>But I'm really posting to point out that Bhagwati
>doesn't agree that the WTO is necessarily good for the
>poor, and indeed in this letter to the FT seems to be
>expressing pretty severe misgivings about the process
>of globalisation:
>
>http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=010220001132&query=bhagwati
>
>I've got a lot of sympathy for his position (rather
>like Rakesh's own, I think), of having started out as
>an unashamed cheerleader for free trade in goods, then
>gradually realising that all your cohorts are
>interested in marching on to free capital flows,
>global intellectual property, MAI, etc, etc (but never
>free global labour markets -- laissez-faire, but not
>laissez-passer). My guess is that within five years,
>Bhagwati will be on our side.
Here's what Bhagwati said about IP when Liza & I interviewed him:
>I'm more optimistic about getting something in the ILO. No
>connection between these two, very much like the early days when
>hillary was condemning the pharmaceuticals for vaccines being too
>highly priced, then bill clinton's mickey cantor was trying to
>[unintel] in the WTO, which he managed, quite successfully. Which
>then meant that pharmaceuticals were going to get higher prices,
>therefore make vaccines more expensive for the poor countries! Here
>was total disconnect between 2 members of the household. [laughs] Of
>course hillary eventually backed down. But the point is if you look
>back on intellectual property protection, so many poor countries
>protested and resisted. This is why I wanted to send $1000 to ralph
>nader -- and then got frightened off [laughs] -- it was not the WTO
>which asked for, we forced it down the throats of the poor
>countries. The AIDS situation, comes up in the public domain and the
>young people say, ah, the WTO has intellectual property protection.
>It shouldn't have been there in the first place! It was just done
>for political reasons....
>
>IPP, I think we really did something quite wrong. The other day on
>an indian meeting vandana shiva was talking about intellectual
>property from quite a different perspective, bio-piracy. And she
>said many of the developing countries had developed their own
>knowhow on using all kinds of genetic material from the rain forest
>and if you were improving on it you should pay some sort of royalty
>because this is age-old knowledge, etc. which you are building. You
>can't rule it out altogether it's an interesting argument actually,
>[laughs] I sided with her pointing out some of the things on IPP,
>there were all these people like Winston Lord and the whole
>establishment of this CFR [Council on Foreign Relations, where JB is
>a fellow this year] and the business establishment, they thought I
>was a green man from Mars for a change. [laughs]
By the way, here's what he said about U.S. labor (Rakesh, you reading the archives?):
>We have this strange position, we want these workers rights to be
>asserted, to get into the WTO, the administration is doing it just
>because it refuses to engage Sweeney in a meaningful dialogue. I
>don't see Sweeney as someone who's cockeyed or anything, I've read
>his book, America needs a raise. A lot of it is really quite
>sensible. Where he speaks from the heart is really quite fantastic
>in my opinion. I've seen him and I know his stuff. Smith who I think
>is his right hand man on legal matters. I don't see that they're not
>amenable to argument and dialogue, I just don't see that. But I
>think the administration has just coasted along with whatever they
>want because they cant be bothered. I think partly they think if
>they engage in dialogue the support will just wither away. I just
>don't see that as a way to hold on to that support.
Sometimes he sounds like a William Gaddis character.
Doug