WTO:World Trade Organization or WORLD TAKE OVER?

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Interesting article in the Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings, by Gerald Cavanaugh.

Apparently there's going to be a protest of the meeting in Seattle by the WTO, as part of a "massive and international popular protest against the destruction of our rights and laws, with a huge rally planned for Nov. 30, the day our fearless leader, Bill Clinton, is to address the WTO ministers."

This article is from Sept. 22, 1999; I don't have any other details.

Has anyone else heard anything about this WTO "world take over"?

A K

-- Al K. Lloyd (all@ready.now), November 16, 1999

Answers

I didn't even know that the Tidings had a web page, but I found this article. If you are interested, go to

http://www.dailytidings.com/index.html

Then go to archive, select September, 1999, then select the 22nd, then select commentary.

A K

-- Al K. Lloyd (all@ready.now), November 16, 1999.


Yeah, its the green movement against the multinationals. The only problem is at the very top of the pyramid of power, the multinationals are funding the green movement to further their own agenda as put forth in the Biological Diversity Assessment. The goal is to concentrate the population into tightly controlled areas, removing rights to movement in and through zones in the US slated for wildlife. Up to 50% of the continental landmass is involved. Since the Biodiversity treaty was not allowed to even go up for vote (in the final hours...they realized the gravity of the treaty) Clinton has been going forth with sections of the plan by executive order. One is the Heritage Rivers Act. What it does, after consent by local congress, is to reduce and/or eliminate rights to river access and adjacent land use by private property owners and business interests. What this does is trash the value of the property and very conveniently allows the government to come through and sweep up these land parcels at bargain basement prices. The idea is to connect these land parcels, one at a time, to enlarge non human use biospheres throughout the US. Another trick the government is now currently using is to declare certain areas 'monuments' and 'world heritage sites' which will eventually become interconnected into ever larger biospheres.

As I have stated before, there are many, many people out there trying to do good by the planet and have not the slightest idea that this is going on.

Take the MAI for example. The multi-lateral agreement on investment, which had been backed by the very multinational interests that are pushing the global warming psuedo science crapola and a host of other issues. The documentation on this treaty also repeals many of the green movement laws that would stand in the way of the profits of these companies. When you dissect it fully and completely, it gets pretty sick and sad.

A good place to start is with www.sovereignty.net

-- OR (orwelliator@biosys.net), November 16, 1999.


I live 1 hour north of Seattle where WTO is meeting. This a.m. on the local news they said they were going to put busses around the Westin Hotel where the diplomats and others going to the meeting are staying, to try and keep the protesters away.

Seattle DOT and local TV stations will be airing what streets the protesters are on so local traffic can bypass. They said they will NOT air where dignitaries motorcades are because of security, so anyone caught in that traffic is just stuck.

God only knows what else they have planned. I am feeling nervous and not at all complacent right now. We sure did not need this on top of Y2K, solar flares, etc.

In the last few days we have also been inundated with so many presidential runners that they are practically stumbling over each other. This is rediculous.

Glad not to be living in Seattle.

-- Sammie (sammiex0@hotmail.com), November 16, 1999.


WTO - World Trade Organisation - meeting in Seattle 29 Nov. thru 3 Dec.

They are expecting over 100,000 protesters from the major labor unions to Greenpeace. There will be so many that the great fear is terrorism - and it will be a mess. Do Not Come to downtown Seattle during that time. There will be so many police and security that you won't be able to turn around, and some of the main streets are to be blocked off and closed. There are several heads of state who will be here at the same time including our fearless CIC so the motorcades will probably shut down traffic. I other words, it will be a MESS. WTO is trying to remove trade barriers with a side effect (some say) of also removing jobs. It is the trailer to the NAFTA and GAF agreements - only more world wide. Should be interesting...

-- Valkyrie (anon@please.xnet), November 16, 1999.


Hey Sammie, glad to find a prepper (?) in Skagit county. One of my fallback plans include skagit waters. Care to correspond? My email works.....Old (grey whiskers) Prepper

-- Alobar (alobar01@webtv.net), November 16, 1999.


The protesters are coming from everywhere. You will not be able to get a room anywhere for four days in downtown Seattle. Among the official protest are a "human chain" event with protestors linking hands together around the convention center in an attempt to prevent entrance and a 50,000+ person march by the AFL/CIO meant to tie up traffic-both vehicle and pedestrian for hours. What concerns me are the groups that will want more direct action. And the groups for whom this will be too great a temptation not to "strike a blow" for their particular cause.

-- Greg Lawrence (greg@speakeasy.org), November 16, 1999.

Quick note:

Sorry for the lack of hotlink... posting from work... had to find WTO information 'cause some CEO's are going, and stumbled across this.

Diane

http://corporations.org/democracy/statement.html

STATEMENT FROM MEMBERS OF INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY OPPOSING A MILLENNIUM ROUND OR A NEW ROUND OF COMPREHENSIVE TRADE NEGOTIATIONS

Last updated: 4 August 1999
Signed by that date by
798 organisations from over 75 countries



-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), November 16, 1999.


Check out the book "The Devil's Jigsaw" by New Zealand author Barry R Smith. ISBN 0-908961-06-5 It puts a religious angle on it which will offend non-Christians, but it clearly states the "pecking order" of the NWO. From the bottom up: the poor ignorant people, the government of your country, the Business Round Table, the Mount Pelerin Society, the Adam Smith Institute, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, the G8, The Bank for International Settlements, The Club of Rome, The Tri-Lateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Adepts - Elect - Sages in top-level of Freemasonry, and finally Lucifer.

-- Sad Aussie (nowa@yjose.con.au), November 16, 1999.

I was downtown on Saturday leaving the Northwest Bookfest, which was held this year in the convention center, and passed an individual on the street handing out leaflets about the mass protest. I took one. The painfully cramped letter spacing, poor layout, and simplistic writing astonished me. After looking over and discarding the paper (in the appropriate recycling container --- this is Seattle), I began to feel even more sorry for the protesters. The complexities of the WTO's laws and operations are daunting enough. If the protesters wish to draw a larger crowd or a more sympathetic press response, they need to articulate their arguments clearly. In "The Seattle Weekly," for example, the predominate message is simply rehashed leftist "big guys are bad; little guys are good."

In any case, it appears that the protesters will amass at Seattle Center at about 10 a.m. on the 30th. They will then march into downtown, moving, therefore, from north to south.

As a local, I could probably stay home and listen to the roar of the crowds from the hill on which I live. But what fun is that? I prefer to see the action. My first preference is to observe the protest from a tall building, which would allow a view of the whole instead of merely a part. It would also decrease my chances of being caught in the vortext of a riot or blown up by a rogue bomb.

What a day it'll be!

-- Celia Thaxter (celiathaxter@yahoo.com), November 16, 1999.


SHOWDOWN IN SEATTLE: FAIR TRADE VERSUS FREE TRADE

By Mark Sommer (*)

BERKELEY, Nov (IPS) - The secretive deliberations of the IMF, World Bank, and other global financial institutions seldom attract much public or media attention. And that's just the way the participants like it: the less publicity, the less interference.

However, the World Trade Organization's ministerial summit, slated for November 29 to December 3 in Seattle, is shaping up to be a very public affair indeed.

Convened to launch a new round of global trade negotiations, the Seattle summit promises to become the first open clash between two utterly contrary visions of the global future: a technocratic, corporate model offering a plethora of consumer goods and services at bargain prices but incalculably high social and environmental costs versus an as-yet half-articulated alternative vision of an economy and society based on local self-reliance and mutual aid, economic equity, social justice, and environmental restoration.

Largely unchallenged until now in their consolidation of a rapidly converging global economy, Wall Street, multi-national corporations, and leaders of the advanced industrial nations are as yet only dimly aware of the widespread and deeply felt opposition to their plans and policies arising all across the planet.

This opposition spans every nationality and nearly every social movement that has emerged from the political ferment of the past three decades -- environmentalists, economic and social justice advocates, peace, labour, and human rights activists, farmers, feminists, churches -- and the list goes on.

The Seattle summit has become the catalyst uniting long- isolated social movements in common cause for the first time in recent memory. Those converging on the hometown of Microsoft and Boeing are generally of a progressive persuasion, but resistance to the corporate brand of globalisation also unites left and right in ways that would have seemed unimaginable in the polarized politics of the Cold War. Many at both poles see the WTO as a global bureaucracy whose functionaries are unaccountable to those they govern and whose policies threaten individual rights, undermine community cohesion, and wrest key decisions from local control.

Suspicion and hostility toward corporate globalisation have been quietly building for some time. Over the past decade, a handful of political intellectuals from both advanced and developing nations has diligently tracked the often tedious negotiations over NAFTA, GATT, and other trade agreements, alerting a broader circle of concerned citizens to their negative long-term implications -- diminished local control, a declining quality of life, increasing economic inequality and ever-widening environmental damage.

But only when, in 1998, President Clinton was thwarted in his efforts to obtain ''fast-track authority'' to negotiate new global investment agreements by a right-left alliance between trade protectionists and a resurgent US labour movement did the nascent opposition begin to show its muscle.

Last year globalisation critics were further emboldened when 600 NGOs from around the world joined forces, largely through the Internet, to forestall closed-door negotiations by the world's richest 29 nations to establish a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

The tens of thousands of demonstrators expected to descend on the building in Seattle where trade ministers from more than 150 nations are meeting come armed with a disparate list of demands. But the trade activists who have summoned them there are hoping to focus their anarchic energies on just one: ''No New Round'' of global trade negotiations before the rules of the game are changed to strengthen labour rights, assure ''fair'' rather than ''free'' trade, protect the natural environment, preserve social safety nets, and retain local control of key decisions. Organizers have scheduled a week of massive public ''teach-ins'' critiqueing every dimension of globalisation.

As the summit's host and the planet's pre-eminent free trade advocate, President Clinton professes to welcome this prospective invasion of protesters. But trade activists remain sceptical. Upping the ante, they say that if Clinton truly welcomes them, he should offer them seats at the negotiating table -- a proposal clearly not on his agenda.

There is no question that their sentiments are now widely shared both in the advanced industrial West and the developing world. The real question is whether their unchannelled anger can coalesce into a political movement capable of slowing the globalisation juggernaut or whether, in the face of a highly organized corporate and bureaucratic elite, disorganization and internal divisions will ultimately doom their demands to marginalization and defeat.

Some form of globalisation is all but inevitable, but how humane it will be will largely depend on how successfully they translate their indignation into the articulation and creation of viable alternatives. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer is an author and columnist who directs the Mainstream Media Project, a U.S.-based effort to bring new voices to the broadcast media. ----------------------------------------------------- ---------------



-- Paul Knight (Paulkght@hotmail.com), November 16, 1999.



URL link Paul?

Thanks,

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), November 16, 1999.


url=http://www.oneworld.net/ips2/nov99/12_19_036.html

-- Paul Knight (Paulkght@hotmail.com), November 16, 1999.

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