Friends of Fish, and other WTO oddities
[further proof that the WTO isn’t the powerful rich countries’ cabal that lots of left critics see it as]
Financial Times - December 15, 2005
Making sense of WTO’s bewildering variety By Guy de Jonquieres Published: December 15 2005 02:00 | Last updated: December 15 2005 02:00
After the failure of the World Trade Organisation’s meetings in Seattle in 1999 and Cancún four years later, Pascal Lamy, then European Union trade commissioner, branded the body’s decision-making procedures mediaeval. Today, as WTO director-general, it is his job to make them work.
Many trade diplomats privately agree with Mr Lamy’s barb. Arcane rules and jargon make routine meetings at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters impenetrable to lay observers. At ministerial conferences, even insiders admit they are often confused about what is going on.
It means that if any decisions emerge from the WTO’s ministerial meeting in Hong Kong this week, it is unlikely that anybody will really know who has taken them or how they were made.
Riding herd over 149 different delegations, which must all constantly refer back to capitals scattered across different time zones, is difficult enough. It is harder still in an organisation in which all decisions must command a consensus and can be blocked even by small members. That requires the WTO to walk a fine line between doing business efficiently and keeping every participant involved and satisfied.
It does not always succeed. The big political deals are supposed to be hammered out in the so-called Green Room, an inner sanctum of about 30 ministers from a range of countries that varies according to the subject at hand.
Although indispensable to managing meetings, the Green Room is resented by those excluded. Anger at being sidelined prompted poorer countries to walk out of the Cancun talks, precipitating their collapse. This time, co-ordinators have been charged with consulting and informing them about developments.
Six committees have been set up to negotiate on the main issues. Each spawns countless ad hoc sub-committees, whose work is supplemented by bilateral meetings between individual countries.
In parallel, governments coalesce in a bewildering array of informal interest groups.
The most important is the recently formed G6, which consists of the US, the EU, Brazil, India, Japan and Australia. Almost as influential is the G20, the Brazilian-led coalition of developing country agriculture exporters. Confusingly, its membership and aims partly overlap with those of the Cairns Group, which includes some developed countries.
Members of the G10, which include Japan, South Korea and Norway, style themselves as food-importing nations but are actually out to defend their highly protectionist farm policies. The G90 comprises African, Caribbean and Pacific states and other poor economies.
Then there is a miasma of smaller special-interest coalitions, such as the wonderfully named Friends of Fish and Very Close Friends of Services.
Also roaming the corridors are several thousand representatives of industry groups and non-government organisations. Some are there just to make their case to anyone ready to listen. Others have semi-official status. The US delegation includes business associations, while some poorer countries are advised by non-government organisations, whose views do not always favour free trade.
Much of the negotiating goes on behind closed doors. But it is also played out at round-the-clock press conferences. That is only partly to counter critics’ jibes that the WTO is a secretive organisation. It is also because ministers know that their debate can be influenced by how it is reported to the outside world.
Every day, participants pore over media coverage to check whether it is going their way. So far, their public appearances have been mostly ritual point-scoring. But if this week’s talks ever get serious, briefings should start yielding useful information.
But, for participants as much as for journalists, judging the meeting’s progress and direction can be as much a question of gauging the mood as of getting the facts. With thousands of delegates constantly caucusing in dozens of different groups, few, if any, have a clear picture of the overall proceedings.
As Seattle and Cancun showed, poor information flows can lead to serious errors and misjudgments. On both occasions, the meetings collapsed with little warning. By the same token, it may be hard to know until the last moment whether this week’s talks will end in agreement.
After many recent WTO meetings, participants have departed saying there must be a better way of doing business. However, despite numerous proposals for reforms, none has yet been devised.
One reason is the intrinsic tension between ensuring that the negotiations are purposeful and keeping them open and inclusive. The other is that any changes would require a consensus.
Unsatisfactory as the existing system may be, retaining it is one of the few issues on which all 149 members are, reluctantly, prepared to agree.
December 18th, 2005 at 12:17 pm
Program on the emergence of civilization.
“14 species of large animals capable of domesitcation in the history of mankind.
13 from Europe, Asia and northern Africa.
None from the sub-Saharan African continent. ”
Favor.
And disfavor.
They point out Africans’ failed attempts to domesticate the elephant and zebra, the latter being an animal they illustrate that had utmost importance for it’s applicability in transformation from a hunting/gathering to agrarian-based civilization.
The roots of racism are not of this earth.
Austrailia, aboriginals:::No domesticable animals.
The North American continent had none. Now 99% of that population is gone.
AIDS in Africa.
Organizational Heirarchy/Levels of positioning.
Heirarchical order, from top to bottom:
Terrestrial management/positioning:
Movies foreshadowing catastrophy
1985 James Bond View to a Kill 1989 San Francisco Loma Prieta earthquake.
Our society gives clues to the system in place. We all have heard the saying “He has more money than god.” There is also an episode of the Simpsons where god meets Homer and says “I’m too old and rich for this.”
This is the system on earth because this is the system everywhere.
20 cent/hour Chinese labor, 50 cents for material.
An $80 sweater costs less than a dollar; homage, tribute kicked upstairs vindicates the creative accounting.
I don’t want to suggest the upper eschelons are evil and good is the fringe. But these individuals become wealthy exploiting those they hurt.
They have made it abundantly clear that doing business with evil (disfavored) won’t help people. They say only good would have the ear, since evil is struggling for survival, and therefore only the favored could help.
The clues are there which companies are favored and which are disfavored, but they conceal it very hard because it is so crucial.
I offer an example of historical proportions:::
People point to Walmart and cry “anti-union”.
Unions enable disfavored people to live satisfactorly without addressing their disfavor. This way their family’s problems are never resolved. Without the union they would have to accept the heirarchy, their own inferiority.
Unions serve to empower.
Walmart is anti-union because they are good. They try to help people address and resolve their problems by creating an environment where there are fewer hurdles.
Media ridicule and lawsuits are creations to reinforce people’s belief that Walmart is evil in a subsegment of the indistry dominated by the middle and lower classes.
Low-cost disfavored Chinese labor is utilized by corporate america to maximize margins. They all do it. Only WalMart gets fingered because they are the ones who help, and those who seek to create confusion in the marketplace want to eliminate the vast middle class who have a real chance and instead stick with lower classes who may not work otherwise. So they dirty him up while allowing the others to appear clean.
The middle class is being deceived. They are being misled into the unfavored, and subsequently will have no assistance from their purchases with corporate america.
The coining of the term “Uncle Sam” was a clue alluding to just this::Sam Walton’s WalMart is one of few saviors of the peasant class.
They desire a system based on duality:::good and evil. They seek to set up a system of two participants and assign them polar opposites:::
Coke and Pepsi (?)
BestBuy and CircutCity
Energizer and Duracell
Coors and Budweiser
Republican and Democrat
The list goes on:::
AMD and Intel
Microsoft and Apple (?)
Lowes and HomeDepot
Sam’s Club and Costco
WellsFargo and BofA
Pier1 and CostPlus
Borders and Barnes&Noble
Amercia is a country of castoffs, rejects. Italy sent its criminals, malcontents.
Between the thrones, the klans and kindred, they decided who they didn’t want and acted, creating discontent and/or starvation.
The u.s. is full of disfavored rejects. It is the reason for the myriad of problems not found in European countries. As far as the Rockafellers and other industrialists of the 19th century go, I suspect these aren’t their real names. I suspect they were chosen to go and head this new empire.
Royalty is the correct way to organize a society. Dictatorships and monarchies are a reflection of the antient’s hierarchical organization.
Positions go to those who have favor with the rulers, as opposed to being elected.
Elections bring a false sense of how the world is. Democracy misleads people.
Which is why the disfavored rejects were sent to the shores of America::To keep them on the wrong path.
Jewsus Christ is a religious figure of evil. He teaches of a begnign, forgiving god when quite the opposite is true.
The seperatist churches formed so they could capture the rest of the white people, keeping them worshipping the wrong god.
And now they do it to disfavored people of color, Latinos and Asians, after centuries of preying upon them.
Since Buddism doesn’t recongnize a god, the calls are never heard, and Asian representation is instead fully selected by the thrones.
Budda was the Asian’s Jewsus Christ::: bad for the people. It was a clue they both emerged at the same time. Timing may be a clue alluding to ranking.
Simpson’s foreshadowing::Helloween IV special, Flanders is Satan. “Last one you ever suspect.”
“You’ll see lots of nuns where you’re going:::hell!!!” St. Wigham, Helloween VI:::missionary work, destroying cultures.
Over and over, the Simpsons was a source of education and enlightenment, a target of ridicule by the system which wishes to conceal its secrets.
The advent of the modern Christmas was a brilliant move. It creates a vested interest among those who would prefer the Church of Evil be destroyed::::
As goes the Catholic Church so goes the majority of annual retail sales.
The similarity between the names “Santa” and “Satan” is no coincidence.
Jews maim the body formed in the image of “god”, and inflicted circumcision upon all other white people.
I think about how Jews (were used to) created homosexuality among Slavics, retribution for the Holocaust.
Then I think of the Catholic Church and its troubles.
What connection is here between Jews and the Catholic church???
If it is their sinister motives that’s behind the evil that is Jesus Christ are they being used at all?
Perhaps it is them who are pulling strings.
Their centuries of slavery in Egypt proves their disfavor.
For their suffering the Jew leaders were granted the right to prey on the up-and-coming Europeans to try to fix their problems with the ruling elite, a recurring aspect of the elite’s methodology.
Jews were ostracised for a reason.
Retribution for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the Korean War got the disfavored United States into this socially depraved environment in the latter 20th century because we attacked an antient, revered peoples. Our continued presence keeps us in trouble.
When the disfavored americans attack the wrong people again, as they suggested they will, in Korea or elsewhere, they will pay dearly.
All peoples are ranked in terms of favor and disfavor. And when the disfavored abuse those with favor there is hell to pay.
All the groups mentioned throughout are necessary to justify the will of the managing species. They conceive a strategy, devise a plan yet need a way to implement it, and without these groups the managing species would be exposed in the course of execution. So, based upon their rank they are assigned goals to accomplish and are rewarded with favors.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Assata Shakur
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Malcolm X
Che Guevara
Black Panthers
Black Panther Party
July 31st, 2007 at 4:46 am
Anger Management…
Anger Management…