World Trade Organization

Kevin Phillips is right on target (Opinion, Nov. 21). The World Trade Organization is a threat to our democracy, and our representatives seem unwilling to insist upon the safeguards necessary to reduce that threat. The WTO is a permanent bureaucracy with power over U.S. laws, and yet it remains unaccountable, secretive and undemocratic.

Under the WTO, panels of three unelected trade bureaucrats hear challenges by other nations to U.S. laws. If a challenged U.S. law is found to violate another country’s trade rules, the WTO could direct the U.S. to change the law or face automatic economic sanctions. In fact, as Phillips points out, the WTO has already overturned part of the U.S. Clean Air Act and also declared illegal a recent U.S. environmental regulation. The process is closed to the press and public. Documents are not subject to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Our very sovereignty is at stake.

HELEN TIEGER

Huntington Beach

* For someone who calls himself a political historian, Phillips’ column on the WTO and the Fed was a pretty poor piece of historical scholarship. Phillips’ comparison of the United States economy of today with the British economy of 100 years ago and the Dutch economy of 200 years ago is at best silly.

There is no ominous similarity between the turn-of-the-century British economy and ours in 1999. Britain’s troubles were caused by inward-looking attempts by Labor governments to stem the decline of failing industries like coal. Add the disastrous impact of the world wars, the money poured into an outdated colonial empire and miserable, class-based labor relations found throughout British industry and you have their recipe for ruin. Britain is finally pulling out of its long funk precisely because it is becoming more international and doing exactly what Phillips warns us against.

FRANK MARTIN

San Clemente