The WTO is a damaging institution
‘Its goal is global efficiency and global efficiency means banks in the west and sweatshops in the east, and whoever attempts to get in the way needs to get with the times.’
If I were to tell you that a global organisation existed that could force the most powerful nation on earth to change one of its domestic laws, and that this organisation was completely unelected and beholden to no one, you probably wouldn’t believe me; and if you did you would be horrified. But such an organisation does exist, and this organisation has far more power than the United Nations or any other attempt at world cooperation.
The World Trade Organisation (hereafter, WTO) is the power of money incarnate, and its mission is to make sure the world makes as much of it as possible. It is inherently an economically neoliberal institution and has fueled world trade and globalisation to a massive extent and its aims have always been to break down tariff and non-tariff barriers, even if those non-tariff barriers are environmental or worker protections. It is the arch-enemy of the local business, of the domestic industry.
Its goal is global efficiency and global efficiency means banks in the west and sweatshops in the east, and whoever attempts to get in the way needs to get with the times.
The organisation has many faults: it violates state sovereignty, often times it refuses to let most of its members into its meetings, its decisions and policies are not made open to the public, its members are unelected and it most importantly has overseen the concentration of the most wealth into the hands of the fewest amount of people. No matter what some people may tell you, our current economic system was created, at Bretton Woods by a group of worried diplomats, bureaucrats and economists attempting to find the all elusive formula for the creation of the ‘bonds of perpetual peace’.
If the world is more interconnected, the argument goes, if other nations rely on each other for their production then war would be impossible. The world thought the same thing in 1914, and in fact most of the shells fired by France in the first year of that war were made in Germany. History has proven that neoliberal economics doesn't work; the 2008 crash shows it.
One good about the pandemic is the source of hilarity it has managed to produce by turning die hard free marketeers into socialists in the space of a few minutes. The WTO is these same people's tool.
Above all, this organisation is why the McEmpire has been allowed to flourish, why jobs have steadily bled away to sweatshops overseas. The WTO is a damaging institution. Abolish it.
