Of course. W hy should w e spend money on anybody but the rich?T he World T rade Organization is the successor to GAT T. Has the
U S been fairly happy w ith the W T O?
Not entirely. T he U S has been brought up more than once for
violation of W T O principles, and w as also condemned by the GAT T
council earlier. But in general, the U S is more or less favorable to
the W T O, w hose mixture of liberalization and protectionism is
pretty much tailored to the needs of pow erful transnational
corporations and financial institutions.
T he U ruguay R ound treaty that led to the W T O w as called a free-
trade agreement, but it’s really more of an investorrights
agreement. T he U S w ants to use W T O rules in areas it expects to
dominate, and is certainly in a position to cancel any rule it doesn’t
like.
For example, a w hile back the U S forced Mexico to cut back
exports of its tomatoes. It’s a violation of NAFTA and W T O rules
and w ill cost Mexican producers close to a billion dollars a year. T he
official reason w as that Mexican producers w ere selling tomatoes at
a cost American producers can’t match.
If the W T O rules in favor of the European U nion’s request to
condemn the Helms-Burton Act [w hich strengthened the U S
embargo against Cuba] as an illegal interference w ith w orld trade,
the U S w ill just go on acting unilaterally. If you’re pow erful enough,
you can do w hatever you w ant.
W hat do you think of the expansion of NAT O?
I don’t think there’s a simple answ er to that—it depends how the
economic and political structure of Eastern Europe and Western
Asia evolves.
As mentioned above, w hen the Cold War ended I expected that
the former Soviet empire w ould pretty much revert to w hat it had
been before. T he areas that had been part of the industrial West—
the Czech R epublic, w estern Poland, Hungary—w ould essentially be
reintegrated into the West, and the other parts, w hich had been
T hird World before the Soviet U nion, w ould return to that status,