Funny thing is, WTO is a US-created corporate lickspittle...
...created for the express purpose of bringing all the world's governments into line and stop them from "erecting barriers" -- to *American* trade.
The world's biggest corporations (which to an overwhelming degree means, American corporations -- check the names on the Fortune 500 list) are ever more rabidly trying to stamp out any impediments to the business of making money hand over fist.(*) Therefore, these "agreements" -- GATT, GATS, etc -- that those irrelevant anachronistic institutions, the political governments of the world's nations, are supposed to sign up and shut up about are mostly (if not exclusively?) "agreements" to limit the political powers of these same governments' *themselves*, enforced by the threats of political and economic ostracism (basically, "Sign up and shut up, or you won't get access to the U.S. and E.U. markets!"). Defined as "impediments to free trade" are not only tariffs, but also such silly irrelevancies as environmental norms, and, almost more often than not, consumer-safety laws(+) -- but, of course, tariffs more than anything. Just look what happens when someone tries to counteract the "dumping" of *American* steel on a *non-U.S* market, for instance -- The howls of outrage are almost audible across the oceans, *without* the benefit of telephones or such.
But, in typical Corporate American have-your-cake-and-eat-it fashion, American corporations who *aren't* all that competetitive at world market prices sure want tariffs to shelter *them* from the big bad competetition. And the Bush administration, of course, hastens to give Corporate America what Corporate America wants -- Biznizz Über Alles, and who gives a fuck about the proles?
Two-faced fucking assholes, all of them.
(*): *Now* do you begin to see what those "damn hippie" protestors in Prague, Seattle, and Genoa were so upset about?
(+): Which makes Drew K's oft-repeated suggestion about slapping tariffs equivalent to the cost of manufacturing in the U.S. on goods that compete with U.S-manufactured ones rather ironic -- God forbid it ever go the other way, eh?
