This is additional fine print. Fine print, when mixed with pepper spray, makes a simply marvellous tortilla dip. Try it with a garnish of parsley at your next soiree.

Free Trade Good

A Free trade will leave you feeling fresh and clean all over production

There's this immortal Tom Tomorrow cartoon — a quick, sharp thrust through the heart of the shamelessness of spin. At the tip of the rapier is an image I expect I will always remember — the industry spokesperson holding up a laboratory flask foaming with malevolent death, beaming a wide-eyed smile, and declaring with all the apple pie enthusiasm of a fifties-cake-mix-commercial mother, "And so you see, toxic sludge is actually quite good for you".¹

I write this from Ottawa, on the opening evening of the summit of the Americas in Québec City.

And in case you've been living on Mars and missed it, this event has gone a bit like this:

(1) Security forces have built a four-kilometer long barrier around the conference centre in the old city, to keep the protesters a good half a kilometer or so away from the actual talks. A precaution, one must suppose, against that nasty odour of tear gas clinging to the dignitaries' clothes, and against the apparently undesirable event that the delegates might actually have to hear what the protesters have to say. Pop quiz: if you are forced to protest the actions of your heads of state from a distance too great for them actually to hear you, is this actually a protest? Or have you been reduced to giving a very large, very disorganized, very noisy photo op for the curious press? Your call — but do think it over.

(2) In the lead-up to the summit, Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT, for short, and yes, we have to suspect the French double entendre² is only too à propos given this department's actual track record at the trading table of late), along with the rest of the members of the Canadian government involved in the talks, repeatedly refused entreaties from angry NGOs to publish the trading position, and cop to what's actually on the table (thus effectively refusing to answer the quite reasonable question posed, which was, effectively, will you be selling our health care system for a handful of beads this week or next, sirs?). In the final weeks, they made what looked (at least cosmetically) like a sort of concession, and claimed they would publish them, but insisted it would take a few weeks to get the translations done, and that this would probably take (and this was a huge surprise) until after the summit. Protest organizers commented wryly that strangely they can build a four kilometer fence in a couple of days, but it takes several weeks to come up with a coupla translations. To which, actually, I have little to add.

(3) The angrier of factions among the protesters³ have, as of about twelve hours ago (as I write this), torn down a few sections of the chain link fence comprising the upper three quarters or so of the now much-loathed barrier. A lengthy, but relatively contained hurled-missile distance confrontation ensued, in which the police showed they've actually been training for this, and refrained from pulling another Oka⁴, at least for now, and made few arrests, in favour of just keeping the protesters back. The police threw gas grenades, and used water cannon. The protesters threw the grenades back, and, in a turn I suspect I will also always remember vividly, lifted the very cobblestones of the Québec streets over their heads, and hurled them at the riot shields. One riot cop hospitalized, three⁵ protesters hauled off to detention. As of an hour ago or so, I turned on Newsworld to see a thick, opaque fog of tear gas hanging over Boulevard René Lévesque, at the spot where the protesters had broken through, a good sized city block entirely fogged in with the stuff. Streetlights shone faintly through the haze. The reporters had been wondering aloud hours earlier what would happen when night fell. Apparently, the police decided they'd rather gas half the old town than leave that to chance⁶. I breathe the clear Ottawa air a little gratefully, this evening.

(4) To complete the memorable impression this event has left me with, the stunned bunny that is, both pathetically and amusingly, the declared president of the United States of America, in a sound blurb given as he arrived, declared oh so earnestly that he could not agree with the protesters' opposition to free trade, since "Free trade promotes the spread of freedom".

And toxic sludge is actually quite good for you.

There's something I'd really like to point out to anyone who's suffered through the 21st century far enough to live to read this. You know that plastic mannequin up there, that haircut that walks like a man, that bundle of glib and meaningless catchphrases that has insulted your intelligence via the TV news for several agonizing months now? Yeah, that guy, the US president up there?

Look folks, he has no bloody clue what he's talking about.

Neither, for that matter, do any of those simpering idiots trying to sell you on this whole free trade thing.

No, I'm afraid not. Not a blessed clue.

I had briefly contemplated, before writing this column, taking a few weeks and recording every instance I could grab of a self-declared soothsayer singing the presumed praises of free trade. I speculated that to really give this piece some kick, I should sit down with VCRs and tape decks at the ready, my pencil poised, and commit to disk every time some vacuous industry or government spokesthingy or other stepped up to a microphone to intone any of the following:

— "Free trade promotes the spread of political freedom."

— "Free trade promotes the distribution of wealth."

— "Free trade promotes intercultural understanding."

— "Free trade will make puppies cuter⁷, will make your whites whiter, will freshen your breath, and will leave your teeth sparkly clean."

— "Free trade will prevent male pattern baldness."

— "Free trade will make you a better lover."

... and on and on and on.

Notice something interesting about all of this?

I've noticed something now becoming particularly difficult to miss noticing, considering that as of this week, the various cheerleaders for globalization, realizing the populace has some (I think quite reasonable) reservations about the whole business, are now saying they'll try to make their case to the people, to ease their troubled minds.

I've noticed that they really don't have that much of a case to present.

I've noticed that their case is pretty much just one bald assertion, given without a shred of evidence, that all of this is for the good.

Well of course, you might want to tell yourself. The evidence is too complex to present in the popular media. But they must have it. They seem so sure. It shouldn't bother us. They must have their reasons.

Look, loves, there's a simple principle here you've got to grasp before making so fatally foolish an assumption. Those guys in suits up there, shaking hands around the podium? The deadeyed corporate lackeys in the boardrooms and the think tanks that write these scripts they recite? These generally very well-educated, generally wealthy, generally quite bright people who keep saying 'trust us on this, we know what we're doing'?

This is the thing. These people are idiots, just like you and me.

Yep, I'm afraid so. And so they reason just as about as rigourously as do you and I. Which is pretty much as well as you'd expect from most any naked ape recently arrived from a semi-arboreal existence in which the height of intellectual sophistication was the ability to use a twig to get the termites out of the mound.

So, just like you and me, if they come across something that has certain positive spinoffs for themselves and their friends, they'd really like to convince themselves, if they can, that really, it's good for everyone, and that they'd be doing nothing wrong by promoting it. And pretty much any utterly flaky theory that gives them this argument, (or hell, no real theory at all, for that matter) is going to be quite enough for them to decide that really, this just must be right. Because it would be oh so convenient for them if it were.

Let's make this more concrete, as it's a simple enough principle. Say you're walking down the street, and you see a wallet on the sidewalk. You pick it up, and it's full of money, and enough ID that actually, if you were scrupulously honest, you could probably get that money back to its rightful owner.

But you tell yourself look, that wallet might have fallen for a reason. That person must have been awfully careless to let that drop. Probably they're not the best person to be handling this stuff.

That right person is obviously you. You found it. Hence, you're observant. Hence responsible. And you can probably invest it better than they could anyway. Or at least buy a slightly better class of scotch with it than could this silly yutz who so conveniently left it for you.

Suppose you convince yourself as a corollary that well, actually, anyone silly enough to leave their wallet in their front hip pocket where you can relatively unobtrusively nick it for your own purposes, well, they're not too good with money either. So maybe you should have that money too. All in the interests of economic efficiency.

Suppose you run with this thread of thought until finally, you're running what's effectively an extortion racket that has little compunction about beating the hell out of third world workers to prevent their forming unions, in the interests of squeezing a few more pennies out of them for your shareholders, so you may more easily get the five CD changer option on your second wife's BMW and write it off as a business expense this taxation year.

That's roughly how it works when it comes to these silly twits and their free trade. Only with fewer ethical hitches, and actually, a slightly less sophisticated argument.

Actually, you can sum up their argument in about three words. It goes like this:

Free trade good.

Throw in the animal posturing, and you get four words. Sort of. As in:

Free trade good. <Grunt>.

Are you getting the picture?

Look. It's not complicated. These guys have been ranting since Seattle now about how these silly protesters are all so terribly misinformed about what these agreements will mean, naive slobs who couldn't paste a syllogism into a deduction and make it come out right. And every five minutes it's "Free trade will make you rich, happy, and reduce your overbite", "Free trade will give you better aerobic conditioning" and "Free trade will increase the length and frequency of orgasm". Not much evidence for these beliefs held with the strength of religious conviction. Just lots of that conviction.

It's become, if you ask me (and even if you don't) more and more transparent, the more flak they get. As more and more people start to wake up to the fact that actually, far too many of their leaders are clearly living on a planet other than this one with respect to this issue, those selfsame leaders get more and more shrill. Since they can't actually form a coherent argument for their claim much beyond shrugging and insisting it does make some intuitive sense (which is maybe arguable, but hardly definitively convincing), nor marshal particularly suggestive evidence for their claims, they've taken to shrieking insistently that look, everyone believes this, outside a few wacky anarchists. Get in step, already.

And yep, there's quite the mix of protesters out there, from people with qualified views I think actually make an awful lot of sense, to people I think make an awful lot less. The ones, actually, who seem to be saying all trade is evil, and that the capitalist system must be smashed, I must confess, I suspect are quite mad.

But really no more mad, sadly, I have to say, than the deluded mandarins claiming ever more shrilly that they must be on to something here about how fundamentally liberating free trade is — since all the lap dogs around all the boardroom tables of all their favourite think tanks agree with them so very adamantly.

And yes, I'm reasonably confident that from their viewpoint (although I also have to suspect that on some level they must retain some remote awareness that they're fooling themselves), that is how the world is. Because everyone to whom they talk, at least, agrees with them that this is all a very good thing. That, for example, this making sure that democractically elected governments can't actually tell transnationals to stop dumping lead into the local water table will somehow protect the environment. That ensuring that civil societies cannot enforce any kind of labour standards independently will somehow put a frozen TV dinner in every microwave. Everyone they talk to just thinks it's all quite logical, and all quite grand.

But then, they're pretty careful about who they talk to, aren't they?

I mean, they could also have talked to any number of academic economists who are far more nuanced about when trade is a good thing, and about who it's likely to be good for. They could have just read their history and noted that interestingly, large, powerful economies have for some time been interested in what they call 'free trade' with smaller ones when it seems to suit their purposes, but only when it does. They could have noted that free trade, to such economies, means, interestingly, just what is most convenient for it to mean. So if Canadian softwood lumber were cheaper than yours, for example, you could slap tariffs on it, and insist the Canadians are subsidizing their production, so this isn't restraint of trade — it's just retaliatory. Really, you could insist (and I'm talking purely hypothetically here, of course), you're still all about free trade — it's just that this obviously can't be free trade, since you're getting hurt.

Look. Here's the thing. Free trade is a very deceptive term for exactly that reason. It sounds so absolute that it suggests itself as some kind of safe objective standard, but the truth is, it's anything but. Life is, as always, just not that easy, and not that simple, that such a standard is going to present itself for use. Keep that in mind the next time your favourite pundit waxes mystical about the promised level playing field.

And frankly, those people who talk about free trade being good for democracy? The nicest thing I can bring myself to say about such folk is well, maybe, at least, they lied to themselves first. Because from where I'm sitting, what evidence there is does rather seem to run in the opposite direction. This trading away the rights of a people to defend their own interests through their own democratically elected goverment in exchange for reliance on some mythical global set of common standards would be comic if it weren't tragic first.

Just ask the obvious question, please. Just how democratic is a ten foot fence, four kilometers long, secretive talks, and position papers the people on whose behalf the delegates are supposedly trading aren't actually allowed to see?

This, finally, for me, is the most wildly amusing spectacle of the whole event. Again and again, we hear them. We're all about democracy, they say. But trade talks, being bargaining sessions, after all, aren't conducive to our telling you what's on the table, since we don't want the other traders to know what we're prepared to do. And no, we don't even want to put in writing what's off the table, since we want the flexibility to trade what we must to get what we want.⁸

I actually reason, along with most of those possessed of some sanity, that there are certain situations where a delegation of powers within a democracy is quite reasonable and justified. But I'm sorry, if you want the kind of carte blanche Canada's traders are asking for in this respect to act entirely independently of the populace, you'd really better be involved in something rather urgent and critical. Like saving us from imminent alien invasion or something. And I'm afraid getting us slightly cheaper running shoes doesn't quite cut it.

So here's my message for DFAIT, and all who would reason this way: you negotiate on our behalf, at our sufferance. We can and will tell you what's off the table. Who in hell do you think you are, anyway? If you're arguing you need the flexibility to hang the health care system and the environmental standards out to dry for about the next twelve human generations, I'm sorry, obviously you're getting a little weak on the very concept of just who works for whom here, and apparently shouldn't be allowed to play with live ammo anymore. No, sorry, quite clearly, you can't be trusted with the inheritance of the 30 million or so you're supposed to serve. Stand down, come home, and don't sign anything, you pathetic, incompetent nitwits. You can be replaced.

And here's what I'm hoping, this warm spring evening, watching it all from a province away. I really don't want to see anyone else hurt, but I can't help but wish the bloody anarchists would tear that eyesore of a fence to tiny little pieces, and spread it to the four winds. And that a good-sized mob thereafter would make it close enough to the conference centre that the delegates can't help but hear them.

Yes, the powers that be are now so far off into their own dreamworld that probably even a crowd of ten thousand or so people shouting it in their ears from six feet away still isn't going to get it through their thick hominid heads.

But it's worth a shot, isn't it?

— 21 April, 2001 / AJM