Seattle Protesters Were Like Judah Maccabee

A few days before the celebration of Hanukkah, 1999, tens of thousands of demonstrators in Seattle took up the modern banner of ancient guerilla fighters. Though the terms of the struggle are different, the protesters were really fighting the same battle that Jews celebrate by lighting candles for eight days.

The struggle of Hanukkah was about a massive Greek empire and its Hellenistic culture, which had taken over ancient Judea and attempted to subvert the independent right of the Jewish people to shape their own cultural, religious, and political life. Today, there are 50 multinational corporations that have gross incomes greater than those of many nations. Corporate power is able to dictate the terms of trade and shape the cultural and political life of many countries around the world.

The contemporary form of domination does not require colonial armies or imperialist interventions. The free market allows for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, and those few are in turn are able to dominate elections and dictate government policies around the world. Their allies in government created the World Trade Organization to extend their power further in countries whose democratic processes have put environmental, labor, and human rights constraints on the reckless pursuit of profits uber alles.

The WTO plan is simple: every country in the world will have to subordinate its own policies to unimpeded free trade. Any policy, from taxes to environmental or labor rules to consumer protections, that might pose a potential threat to corporate profits could be challenged. For example, if the WTO had been operating in the 1980s, the boycott of South Africa would have been seen as constraining trade, and might have been impossible for cities or states to join.

The WTO is the perfect way for industry and government to pursue policies that would be rejected by the peoples of the world were we given a voice. Leaders of the advanced industrial world created the WTO to advance free trade above all else--and now President Clinton and others can portray themselves as frustrated and powerless to have environmental and human rights issues taken seriously by the organization they created. I suspect that most Americans oppose the substance of what the WTO seeks to establish, but they have no effective political leadership ready to say so, because our system of government requires that politicians amass huge campaign funds from the very elites of wealth and power who benefit from the WTO.

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