Post-Summit reflections

I should have been in Quebec City

Commentary from Larry Solway

  I envied the people in the trenches in Quebec City. I sat cosseted in my office with only a computer screen to bark back or threaten me. I should have been up there manning the barricades.
  I don't mean to be facetious. In my years on Talk Radio I was more than once the target for misguided death and dismemberment threats and a few poisonous letters. The worst thing that ever happened was late at night after I had done a program reviling motorcycle gangs, a group of them buzzed the building on Yonge Street, and parked menacingly in the window where I could see them. I called the cops. Next day a vintage seven-passenger limo pulled up in front of the building. A leather-clad minion strode to our front desk and announced that "the boss" wanted to see me. I should come to his car and talk. I don't remember whether I came or he came.
  The threat was clear.
  This was long before the Hell's Angels brought fear, death and intimidation to the streets. (Incidentally, I was a little startled that we so suddenly came awake to the threat these gunsels represent. Many years ago the Rolling Stones used The Angels as security guards at a concert in L.A. At least one person died. That was more than 30 years ago.)
 

Why do so many people buy into the notion that what world trade is trying to do is to elevate the poorer nations and spread affluence to the underdogs?

  Print journalists can hide behind the typewriter. They are not held directly accountable. Of course, my own "accountability" was simply to take phone calls after I made my comments. But it is not life in the trenches.
  Mel Watkins, who at his age should know better, and Ish Theilheimer, our editor, owner, and general cook and bottle washer at Straight Goods, were both at Quebec City. I was not. The best I could do was sit here cozily and fulminate. Which costs nothing except slightly and temporarily elevated blood pressure.
  Last Tuesday before the official Summit as I pecked away, the Globe and Mail was full of stuff about how great free trade is, and Norman Spector predictably chimed in with a blast at people who failed somehow to grasp that globalization is the way - the only way.
  Of course I want prosperity spread beyond the cozy confines of corporate boardrooms, assembled cronies and shareholders. Why do so many people buy into the notion that what world trade is trying to do is to elevate the poorer nations and spread affluence to the underdogs? Silly us, we simply don't understand what an act of self-sacrificing, altruistic nobility the whole spread of buccaneer capitalism is to the underprivileged.
  There has been a lot of editorial mocking of the expression "race to the bottom" as if none of these transnational companies was trying to get the most labour at the lowest cost or produce goods in jurisdictions that are not squeamish about environmental or labour standards. They are bringing, with their industrialization, a new age for the poor.
  The evidence should be clear. The Asian Tigers have come a long way. The forces of Enterprise want only to spread the good news. But even in Asia with industrial and technological progress, jobs fly away as the tycoons look for cheaper labour. They run to Thailand, and from there if the wages go too high, I suppose, to Bangladesh or Myanmar. The point is: they will follow the trail to the neediest countries where labour is cheap and the government (often corrupt as in Indonesia) is only too glad to welcome them.
  Look no further than the stench, the open sewer, the garbage in the streets, and the cardboard-shack-dwelling maquiladoras across the border in Mexico. El Paso prospers. Across the Rio Grande is a slum with factories and people whose wages can barely feed and clothe them.
  To the claim that these people are doing better than they did before, and that their lot will improve, I say - I can hardly wait! The minute the poverty of the Mexicans in the maquilos starts to ease; the moment there are some unions threatening to raise standards; the moment their government demands better conditions - those corporations will move "toward the bottom" looking elsewhere in Latin America for a new source of cheap labour.
  Historically it happened in the U.S. itself. The textile industry that once thrived in New England went south - literally - to the Carolinas where right-to-work laws and low wages put steam back into their profits. When the Old South proved to be less than a perfect partner, they moved again.
  Every place that is now a prime picking for cheap labour runs the risk of becoming next year's Flint, Michigan.

Now it's your turn:
How do you feel about last week's protests in Quebec City? Do you wish you could have been there? Could they have been done better?

Tell Straight Goods and see what others are saying...

Then Take the Straight Goods poll...

Posted: April 24, 2001

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