The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [97]
The Jubilee movement—inspired by the biblical concept of a Jubilee year in which debts are forgiven and equity is restored—is active in many countries around the world, uniting faith-based communities with advocates for human rights, the environment, labor, and economic justice. It calls for a cancellation of international debts and the restoration of healthy relationships between nations. Some progress is being made. There is proposed legislation before the U.S. Congress called the Jubilee Act, which would cancel debt among the poorest countries in the world and promote more transparency and responsibility in future lending. In 2008, this act passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but didn’t make it to the full Senate for a vote.112 Even while waiting for the Jubilee Act to move forward, there are other signs of hope, such as the April 2009 promise by the Obama administration to provide $20 million to cancel Haiti’s absolutely crippling debt payments to the World Bank and its regional ally, the Inter-American Development Bank.113
The last of the big three is the World Trade Organization. The WTO was created in 1995 as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (or GATT). First aimed at reducing trade tariffs, it later turned to “trade liberalization”—that is, removing obstacles to increased trade. Now, I am not against trade, which has been happening since the beginning of time and has brought many good things. But trade should take place when it supports a thriving environment, good jobs, healthy communities, and cultural diversity. Trade can support all those things when those things are the end, and trade is one (just one) means by which to achieve them. The fundamental problem with the WTO is that it acts as though trade itself is the goal and that therefore trade must be given preference over pesky little things like public health, worker rights, and strong and vibrant local economies.
The trade-trumps-all approach of the WTO is demonstrated in its highly controversial provision which prevents nations from discriminating against any product based on how it was produced. It doesn’t matter if the technology involved in making the product is horribly polluting or unsafe to workers. Any country—driven by its corporate interests—can challenge a law in another country by claiming it’s a “trade barrier.” Such disputes are decided by three-person arbitration panels that meet in secret and are not screened for conflicts of interest.114
In the late 1990s, I worked in Ralph Nader’s office in Washington, D.C. One of my colleagues there, Rob Weissman, a Harvard-trained lawyer and leading critic of the WTO, used to chide me for my obsession with factories and dumps, urging me to join those fighting the WTO instead of, or more accurately in addition to, working on garbage. He pointed out that every law that I worked tirelessly to strengthen, and every victory against a dirty production process could get wiped out, or rendered illegal, by the WTO.
Weissman was right on: many of my local-level campaigns, for example to prevent a certain incinerator or polluting factory, were won as battles but then lost in the overall war as macro-level policies determined a different longer term outcome. Under the WTO, environmental laws, labor standards, human rights legislation, public health policies, protection of native cultures, food self-reliance—all of these can and have been attacked and overturned as impediments to free trade. For example, the WTO overruled the European Union’s law banning beef raised with artificial growth hormones when beef producers outside Europe claimed the public health law constituted a trade barrier.115 Under the WTO, government laws made in the public interest can be overturned just like that. Obviously, many companies that extract resources and produce Stuff love this, since it means fewer obstacles to their business. For those of us who are working to promote higher standards and better practices