posted on September 10, 2003 04:41:37 PM
S. Korean Man Kills Himself at WTO Protests
CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) - A South Korean activist stabbed himself and died on Wednesday in violent anti-capitalism protests at a World Trade Organization meeting in Mexico's Caribbean beach resort of Cancun.
Reporters saw the man climb up onto a high security fence and wave a banner that read "WTO Kills Farmers." He then stabbed himself in the chest.
The South Korean man, in his 50s, was carried away and treated for his injuries but later died in hospital. One of his friends said it was an "act of sacrifice" to show his disgust at the WTO and its policies.
Mexico's foreign minister Luis Ernesto Derbez, who is hosting the WTO meeting, said the man had died from a self-inflicted wound.
The anti-globalization protests turned violent when a group of about two dozen activists broke through a metal barrier and attacked Mexican riot police.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 10, 2003 05:12:37 PM
So he silenced himself... that is not much of a statement.
Better to be alive and yelling, than dead and decaying...
posted on September 10, 2003 06:29:13 PM
There is a Buddhist tradition of ritual suicide as the ultimate form of protest, it is an honorable end. During the American occupation of Vietnam many monks took their lives usually with fire.
The wheel is turning and you can't slow down,
you can't let go and you can't hold on,
you can't go back and you can't stand still,
if the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will.
posted on September 10, 2003 07:51:33 PM
It's sadly based on the mistaken belief that even the powerful have some empathy and can feel shame. Wasted effort.
posted on September 10, 2003 09:06:31 PM
gravid "It's sadly based on the mistaken belief that even the powerful have some empathy and can feel shame. Wasted effort."
posted on September 10, 2003 09:22:25 PM
Gravid - perhaps you could explain then the train of logical thought that connects commiting suicide to convincing the WTO member nations to work out a equitable agreement regarding their individual agricultural subsidzing programs. While North Korea and Taiwan (among other) farmers feel that US subsidation of agriculture is hindering their survival, and they are probably right, what do you think is going to happen to US farmers if they get their demand that the US end all sudsidations. It is up to a goverment to protect it's own. Nations that feel that subsiduzed food coming in is hurting their internal industry should tariff the imports, not try to tell other nations how to control their own house.
I do find it humorous that you object to the US attempting to bend the will other soverign nations through acts violence but feel that it is ok for individuals.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 11, 2003 08:50:16 AM
There is such a gap between how we think that I don't even know where to start....
It's like we don't even speak the same language we are starting so far apart with such different assumptions.
Let me address just the last statement.
There is no such thing as a sovereign government which actings against other governments or individuals.
All the acts you see on the news where the speaker says - 'The US today did so and so' - are really acts of individuals.
That you accept their actions as institutions simply means you agree to not demand to know which individual behind their facade really made the decision.
A nation is as much a legal fiction as a corporation. Just an older one. In fact a corporation might be said to be the government license to create private blame and responsibility spreading sub-governments.
The current way people are upset with Bush is directly from his peeling back a layer of the denial of responsibility and showing the truth to people. It is a stupid thing to do but he is a man who is bright in some ways and not in others like most of us.
If he realized how upsetting it is to people to see that yes, he as an individual can order their sons and daughters off to death and plunder their treaure to do whatever he wills he would have worked harder to use the congress and UN to spread the blame for his actions wide enough to disassociate them from him personally.
He has lied enough to the public now with silly silly explainations that the people who are bright enough realize the old law of the king can do no wrong is still very much in the heart of men.
ABC news is going to quickly find out from their smuggling Uranium in and showing the governments incompetance that this government is different.
They will not wink at those challenging them.
They are successfully gathering the tools to destroy anyone who opposes them.
By the end of the second term this government will have the joy of taking the glove off and enjoying using it's power in an even more public manner and there will be no one to gainsay them. Some in Congress are already afraid of them just as Congress was afraid og the Lincoln government. They may be taken away in the night if they object too plainly.
I don't see anyone in his path that has the will to stop it. I expect a totalitarian fascist government with the technological eradication of freedom in my life time.
The jobs being done by middle class people now will be done by those that we'd consider poor now. The well off will live completely seperate under tight security and their children will go to private schools and they will spend a great deal of their wealth just keeping themselves safe and seperate from the mob. People who are not wealthy will only travel freely if they have permits issued through their employment. Being wealthy will mean you belong to a government agency,company or university that allows you to travel as one of the perks of being in that class. Otherwise you will be red tagged as a risk. Even your car will be restricted from city centers and state crossing if you don't have permits or 'need'. Many of the things we take for granted will become privilages. And the elite will love it. It will reinforce their superiority to themselves...
posted on September 11, 2003 12:43:10 PM
That was a very nice rant. Now can we address the actual subject at hand? Are you aware that thee are other issues in this worldother than Bush and Iraq because you are starting to sound like a broken record. You are going to stand up for this individuals actions in terms of dying for a cause and then turn right around and completely ignore the rational behind it. Bush and Iraq have absolutely nothing to do with WTO and a global economy and it's effect on agricultural issues whi was the reason for his action. If you are going to throw out barbs at people for thei8r percieved insensitivity to his action then the least you should do when responding to them is direct your diatribe to the reasons behind it as opposed to completely unrelated issues.
If Bush and Iraq is the only thing that interests you fine, but try to keep your rants confined to the threads in which they are actually relevent.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 11, 2003 02:31:17 PM
I didn't address how well the target of his action was chosen. It was poorly chosen. Not rational at all. I don't support it. I just said it was pointless to try to use the tactic to influence powerful people. They will not see any value in his life and certainly won't feel any guilt he was trying to inflict. I'm rather immune to having guilt laid at my feet that way also.
But I do think your vision is too narrow if you think the association between Bush's government, their international conquests and the huge flow of money to Iraq are not having huge effect on what the WTO have to deal with. I'm sure that much money flowing has a huge effect on the global economy. I'm sure it reaches down into even that one farmer's life - if in ways he might not anticipate. The US economy going from + to minus full scale in a matter of months will create all sorts of disturbances in the whole world.
It all seems intimately related to me - not off topic.
I'll stop before it is a rant.
It does seem to me if the farmer was honest he'd rather see he wants fellow men to starve so he can get a better price for his grain. I'm sure he thinks the people in charge can just wave a magic wand and make that not so.......
posted on September 11, 2003 04:11:18 PM
::But I do think your vision is too narrow if you think the association between Bush's government, their international conquests and the huge flow of money to Iraq are not having huge effect on what the WTO have to deal with. I'm sure that much money flowing has a huge effect on the global economy.::
In the big picture, it will have an effect on the global economy but what I was referring to was the agricultural aspects which is what the meeting in Cancun is about.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
The world's attention should be focused on the World Trade Organization's meeting at Cancϊn this week for reasons having nothing to do with the anti-globalization protests. The protesters will be trying to be as colorful and disruptive as they were when the W.T.O. met in Seattle in 1999, but their role is marginal. The real drama involves the delegates from 146 nations. They are bound to be speaking in eye-glazing bureaucratic Esperanto, but they will be engaged in crucial negotiations aimed at making life fairer for poor countries' farmers, who are struggling haplessly against a rigged global trading system.
Few things could improve the lives of more people including the more than one billion struggling to live on a dollar a day or less than a positive outcome in Cancϊn. By that we mean a strong W.T.O. commitment to create a fair and efficient global market for agricultural goods.
To date, globalization remains a flawed game whose rules have been fixed by rich nations. The United States, Europe and Japan have succeeded in forcing others to reduce trade barriers in services and in the industrial goods they excel at producing, while maintaining high tariffs on imported agricultural goods. Or they dole out lavish farm subsidies the developed world pays its farmers roughly $1 billion a day in subsidies and the produce is then dumped on the international market at prices below the real cost of growing it. That has devastating effects on poorer nations, many of which could improve living standards if only given a chance to export farm products at fair market prices.
Agriculture, the key export industry for many poor countries, is the cornerstone of these trade talks called the "development round" launched at Doha, Qatar, in late 2001. Nobody doubts what needs to happen to restore the credibility of the global trading system. Eliminating agricultural protectionism could help the developing world's income grow by an estimated $1.5 trillion in the next decade, and that possibility makes the developed nations' selfish reluctance to abandon their farming subsidies all the more appalling. Repeated deadlines have already been missed in this effort, and unless substantial progress is made in Cancϊn, with all the trade ministers locked in the same conference hall, the chances of coming up with an agreement by the scheduled end of the development round next year seem slim.
Since World War II, the United States has been a steadfast champion, and beneficiary, of freer trade and ever-greater global economic integration. It is in the nation's broadest economic and security interests for the Bush administration to reassume this leadership role, but doing so entails offending powerful farming interests cotton and sugar lobbies, for starters that stand to lose if forced to compete fair and square against foreign farmers.
Despite the barrier-reducing proposals put forth in the past by his trade czar, Robert Zoellick, President Bush's record of abandoning principles to score cheap political points with special interests like steel unions and the farm lobby raises doubts about whether he will have the stomach to defend the broader national interest and do right by the world's poorest.
Japan and Europe have been even more resistant to the idea of surrendering their harmful agricultural policies. Last month, the United States and the European Union agreed to a vague joint negotiating framework, roundly denounced by others as insufficiently ambitious. It fails, for instance, to stipulate the complete elimination of egregious export subsidies. Mr. Zoellick was no doubt trying to pull Europe closer to the American position, but he must now try again, rather than digging in his heels at the side of European protectionists.
No longer can the two richest trading powers set the world's trading rules on their own. At Cancϊn, an influential alliance of developing nations and major agricultural exporters including Brazil, Thailand, India, Australia and South Africa will be pressing, and holding out, for a meaningful liberalization of agricultural trade. The United States ought to make common cause with them.
posted on September 12, 2003 04:25:41 PM
A failure at Cancun will not only be a setback for those wanting to see a fairer, more inclusive global trade regime, with the benefits accruing not only to multinationals in the north but to the poor in the south. It will represent another manifestation of the failures of global democracy so evident this year: the system of global decision-making does not reflect the interests and concerns of the majority of the world's population. It is not one person one vote, not even one dollar one vote. But it will also represent another manifestation of the failure of democracy within our societies.
Most Americans and Europeans want a global economic system that is more balanced. If the issue of access to life-saving Aids drugs were put up to a vote, the overwhelming majority would not support the position of the pharmaceutical companies. These trade negotiations demonstrate, as much as anything else, the power of special interests, often driven by campaign contributions, in determining political outcomes. The problem is that in this case, it is the poorest people in the world - the billions living on less than $2 a day - who are asked to pay the price.
posted on September 12, 2003 07:16:48 PM
Keep reading up Helen - a failure in Cancun will end up speeling more damage to the WTO itself than anything else. Many of the small nations are making outside alliances. The problem is that unless there is huge movement on both sides there will be no agreement because one of the two largest alliances is demanding complete eradication of farming subsidies by the UK and the USA and I think we can all agree that is not going to happen.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 12, 2003 07:50:39 PM
Fenix, I have posted this information for anyone who may have an interest in the topic. The articles that I have linked are far more informative and a better introduction to a discussion of the topic than a story such as you posted about a nut who killed himself.
Of course, I have no interest in discussing anything with you. Your nasty, and mean spirited attitude will eventually leave you with no one to talk to but yourself.
posted on September 12, 2003 08:44:47 PM
I haven't read much on this subject....did try to read helen's links but the require registration to the NewYork Times...and thank you, but no thank you.
A copy and paste of the Q & A link says:
Q: When and how did the WTO come into being?
A: The WTO was created as part of the treaty on the Uruguay Round of trade liberalization negotiations. The organization came into existence on Jan. 1, 1995, to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It employs 550 people at its headquarters, on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Unlike its predecessor, the WTO has legal force and its agreements and rules are binding on all its members.
Q: What does it do?
A: It sets out the legal rules surrounding international commerce, through a series of treaties and agreements negotiated by its members. These treaties are built upon the principle that trade should be as uninhibited as possible and that a country should treat all its trading partners equally and avoid discriminating between domestic and foreign products, services or people.
To ensure this, the WTO has a legal system for settling disputes between members and a surveillance mechanism to look at trade policies in each country. It also is responsible for the occasional "rounds" of negotiations that lead to treaties to open up trade. The current round was launched in November 2001 and is supposed to finish by the end of next year, though the last round overran by several years.
Q: The phrase "free trade" is widely used and often criticized. What does it actually mean?
A: In economics, it is the principle that the global economy benefits if trade is dictated only by market forces. Countries specialize in the products that they can produce most cheaply and import those that can be produced more efficiently elsewhere.
Barriers to free trade, like import tariffs, quotas, government subsidies and complicated customs procedures adversely affect economic growth.
A recent study by the University of Michigan found that cutting global trade barriers by a third would boost the world economy by $613 billion the equivalent of adding a country the size of Canada to the world.
Q: That sounds good. Why not just do it?
A: Because free trade creates losers as well as winners and can widen the gaps between rich and poor.
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I admit to being unknowledgable on this issue. But from what I've read here.....
I'd have to know a LOT more about how this would affect both our AMERICAN farmers AND OUR economy. If it doesn't favor the US, I'm against it.
The way I take this, and I'm sure someone will let me know if I'm wrong, this sounds like more 'let's do what's best for ALL the nations in the world...even if it has the affect of doing further damage to the US economy and maybe???? our American farmers.
posted on September 12, 2003 09:09:25 PM
Helen - I was not being mean spirited or arguementative... I was pointing out an interesting aspect of the situation that was not pointed out in the article you posted.
Get off the defensive. All I said was keep reading and you decide to once again start calling me names. And you have the nerve to call other posters disrespectful?
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
[ edited by Fenix03 on Sep 12, 2003 09:22 PM ]
posted on September 12, 2003 09:19:36 PM
LInda - what you are pointing out is exactly where the problem lies.
Growers in small nations are complaining that Imported products are being sold in their country for less than they themselves are able to grow them for because the larger countries subsidize their farmers which allows them to sell for less than they actual cost of production. Since the WTO calls for an end of tariffs that would balance the pricing and give them a fighting chance, they want an end to the subsidizing so that the foreign growers would have to sell at their actual costs.
If you look at it in a microcosm of soley agriculture - then it seems logical that the US reps would tell them to go pound sand. If you look at the big picture you see that our steel industry has long has the same arguement against imported steel that Thai farmers have against foreign grain. Therein lies the problem. If we want consesions on topics that benefit us, we have to give them on those that don't as well.
I don't know if this helps at all, but I hope it did.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 12, 2003 09:30:15 PM
Personally I want to see them make those countries come up to our standards, they must pay the same and be held to the same EPA and saftey standards as our companies and be held to the same agricultural standards also...
Once this happens, then I could see a "balanced" world trade.
posted on September 12, 2003 09:39:29 PM
Twelve - many of our own farmers cannot afford to live up to those "standards", thus the subsidies. How do you expect other, less affluent nations to do it?
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 12, 2003 09:48:33 PM
Farming subsidies have slowly but surely been going away... reason so many farms are going away... can't grow for a profit without the subsidies... it is a viscious circle, but each country must do their own at equal standards... I don't believe we should lower ours...
posted on September 12, 2003 10:01:21 PM
fenix - Thank you. So I was reading it correctly. Almost hate to say anything here anymore as one gets attacked and insulted just trying to have a conversation or state their opinions lately.
If we want concessions on topics that benefit us, we have to give them on those that don't as well. Okay that's how you see it. I question WHY do we HAVE to? Do these small countries who want this agreement reached have something the US wants? I don't believe so....but maybe I'm open to being corrected. Or is this just a moral issue that says everything in the world should be 'fair'...equal for all, even if it hurts our own economy? Smacks of world wide socialism to me. I'm really so tired of hearing those who want America to be on the short end of the stick, as long as it benefits some 'poor' nation.
We have enough problems of our own to deal with and I already see us as a very 'giving' country. But a lot of this 'global' society that seems to be forming, really does bother me. Being one of the more successful nations, I really feel we have more say in what's in our best interest. Not giving every country an equal vote, per sey. Because we're not equal.
Maybe part of this particular issue comes from my extended family being farmers. They hardly earn a decent living for working 24/7 and to see them on the losing end of any trade agreement....doesn't go over well with me. I don't feel sympathy for foreign farmers....but I do for American farmers.
:: I question WHY do we HAVE to? Do these small countries who want this agreement reached have something the US wants?::
Yes, many of them of these countries do. Mexico has Steel, Thailand, Thaiwan, India have cheep labor and manufaturing, etc. As much as people like Twelve complain about that cheap manufacturing, our ability to utilize that in parts manufacturing and assembly helps keep american companies competitive and profitable on the world market.
As much as it seems logical that we need to take care of our problems at home, much of our economy is linked to other countries and while it's not up to us to be their savior, it would be irresponsible bussiness for us to let them whither. How many US companies could survive if pieces of their global market died because those already weakened or economies colapsed?
To tell you the truth, it's game of some many intricacies that I certainly would not want to be the rule maker. It does make for interesting study though and the more you read about it the more you realize what a house of cards it all is. We may be on top but if those bottom cards become too instable, it all comes tumbling down.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
[ edited by Fenix03 on Sep 12, 2003 10:45 PM ]
posted on September 13, 2003 03:54:06 AM
Competitive? How do you see the US competitive in a world market that has labor outside the US at levels that wouldn't support a homeless man here in the US?
How can you explain to the person who just lost their job to a person in India, because they will work for $2/hour over there and live in the street at the same time?
How can you explain to that 19 year manufacturing person, that their job left to Mexico because assembly is cheaper there?
Where is the "balance" in that? The US should not have to lower our standards to "compete" in a global market, any new agreements should include wages, health and safety requirements and EPA standards that the other country must abide by to have tariff free products brought into this country.
Wonder how many companies would still move?
Wonder how many companies would then reinvest right here at home. Because it would be actually just as "cheap" here to do business.
People like you Fenix who are running off to live outside the US are actually the ones bringing down the US through economic means and now is the time to put a stop to it.
By leaving this country where is the creativity and investment going? To that other country.
The "American Dream" of owning a home is almost dead here in the US, not many in So Cal can even think of buying a home, unless that is what every dime they make goes for each and every month.
When the US let companies leave this soil and allowed them to bring in those products with no penalty, that is where our downfall started... economics will bring us down, not bombs and guns. But we may need those bombs and guns to just to survive.
Because when people like you fenix are done, the only manufacturing that will still be done here on a mass basis will be arms and government contracts for military products.
