In December of 1998, Krygyzstan became the first Central Asian nation to join the WTO. Hailed as an “island of democracy” and “the Switzerland of Central Asia” by its Western boosters, Kyrgyzstan seemed to have finally joined the family of civilized nations, marching into the gold-lined free market future, leaving behind its former imperial overlord Russia, which at the time was reeling from both economic shock and political instability following the August financial meltdown.
Yet a funny thing happened. Entry into the WTO didn't do a single good thing for Kyrgyzstan. In fact, in the 3-1/2 years since joining, the country's economy, which was one of the best performing in the region until then, slowed dramatically to the point of contraction this year, its debt ballooned and foreign investment has practically disappeared. The WTO-enforced liberalization of the economy meant that neighboring autocratic regimes like Uzbekistan, which violate neo-liberal orthodoxy by subsidizing industry, have since undercut the Kyrgyz and devastated local industry.
Worse still, its experiment with democracy, which according to the dogma preached by fundamentalist neo-liberals like Michael McFaul is supposed to walk hand-in-hand with free markets, has, since joining the WTO, been abandoned for the usual Central Asian autocracy. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists recently chose Kyrgyzstan as one of the 10 worst places for a journalist to work in the world due to government harassment. President Askar Akayev brutally cracked down on the opposition and arrested his critics, leading to a massive rebellion in the south this year in a nation known for its once-docile population.
Kazakhstan, which is not a member of the WTO, is the fastest growing economy in Central Asia, followed by Uzbekistan, also not a member. Is the World Trade Organization to blame for Kyrgyzstan's problems?
Who knows, although one thing is for sure: if the economy had boomed over the past three years, you can bet that all the WTO boosters would have been frantically batting out pro-WTO “see, I toldja so!” editorials pointing to Kyrgyzstan as proof of their model's success. As it is, they're today oddly silent.
The other ex-Soviet states which managed to join the WTO are Georgia, Moldova and the Baltics. The stats there don't paint a very tempting picture for joining the WTO either. Georgia joined some three years ago. USAID's web site brags that it had helped Georgia, which barely has an economy or even a state to mention, join the WTO: “USAID played a large role in Georgia's successful accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). [. . . ] WTO accession in October 1999 was a major benchmark for Georgia, further integrating the country with the world market and at the same time making Georgia more attractive for foreign investors. ”
The jaw-dropping result of Georgia's accession into the WTO is that Georgia's economy grew 2% in 2000, 4.5% in 2001, and looks set to fall to the 2-3% range this year. Foreign investment has fallen by a third since joining the WTO. By contrast, Caucasus neighbors Armenia and Azerbaidjan, neither of which have made it into the WTO, have grown in the 10% range for each of the past three years.
Did politics have anything to do with Georgia's accession? Let's ask ourselves this: does a transnational oil company shit in the woods? There's your answer.
Moldova, the poorest country in Europe next to Albania (another WTO member), joined the WTO last summer after a decade of being the IMF darlings —and its own population's nightmare. That decade saw Moldova become the basket case of Europe, whose only export became shipping its girls into war zones with a large international peacekeeping presence. Around the same time that Moldova was accepted into the WTO, it became the first ex-Soviet republic to democratically re-install the Communist Party into power as a reaction against the very neoliberal policies that the WTO demands. While Moldova's economy has continued to shrink as fast as its population, non-WTO member Ukraine, which should be even more of a basket case, has actually seen its industrial output soar.
Kyrgyzstan and Moldova are today ranked by the World Bank as among the countries with the worst wealth inequities in the world. Belarus, on the other hand, ranks along with Slovenia as among Eastern Europe's best.
Even Estonia had a higher growth rate before joining the WTO than after. Is there a cause and effect? Who knows. But the fact is this: if WTO accession is the biggest carrot that the Bush Administration can offer Putin in return for his initial unqualified support for the War on Terror and acquiescence on a series of US humiliations from the unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty to the introduction of troops in Georgia and the expansion of NATO, then Putin has been offered an exploding carrot straight from the Acme Corp of Looney Toons.
The fact that Putin has started shifting his policy away from total accommodation with the United States — signing a $$40 billion economic agreement with Iraq, continuing to develop a multi-billion dollar nuclear power deal with Iran, and this week accepting North Korean madman Kim Il Jong into the Far East, thus completing Putin's return to his courtship of the “Axis of Evil ” --shows that Putin has finally caught on that he got the shaft from the Americans, just as Gorbachev and Yeltsin did.
WHAT IS THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION?
The more you study this question, the less you're able to swallow the literature of bullshit out there. What is the WTO? Quite clearly it's a cover for transnational companies to open up new markets in underdeveloped countries hiding under the guise of once-fashionable late-20th century economics dogma. Multinationals are a lot like vampires: they know that they can destroy any developing nation's industry and take it over for their own profit, if only they can get invited in the house. The question is how to convince the local population that it's in their interests. Bribing the dictators or the parliaments to pass laws allowing them to take over isn't enough -you need a dogma to make people BELIEVE that when they lose their jobs, it's for their own good, or at least, it's no one's fault but the natural laws of history. That, it seems, is what the World Trade Organization's job is. And in the 90s, before the statistics started to roll in, it did a pretty good job of propping up the earnings growth of the transnationals that it serves, and destroying the developing nations who were promised the moon.
If you don't believe that this is what the WTO is about, if you think my description is just left-wing pablum, then open up their web site. Seriously. It's one of the creepiest things I've ever seen. Take for example the page for “The Ten Misunderstandings ” about the WTO. Using kindergarten semi-stick figure illustrations [shown throughout this piece ] with primary colorings that intentionally cross lines to give it a naive, child-like, harmless appearance, the first page introducing the Ten Misunderstandings depicts a crowd of stick figures holding rakes and hoes and torches [see bottom right ]. In other words, in the WTO's mind, people who don't understand or who criticize the WTO are nothing but crazed peasants intent on burning the manor down —and yet, out of the goodness of their hearts, the WTO are going to teach those poor thick-headed savages why they're wrong.
When a giant evil corporate organization responds to mass global protests with cartoons, you know they're up to something. I've seen this before —those Shell Oil commercials with the sweet dinosaur that turns into a gas station or the BP logo that turned into a green, eco-friendly icon.
Another way you can tell right off that even the WTO folks know they're lying is that they use the old “if you don't believe in us, you're going to burn in Hell ” scare tactic employed so successfully by the Christians and Muslims. That is, time and again the WTO justifies itself to its critics by claiming that it was protectionism in the 1930s that led to World War 2 — the 20th century's equivalent of Hell —and therefore, the WTO is doing God's work, not the corporations', to prevent World War Three by forcing countries to allow Bechtel to buy their water and dole it out in drops to its population.
I never understood the logic of this argument that protectionism made Hitler. Does that mean that the free trade of the 1920s can be blamed for the Great Depression? Do these golfing goblins really believe that it was because of the passage of the SmootHawley (or whatever it was called) import tariff that drove Hitler to blitzkrieg Poland and gas 6 million Jews? The scary thing is, maybe they do.
If they just presented a case, you might think that the WTO was in the pale of reason. But by the degree and insanity of their deception on their web site, one of the few places you can get information from them, you get the feeling that they've got something big to hide.
The lies are so obvious, and the drawings and tone so offensive, you wonder who they think they're writing to — if their purpose is actually to incite rebellion, to flush out the resistance in order to cut off their heads. For example, “Misunderstanding Number One ” is the “mistaken ” belief that the WTO's decision-making process is undemocratic. “[D]ecisions taken in the WTO are negotiated, accountable and democratic, ” it reads.. But how can this be when the list of WTO member nations is a Who's Who of the world's most corrupt, autocratic, unaccountable regimes?
Pose a question like that to a web site for an organization that oversees hundreds of trillions of dollars of trade and uses stick figures and children's language to explain itself to its critics, and you start to understand why those critics stop trying to debate start to smash and burn things.
RUSSIA AND THE WTO The first question to ask is, why, if Bangladesh, Cameroon and Papau New Guinea are members of the WTO, does Russia not qualify?
Part of the answer is obviously political. And part of it is that Russia may not want to.
What would happen if Russia joined the WTO? A World Bank report admits that one of the immediate effects would be the destruction of the local automobile, aviation and banking industries (50 to 90 percent of Russia's banks, quite a large range, are projected by the World Bank to go bankrupt in the event of accession), but not much else since they were already destroyed during the market openings in the first shock therapy. In other words, whatever survived that will die, leaving Russia with little industry beyond raw material exports. The ice cream is owned by Nestle;the tobacco by Philip Morris and BAT;the beer by Interbrew and SAB, etc.
Moreover, Russia's “phone tariffs would rise dramatically, ” and this would have “social consequences. ” That's just for starters. The WTO might also force the Russians to privatize their water;when this happened in Bolivia, citizens were forbidden by law even from collecting rain water on their roofs without a permit from Bechtel. It led to a riot, deaths, and the renationalization of the water supply.
A secretly-negotiated amendment, GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Service), pushed by European and American service multinationals, is looking to force member nations to open up their health care, education and water services to foreign competition and takeover.
Many leading Russian industrialists and politicians, including Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, have warned against Russia's joining.
Yet in the end, Russia will have no choice. Right now it sits on the sidelines with a couple dozen half-assed countries getting even shittier deals than it might get if it joins the WTO. To reapply the metaphor, the WTO is really a lot like the Church in presecular humanist days. You could chose, in late 18th Century South Carolina, to be a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim if you wanted to -that was every citizen's right -but you sure as hell wouldn't get much in the way of business contracts, party invites, daughters' hands or vacancies in the local university for your son. The same goes with the WTO. The countries that are members make up nearly all the world's population and GDP. Russia today sits on the “observer status ” sidelines of the WTO in the company of such heavy- weights as Samoa, Equatorial Guinea, the Vatican, Sao Tome and Principe (whatever the fuck that is), and classic ex-US enemies such as Vietnam, Cambodia (which is about to get made)and Laos, waiting, like some stubborn geek, for the frat house to give Russia a thumb-up. It's going to join whether it likes it or not, sooner or later, and when it joins, it's going to get fucked in new ways it hasn't yet imagined. Because American multinationals, backed by American military power, write the rules.
So Putin is between a rock and a hard place: he either sells Russia out to the multinationals as Argentina did, or he protects it and lets it fall further behind, like Belarus. You gotta assume that Putin's in the Kremlin saying, like Sam Kinison, “Thanks a lot, God! Thanks for the big menu!”
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