James Sheehan

The World Trade Organization has a fantastic but undeserved reputation in international circles as the world's premier institution of free trade. Despite all of the WTO's pretensions to greatness, this glorified trade-management bureaucracy exists only to promote the interests of well-heeled trade lobbyists and political power brokers.

When the Soviet Union's central planners failed year after year to produce a respectable grain harvest, they blamed "bad weather." If only the weather could be controlled, Moscow dreamed, communism might be made to work. Officially, communism is dead, but the bureaucratic obsession with controlling the weather lives on in Washington, D.C.

According to the hoopla, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created in 1995 as an instrument of global free trade. Instead, it is proving to be a vehicle for corruption, economic reprisals, and politicization of trade.