Last week five aids activists chained themselves to the balcony of U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky's office, protesting WTO patent rules that have made AIDS medicine expensive for poor countries. Bowing partly to such concerns, Congress has twice refused to give President Clinton expedited trade-negotiating authority, thus defeating efforts to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement. Their argument couched in moral terms, the unions are allied with U.S. environmental, human-rights and consumer activists in an effort to make social policy through trade. On Nov. 30, the first day of WTO deliberations, the AFL-CIO plans a rally in Seattle led by 900 Boeing machinists, whose employer is one of the world's top exporters. Union delegations representing everyone from teachers to teamsters are flocking in from 25 states and 143 nations.
Dockworkers plan to shut down the port.
Even the Wobblies are roused. The Puget Sound chapter of Industrial Workers of the World is orchestrating a student walkout. He has taken a course in civil disobedience to prepare for the protest. I am not a victim if I can organize. The antiglobalist message resonates across a broad swath of ideology, from the isolationist Buchananite right to a kaleidoscope of left-wing groups.