APEC and the Politics of Trade

Anyway You Pitch It, the Name of the Game is Profits "The World Over"

by Eric Nelson
The Free Press

Fresh off his NAFTA sell-out of the working class and buy-out of Congress ("We are shocked!"), Bill Clinton came to Seattle waving the big stick of North American free trade. Play ball, he told Europe, or we'll play with Asia in the APEC League.
Administration figures warned certain European Community members (read France and Germany) to get moving on the long-stalled Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), or else we'll cut trade deals with Asian countries (which now represent 50 percent of the world's economic power).
But Wild Bill's APEC high-jack did not entirely sit well. One longtime ally, Australia, which has done most of the work on APEC, has some legitimate gripes with the level of US agricultural export subsidies. And two sometime enemies, Japan and China, prefer their own styles of the imperial game to ours.
While the US and the EC point the finger at each other over GATT, Asia (except Japan) is doing quite well economically. And middle-weight countries like Australia are usually ignored no matter what the forum. So everyone gathered up their balls and went home from APEC, agreeing to play another time but without firm rules.
Perhaps more interesting than the high level do-nothings were the doings of the corporate types. Boeing, of course, was the most ubiquitous, as Asia represents significant airline-industry growth.
Boeing's latest full-page ads read:
"Trade helps people the world over discover how different we all are. And how very much alike." Translation: "Sure, the Chinese don't value life the same way we do, but shut up about the human rights so we can sell them airplanes. C'mon they're not so bad... Look, we've arranged PRC President Jiang Zemin's visit to a Boeing worker's home and told him not to forget pictures of his grandchildren." (A classic populist touch used by American and Communist dictators the world over.)
Little noticed, however, was a Nov. 16 announcement that China bought six Airbus 340s, a $700 million order that could have been nicely filled by Boeing 747s. Jiang may have gone along with Boeing's PR stunts, but his message was "Respect our rules or we'll play with someone else."
Meanwhile, Microsoft used the conference's business forum to tell Asian software pirates to walk the plank. As much as 90 percent of the software circulating in Asia misses Bill Gates' coffers because it is bootlegged. And McCaw Cellular, riding high on the shoulders of its new corporate parent, AT&T, would like nothing better than to install cell-phone grids in still wire-less China.
But the logic of free trade falls flat when everything is going to hell at home. Upon his arrival in Seattle, Bill Clinton justified NAFTA by explaining that we have to compete in world markets by providing products for developing nations, such as Mexico. When was the last time you bought a TV (or a car for that matter) that truly was "Made in the USA"?
Free trade may extend the corporate reach into the consumer's pockets worldwide, but not everyone can work for Boeing, the nation's biggest exporter. To make things worse, our own standard of living is falling and our natural resources are already stretched thin.
The American public knows that Bill greased the ball, and they're not as easy to pay off as their congressional representatives who stood at bat on NAFTA. The "corporate globalists" are planning a very long, profitable overseas tour while we strike out at home. Slimeballs...



Please see related article:
"APEC and the Shape of Things to Come"

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Contents on this page were published in the December/Jan, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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