The answer is that this fight should not be made our fight. The problem
is that many progressive groups are making this a top priority. We should
be putting our energy into and mobilizing people around other issues and
struggles.
Marty
No. "This," meaning PNTR, is just a battle in an extended war.
Likewise with China in or out of WTO, or even WTO itself.
It's getting attention now because the vote is this week.
The campaign is much broader, nor, for labor, does it hinge
in any important way on China's communist identity. You keep
telescoping the campaign to the parts you don't like, just as you
mischaracterize the emphases in the Teamster quote I posted and
in your allusions to positions in EPI publications.
Since you don't want to endorse the WTO, you counterpose an
abolitionist position, nix rather than fix. This is very
superficial. With no WTO, U.S./China trade would be subject
to some alternative web of laws, regulations, and institutions.
"No WTO" leaves to the imagination what these should be.
What should they be? What would an MTO -- Marty's Trade
Organization -- do in the face of capital migrating from
the U.S. to a union-free environment?
Or we could put it this way, in the spirit of targeting
the corporations. Suppose Ford announces they would rather
produce Escorts in China than in Wayne, Michigan, so good-bye
3,700 auto jobs, hello 3,700 lesser opportunities (optimistically
speaking). Should the workers excoriate the company, but fail
to demand the government do anything? Should they threaten to
strike? If strikes were effective in this vein we would not
have the problem in the first place. If the government does
prevent the plant from leaving, what would be the difference between
this and a WTO regime that accomplished the same thing?
It is almost fair to say your position is analogous to one
that stipulated, don't attack the state, attack the corporations
(or capital, or whatever) underlying the actions of the state.
In this case the WTO is the surrogate for states and Capital.
It's the new global form of business as usual. If you want
to create some leverage by disrupting the machine, you go for
the gears; you don't agitate for better safety goggles.
mbs
