Was Global Trade a Mistake?

"ONE WEEK TO CHANGE THE WORLD: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests, by DW Gibson

HOW THE WORLD RAN OUT OF EVERYTHING: Inside the Global Supply Chain, by Peter S. Goodman

On a cold November morning in 1999, Harold Linde, a member of the Rainforest Action Network, was trying to hang an enormous sign from a construction crane hundreds of feet in the air over downtown Seattle. Loosely attached to a rope, he rappelled off the crane, lost control and began to plummet.

Linde might have died, but thanks to the Ruckus Society, a nonprofit that trains activist groups, he knew to rip off his frictionless fleece gloves, grab onto the rope with his bare hands and wait for his colleagues to help him back up. After some spiritual assistance from “a circle of pagan witches on the ground” who were “sending prayers up,” Linde and his friends succeeded in unfurling a 100-pound banner. It showed two arrows pointing in opposite directions, one labeled “DEMOCRACY” and the other “W.T.O.”

This stunt, which kicked off the Battle of Seattle, a protest of the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization, captures the combination of high idealism, drama, detailed organization, radicalism and public relations savvy that defined a movement against the rising tide of globalization in the decades after the Cold War.

DW Gibson’s comprehensive oral history “One Week to Change the World” gives a panoramic view of the multiday festival of dissent, from its authorized marches and semi-legal “direct actions” to its extremely illegal vandalism. There was even a concert.

The protests attracted the attention of progressive elected officials like Sherrod Brown and Dennis Kucinich, grunge scene stalwarts like Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, the presidential candidate Ralph Nader, the linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky and the British actress Julie Christie. “Wow — we’re really going to give them an experience,” Nader recalls thinking. The experience ended with mass arrests, broken windows and tear-gassed protesters.

The W.T.O.’s ministerial meetings were meant to advance the project of knitting together the newly liberalized world with a “harmonization” of common rules — internationally agreed upon food safety standards, for instance — to lower trade barriers. Ambassadors and NGO officials from around the world had assembled in a city that was fast becoming associated with a new digital economy that promised to accelerate globalization. The city would also soon become home to one of the first major protests partially organized online

As Gibson outlines, the W.T.O. protests in Seattle became a natural meeting point for a wide range of leftist groups who felt abandoned by the neoliberal turn cemented by the Democratic president in the White House. American union leaders worried that cheap overseas labor would put downward pressure on blue-collar wages and many green activists were concerned that trade liberalization would be used as a battering ram against domestic environmental protections.

While the protests themselves were global front-page news, Gibson and his interviewees devote substantial time to the months of lead-up and preparation for the rally as well as the uneasy alliance between strait-laced progressive political leaders and more antic provocateurs who climbed trees to keep them from being felled. “We are here, we’re nonviolent, but we are dedicated to shutting down the W.T.O.,” one activist remembers saying at a pre-protest news conference.

Gibson also gives due space to the political and law enforcement officials who ultimately failed to quell the demonstrations. In quote after quote, blame largely falls on the Seattle mayor Paul Schell, who died in 2014, and his police chief, Norman Stamper: They didn’t allow enough intelligence gathering before the protests; they didn’t ask for the National Guard soon enough.

After Seattle, despite further meetings (with much more thought-out security) the W.T.O. was not able to reach another major global trade agreement — and has not to this day. Still, it did provide a framework with its existing rules, and trade liberalization advanced in the years that followed, thanks to China’s incorporation into the global economic system. The country joined the W.T.O. in 2001 and quickly became the workshop of the world. China’s growing importance within the global economy also set the stage for the great blow to global trade that would arrive two decades later thanks to coronavirus pandemic.

Peter S. Goodman’s “How the World Ran Out of Everything” is an impassioned account of globalization’s rise and stall. Goodman, a longtime economics correspondent for The New York Times and The Washington Post, offers an expansive view of the modern supply chain, from the Port of Long Beach and long-haul truck routes across the middle of the country to cattle ranchers in Montana and the travails of a Mississippi-based toy company trying to get a shipment from China in time for the holiday season.

At every point in the chain during the pandemic, workers faced deteriorating conditions and financial instability. Toilet paper, meat and other consumer goods shot up in price and declined in availability as container ships idled in ports.

Goodman argues that the crisis exposed the brittleness of a system that relied, for years, on “just in time” manufacturing, which shrank inventories. Big retailers like Amazon and Walmart and food processors like Tyson and J.B.S. also squeezed suppliers and labor. This system “worked” in terms of lower prices for consumers and higher — Goodman argues, monopoly-size — market share for these giants. When the pandemic struck, manufacturers with low inventory couldn’t deal with the combination of increased demand and fewer workers, while some middlemen, like the global shippers and meatpackers, were able to profit.

Manufacturers also strained under the odd strength of the Covid-era economy. Americans unable to spend on restaurants and trips took to Amazon and began to vacuum up more stuff made cheap by international trade — televisions, basketball hoops, pastry blenders. “The result of this surge was chaos,” Goodman writes. Lights flickered from power outages “as Chinese plants deployed every available production line.”

Goodman is not naïve enough to think that globalization can or should be reversed, or that companies seeing political or business risk in China means a renaissance of American manufacturing (the last portion of the book is devoted to the manufacturers finding their way from China not quite back to America, but to Southeast Asia and Mexico).

While the global supply chain is unlikely to be dismantled, the ideology of globalization is under attack practically and politically. “The U.S. is moving towards a kind of nationalistic mercantilism,” Chomsky tells Gibson. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are at odds on many issues, but they’re more similar to each other on trade policy than they are to predecessors in their own parties. Both presidents have shown more interest in using tariffs than in working out trade disputes through the W.T.O.

Seeds of this turn against business-friendly globalism were planted in 1999. Even if no one in the Biden administration is climbing up construction cranes to announce their policy proposals, Democratic lawmakers today have taken up many of the demonstrators’ concerns — environmentalism, labor power, skepticism of global trade arrangements — and knitted them into a policy synthesis that rejects the bipartisan consensus the Seattle protesters sought to overthrow.

The late-20th-century project of integrating China into the global economy, in the hope that economic development would come hand in hand with political liberalism, feels at best misguided. Offshoring resulted in a predictable loss of U.S. jobs, Goodman writes, and programs designed to help Americans negatively affected by global trade were left underfunded.

What remains to be seen is whether the new policy responses can win over not just American activists and intellectuals, but also American consumers who tend to prefer lower costs over all else and who far outnumber any particular group of truckers, cattle ranchers or union workers squeezed by the economic pressures of a long, lean supply chain. The W.T.O. may have lost, but democracy will also have its say." [1]

1. Was Global Trade a Mistake?: Nonfiction. Zeitlin, Matthew.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 19, 2024.