Congressmen blast the WTO: though the House rejected a measure that would have withdrawn the U.S. from the WTO, a vocal minority of representatives explained their opposition eloquently.

On June 9, the House of Representatives rejected House Joint Resolution 27, which would have withdrawn U.S. approval of the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO), by a vote of 86-338.

The principal sponsors of H. J. Res. 27 would make a curious pair of bookends on anyone's political spectrum. They were libertarian-conservative Ron Paul (R-Texas) and socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Despite huge ideological differences, the two apparently share a disdain for the domination of America's trade policies by multinational mega-corporations and internationalist builders of world government.

To gain congressional approval of the WTO agreement in late 1994, backers agreed to add a provision allowing any member of the House or Senate to introduce a "privileged resolution" on every five-year anniversary of the agreement, calling for U.S. withdrawal from the WTO. Under the terms of the privileged resolution, it must come to the floor for a vote by the full House or Senate within about 90 days of being introduced.

The 2000 and 2005 votes were the result of such privileged resolutions, but they are not the only means by which WTO membership can be terminated. The normal legislative route may be employed in any session of Congress. However, though the 2000 and 2005 votes show that there is growing opposition in Congress to the WTO, much more informed pressure needs to be applied on our congressmen before they can be expected to vote to get the U.S. out of the WTO.

One bright spot in the recent vote was the level of determination and understanding shown by some House members during the pre-vote debate. Though they came from different parties and had different perspectives, many of their arguments were sound and persuasive--but were not what most representatives, who were apparently under the control of the internationalist world trade lobby, wanted to hear. Here are some excerpts:

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.): "It is time to send the Bush administration a message and a wake-up call that our current trade policies have failed and need to be completely rethought so that they represent the needs of the middle class and working families of our country and not just the CEOs of large Corporations.

"Mr. Speaker, international trade is a good thing, if implemented properly, but the evidence is overwhelming that our current trade policies, including NAFTA, including permanent normal trade relations with China, and the current roles of the WTO are not working for average Americans, they are not working for the environment, and they are not working for human rights. If we do not fundamentally change those policies, we can only expect more of the same....

"Mr. Speaker, while some of my colleagues are going to extol all of the wonderful virtues of unfettered free trade, perhaps they can explain why in the last four years alone we have lost 2.8 million good-paying manufacturing jobs, one out of six in this country. One out of six in the last four years. In my own small State of Vermont, we have lost 20 percent of our manufacturing jobs in the last five years....

"When my friends talk about the so-called robust economy that has been created, perhaps they can explain to us why four million more Americans now live in poverty than just four years ago, four million more Americans in poverty; and why incredibly there are 24,000 fewer private sector jobs now than when George Bush first took office. If our trade policies are so successful, how could we have experienced an unprecedented net loss of private sector jobs over the last five years? The only new net jobs that have been created by the Bush administration have been government jobs, 917,000 of them. Maybe the Republican Party is becoming the party of big government and creating government jobs, but certainly it has not been private sector jobs that free trade is supposed to create....

"Mr. Speaker, it is not only blue collar jobs that we are on the cusp of losing. Millions of white collar information technology jobs are also on the line to go to China and India. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, predicts that the United States will lose the bulk of its information technology to jobs to China and India within the next decade."

Walter Jones (R-N.C.): "Let me take just a moment to talk about how WTO membership strips American sovereignty. If the United States does not change its laws to suit WTO, then America's businesses and consumers face trade sanctions. Trade disputes are decided by international panels that are hand-picked by the WTO. The identities of panel members are kept secret, and deliberations are kept confidential....

"WTO panel rulings go far beyond trade. In fact, the WTO panel recently found a Utah law prohibiting Internet gambling to be illegal. What will the WTO do next?"

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): "Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of our position to remove ourselves from the WTO. My economic position is somewhat different from some of my allies, because I come at it from a free trade position.

"I happen to believe in minimum tariffs, if any, but I do not believe that the process of the WTO and world government is a good way to do it. I do not think the WTO achieves its purpose, and I do not think it is permissible under the Constitution. Therefore, I strongly argue the case that, through the process, that we should defend the position of the Congress which gives us the responsibility of dealing with international trade, with international foreign commerce. That is our responsibility. We cannot transfer that responsibility to the president, and we cannot transfer that responsibility to an international government body.

"Therefore, there are many of us who ally together to argue that case, although we may have a disagreement on how much tariffs we should have, because the Congress should decide that. We could have no tariffs; we could have a uniform tariff, which the Founders believed in and permitted; or we could have protective tariffs, which some of those individuals on our side defend, and I am not that much interested in. But the issue that unifies us is who should determine it. For me, the determination should be by the U.S. Congress and not to defer to an international government body.

"Now this always bewilders me, when my conservative friends and those who believe in limited government are so anxious to deliver this to another giant international body. For instance, the WTO employs over 600 people. Free trade, if you are interested in free trade, all you have to do is write a sentence or two, and you can have free trade. You do not need 600 bureaucrats. It costs $133 million to manage the WTO every year. Of course, we pay the biggest sum, over $25 million for this, just to go and get permission or get our instructions from the WTO.

"We all know that we raised taxes not too long ago, not because the American people rose up and called their Congressmen and said we wanted you to repeal this tax and change the taxes. It was done in order to be an upstanding member of the WTO. We responded and took instructions from the WTO and adapted our tax policy to what they desired....

"Another area of importance to so many of us, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, has to do with the Codex Commission regulation set up by the United Nations. How much regulation are we going to have on vitamins and nutrition products? The UN already indicated the type of regulation. Guess who may, most likely, be the enforcer of these regulations? It will be the WTO. The Europeans have much stricter regulations. This means that some day the WTO may well come to us and regulate the distribution of vitamins and nutritional supplements in this country, something that I do not think we should even contemplate. The case can be made that if they have already pressured us to do things, they may well do it once again.

"Our administration is not too interested in the Kyoto Protocol, but that may well come down the road, and the enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol many believe will be enforced by the WTO.

"So this is big government, pure and simple. It does not endorse free trade whatsoever. It endorses managed trade; and too often it is managed for the privileges of the very large, well-positioned companies."

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.): "This is an extraordinary undermining of the sovereignty of the United States of America and the interests of the American people. This is not about free trade; this is about corporate-managed trade through a secretive body which is dominated by those very same corporations and many dictatorial governments around the world; and the U.S. is bound by their secretive decisions. This is absolutely outrageous.

"To date, the WTO has ruled U.S. policies illegal 42 out of 48 cases, 87.5 percent that has been brought against us. They ruled illegal regulation issued under the Clean Air Act; the United States Tax Code; laws to protect companies from unfair dumping or subsidized foreign products, among others. And it is true. We can keep those laws if we are willing to pay massive fines to keep them.

"Now, what kind of sovereignty is that? Next in their sights are buy-America laws, those referenced by the gentleman from the Carolinas. What he said is he does not want to see a Social Security program administered from China. Now, people would have thought that was a weird thing to say. No. The WTO requires we cannot discriminate in terms of who the vendors will be. In fact, homeland security can be provided by the Chinese, or maybe even by Iran, under the rules of the WTO. Will that not be just peachy?"

Rep. Peter Viselosky (D-Ind.): "Mr. Speaker, in 19941 supported the establishment of the WTO. I supported the establishment of it because the creation of the WTO was supposed to lower trade barriers. The WTO was supposed to include developed and developing countries, and environmental and labor standards were expected to rise for all.

"The WTO was created with the assumption that the rules would be applied fairly to all. Today, I am voting against the WTO because it has failed to deliver on any of its promises. The WTO was created by sovereign nations to create a true international trade community, but today the WTO is manipulated by multinational corporations with a loyalty to nothing but their bottom line. These multilaterals are patronizing, not patriotic."

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.):

"Mr. Speaker, it is our job to watch out for the interests of the American people. We are elected to do so. Transferring our sovereignty and decision-making power to the WTO, to the United Nations, or any other international body is not in the long-term interests of our people.

"The United States did this back in the 1950s or 1940s with the United Nations, and it too was a dream, a dream for a better world, a new order that would bring about prosperity and peace. What do we see now in the United Nations, corruption at the highest levels and arrogance. We see United Nations peacekeeping troops stand by as people are massacred. They themselves have participated in atrocities, and yet we see coverup at the United Nations and corruption. Is that the type of people we want to give sovereignty to? No.

"So why do we think the WTO is going to be any different? The WTO is made up of non-democratic countries as well as democratic countries, just like the United Nations. We are not going to bring them up; they will bring us down if we give up our decision-making process to unelected bodies that have been set up.

"They call it the new world order. The new world order, what is that going to bring the American people? A loss of sovereignty, a loss of our ability to control our own destinies. We will see the WTO manipulated by special interests in the same way we have seen other bodies manipulated by special interests, but the WTO will be made up of organizations that are comprised of governments that do not believe in democracy and honesty and free press and free speech and the standards we believe in.

"Mr. Speaker, 10 years from now as the WTO evolves, and even today, we will find our huge international corporations and international corporations in general going to these bodies and manipulating them and bribing them. And why not accept the bribes? The people of Burma or China or these other countries who are not democratic, who are not honest, that is their way of life. So why are we transferring authority, putting our faith in an organization, even if today in the short run we can see some examples where it might be in our benefit? In the long run it is not to the benefit of the American people to give up this kind of decision making....

"I say we should have free trade between free people. We should not be establishing super-powerful, unelected bodies by the WTO to control our destiny in the United States and determine what economic policies we will have in the long run."

We Must Keep Fighting

It would be safe to say that the arrogant trade policies King George III imposed on the American colonies, and which prompted the War for Independence, were no worse than what the WTO considers to be business as usual. We cannot look to the White House for defense against the WTO. Consider this November 26, 2004 statement by President George Bush: "[W]e've worked hard to comply with the WTO [World Trade Organization]. I think it's important that all nations comply with WTO rulings. I'll work with Congress to get into compliance."

The American colonists, circa 1776, had a designation for citizens who expressed similar subservience to the Crown. They called them Tories. Those congressmen who would not repeal the Declaration of Independence will continue to fight for WTO withdrawal. But for them to be successful, their ranks must be swelled--not only by those who honestly believe in American independence but by those who recognize that they must become pro-independence in order to stay in office. And that will only happen if many more Americans become involved and apply informed pressure on their congressmen.