Selling Out to Global Governance

The December 1999 demonstrations in Seattle woke up Americans to the fact of our membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The United States was put into this global group by a Clinton-Dole-Gingrich deal in the 1994 lame-duck session of Congress, after the landmark Republican victory on November 8 but before the new members took office in January. Almost a third of those who voted for the WTO had already been rejected by their constituents.

The WTO is a 14-page charter that was surreptitiously added, without debate or publicity, to the 22,000-page revision of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). WTO is not a trade agreement at all but a stealth treaty inserted into GATT in order to evade the constitutional requirement that treaties need a two-thirds Senate majority.

WTO's origin grew out of the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II, when a three-legged plan was proposed to control the global economy. The World Bank, which makes loans to developing nations, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which makes loans for foreign reconstruction and development projects, were born in December 1945 and have been bleeding the U.S. taxpayers ever since.

The third leg, then called the International Trade Organization (ITO), was blocked by U.S. Senators because it would diminish U.S. sovereignty and interfere with U.S. laws. GATT, which is simply a contractual relationship among sovereign nations, then became the basic multilateral agreement on global trade and has been negotiating rounds of tariff reductions ever since. When the final Uruguay Round of GATT Multilateral Trade Negotiations was signed in Morocco on April 15, 1994, the globalists returned to their 1947 plan of creating an actual organization with the power to control world trade. The WTO charter was then slipped into the GATT document that Congress passed.

The WTO is a supra-national body in Geneva that sets, administers, and enforces the rules of global trade. It includes a legislature, called the Ministerial Conference, consisting of 135 nations each with one vote; an executive branch consisting of a Director-General and an unelected multinational bureaucracy with a secretariat, committees, councils and review bodies; and a supreme court of trade called the Dispute Settlement Board that decides trade disputes and whose rulings cannot be vetoed by any nation.

The WTO is based on the one-country-one-vote pattern. The United States has only one vote out of 135, the same vote as Somalia, Haiti, Cuba or Rwanda. We have no veto. Most of the 135 are dictatorships and not our friends. They look upon international organizations as vehicles to finance their socialist economies and ruling classes out of U.S. wealth and technology.

The WTO's procedures are dramatically different from those used in prior years by GATT. GATT required a consensus decision to impose a penalty recommended by a dispute panel, and the United States could reject rulings that intruded on our interests. Under the WTO, unilateral action is forbidden. The United States must abide by the judgments of WTO's Dispute Settlement Board, which deliberates and votes in secret.

WTO is a direct attack on our sovereignty because it can force us to change our laws to comply with WTO rulings. Article XVI, paragraph 4, states: "Each Member shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations, and administrative procedures with its obligations." The WTO has the final say about whether U.S. laws meet WTO requirements. The WTO can impose financial penalties and sanctions if WTO decides that our laws don't fully obey its dictates.