[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 64 (Thursday, May 10, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E775-E776]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              WTO MEETING

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. DOUG BEREUTER

                              of nebraska

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 10, 2001

  Mr. BEREUTER. Mr. Speaker, this Member strongly urges his colleagues 
to read and carefully consider the excellent column of Paul Krugman, a 
New York Times columnist, which appears in numerous American 
newspapers.
  He has it right in describing the motivation, misguided views, and 
counterproductive actions of key groups involved in organizing the 
demonstrations against their perception of globalism at numerous 
international meetings since the WTO meeting in Seattle.

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 24, 2001]

                Foes of Globalism Don't Use Their Heads

                           (By Paul Krugman)

       There is an old European saying: Anyone who is not a 
     socialist before he is 30 has no heart; anyone who is still a 
     socialist after he is 30 has no head. Suitably updated, this 
     applies perfectly to the movement against globalization--the 
     movement that made its big splash in Seattle back in 1999 and 
     did its best to disrupt the Summit of the Americas in Quebec 
     City this past weekend.
       The facts of globalization are not always pretty. If you 
     buy a product made in a Third World country, it was produced 
     by workers who are paid incredibly little by Western 
     standards and probably work under awful conditions. Anyone 
     who is not bothered by

[[Page E776]]

     those facts, at least some of the time, has no heart.
       But that doesn't mean the demonstrators are right. On the 
     contrary: Anyone who thinks that the answer to world poverty 
     is simple outrage against global trade has no head--or 
     chooses not to use it. The anti-globalization movement 
     already has a remarkable track record of hurting the very 
     people and causes it claims to champion.
       Even when political action doesn't backfire, when the 
     movement gets what it wants, the effects are often 
     startlingly malign. For example, could anything be worse than 
     having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child 
     workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for 
     Wal-Mart, and Sen. Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning 
     imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct 
     result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped 
     employing children. But did the children go back to school? 
     Did they return to happy homes? No according to Oxfam, which 
     found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse 
     jobs or on the streets--and that a significant number were 
     forced into prostitution.
       The point is that Third World countries aren't poor because 
     their export workers earn low wages; it's the other way 
     around. Because the countries are poor, even what look to us 
     like bad jobs at bad wages are almost always much better than 
     the alternatives: Millions of Mexicans are migrating to the 
     north of the country to take the low-wage export jobs that 
     outrage opponents of NAFTA. And those jobs wouldn't exist if 
     the wages were much higher: The same factors that make poor 
     countries poor--low productivity, bad infrastructure, general 
     social disorganization--mean that such countries can compete 
     on world markets only if they pay wages much lower than those 
     paid in the West.
       Of course, opponents of globalization have heard this 
     argument, and they have answers. At a conference this month, 
     I heard paeans to the superiority of traditional rural 
     lifestyles over modern urban life--a claim that not only 
     flies in the face of the clear fact that many peasants flee 
     to urban jobs as soon as they can, but that (it seems to me) 
     has a disagreeable element of cultural condescension, 
     especially given the overwhelming preponderance of white 
     faces in the crowds of demonstrators. (Would you want to live 
     in a pre-industrial village?) I also heard claims that rural 
     poverty in the Third World is mainly the fault of 
     multinational corporations--which is just plain wrong but is 
     a convenient belief if you want to think of globalization as 
     an unmitigated evil.
       The most sophisticated answer was that the movement doesn't 
     want to stop exports--it just wants better working conditions 
     and higher wages.
       But it's not a serious position. Third World countries 
     desperately need their export industries--they cannot retreat 
     to an imaginary rural Arcadia. They can't have those export 
     industries unless they are allowed to sell goods produced 
     under conditions that Westerners find appalling and by 
     workers who receive very low wages. And that's a fact the 
     anti-globalization activists refuse to accept.
       So who are the bad guys? The activists are getting the 
     images they wanted from Quebec City: leaders sitting inside 
     their fortified enclosure, with thousands of police 
     protecting them from the outraged masses outside. But images 
     can deceive. Many of the people inside that chain-link fence 
     are sincerely trying to help the world's poor. And the people 
     outside the fence, whatever their intentions, are doing their 
     best to make the poor even poorer.

     

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