Bill Safire is a columnist for the NY Times but was a Nixon speech writer, along with Pat Buchanan. Their views are not the same although they are both “conservatives.” Bill calls himself a “lib con,” for libertarian conservative. Conservative today means narrowly someone who favors the least possible government activity in the affairs of the society while also believing that the eternal verities are indeed eternal and verities and that their practice is essential to the peace and prosperity of a society.
Bill’s thought about the WTO mess expressed my answer to your question about what DID get harmed that week.
His thought was that, even though he is a strong free trader — as Pat is not, for example, even though both are “conservative — and no lover of the Clintons, he agreed with Clinton that if developing nations and corporate internationals would use slave and child labor to produce cheap goods to sell in a free trade economy, they should be sanctioned.
It was Clinton’s use of that word sanctioned that shut down the WTO because the developing nations and corporate internationals, whose votes control WTO, so strongly favor slave and child labor, not using those words, of course.
Clinton was told by advisors NOT to use the word. But in his heart of late-comer to the 60s heart he responded to the call for freedom, as every American will when pushed, and used the word.
He used it to polish the apple with the AFL/CIO for Gore, of course, and Safire mentions that. “But by jingo” as Bill says noting this possible cynical spin on Clinton’s use of the word, the most precious thing America has to offer the world is freedom and its supporting legal rubrics and let’s be delighted that point was made willy-nilly by our president, who in this case spoke against his advisor’s advice and made a fundamental point: that liberty is the foundation of life and Americans will accept no less for themselves or for anyone else. This is our “trade.”
The damage then was done to the slave and child labor owners and their governments and supporting corporate multinationals.
And you know what, not one Seattle leader has publicly applauded the President for using that word, sanctions, and thereby expressing the principle that we will not accept tyranny of human beings. No one here in leadership has mentioned it. And Seattle prides itself on being anti-hierarchical and laid-back (aka drugged out).
It is estimated that one is three households in the City of Seattle grows their own marijuana. The code phrase for this is “a laid-back city.” Authoritarians do not go here, not officially, so there is extensive back-room decision-making that is veiled by the media, whose owners are in the back room. None of the back room people has raised a public eye brow over the slave and child labor that is the basis of WTO’s version of free trade. They know all about it, rely on it.
Like Safire, my feeling is that the mess around WTO is not about jobs or money or trade or corporations. It is about the circumstances in which all of these aspects of life are dealt with and resolved. In, over, under, around and through all of the hurly burly of life, which will always be, there is freedom and supporting that, civility, human values. America represents this truth and Americans are very and justly proud of that.
At WTO we told the tyrants of the world, through a president we all but despise, including for tyranny(!), that they should grow up personally and foster freedom in their realms. What a dramatic picture!
I was just tickled that Safire, expressing my feeling, gave a big atta boy to this president, and that it was over something so vital, as of course it had to be.
I do not want to get sentimental about it, but I did enjoy watching that one word blow up the WTO and knowing that it came from a heart reaction of a man who grew up dishonestly and lives dishonestly and just wanted to say something at that historical moment that he knew is true and is. It was a confluence of serendipities.
AMDG
