the world's poor really
benefit from increased access to the markets of the rich countries?
And is this really the best way to level the playing field --
"free trade" for everyone?
As often happens with debates about economic
policy, few of the people writing and chattering about the subject
bother to look at the numbers. For example: imagine that the
rich countries of the world open all of their markets for merchandise
trade-- agriculture, textiles, steel, everything. This would
be phased in by 2015. How much more annual income would the
low- and middle-income countries have in 2015 as a result of
this increased access to the markets of rich countries?
According to the World Bank, the answer
is about 0.6 percent. The poorer countries would not get their
fair share, but imagine that they did: a country in Sub-Saharan
Africa whose income per person would otherwise be $500 a year
would, as a result of this trade liberalization, have $503.
Not much to write home about.
In fact, according to other widely-used
economic models, many developing countries will actually wind
up with a net loss from the liberalization of agriculture and
textile trade that was agreed upon at the WTO's creation in
1994.
But it gets worse. The WTO doesn't just
make and enforce trade rules. It has a seamier underside --
the highly protectionist agreement known as "TRIPS"
(Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). The
goal of these rules is to get the low and middle-income countries
to obey patent and copyright laws that are made in the USA and
Europe.
Economists haven't spent too much time
looking at what this will cost developing countries. But preliminary
estimates (again from the World Bank) indicate that this one
form of protectionism could easily exceed the gains from trade
liberalization.
And there are other serious concerns
that people in developing countries have about implementing
the rules of "free trade," as it is commonly and inaccurately
labeled. In many countries a large part of the labor force,
sometimes the majority, is still employed in agriculture. In
the United States we went from 53 percent of our labor force
in agriculture in 1870 to 4.6 percent in 1970, and yet the
displacement of people from the countryside still generated
much pain and serious social unrest. Imagine what would happen
if this century-long process were collapsed into a couple of
decades, as advocated by the WTO (along with the IMF and World
Bank) for much of the world. This is a recipe for social explosion.
The truth is that equalizing the enforcement
of bad rules will not make the world better off, any more than
spreading street crime from poor to middle-class neighborhoods
would. If we look at the few countries that have made it out
of poverty in the last half-century -- for example South Korea
or Taiwan -- they didn't get there by adhering to the "Washington
Consensus" of free trade and unrestricted foreign investment
flows. Quite the contrary: their governments protected, subsidized,
and even created key industries, and intervened heavily to move
their economies into higher technology, higher value-added production.
Of course we did similar things when
the United States was a developing country, with an average
tariff of 44 percent on manufactured goods as late as 1913.
Not to mention "borrowing" technology from wherever
it existed in more advanced form, ignoring foreign intellectual
property rights. "Do as we say, not as we did."
Mark Weisbrot
is co-Director of the Center
for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
He is co-author (with Dean Baker) of Social
Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press).
Today's
Features
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear
Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the Bush Adminstration Buried
Coleen Rowley
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