AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González. And we’re joined by California state Senator Tom Hayden, longtime activist, who has come to Seattle. I don’t know. What? To relive your SDS days?

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: Well, that’s not a bad idea. But I’m here partly as a state legislator, because, according to one analysis at least, 95 California laws are at risk with these new trade rules, including some that I’ve passed, consumer issues, environmental issues, health issues, procurement issues. And we were always told by the Mickey Kantors and the others that the federal government would protect our laws. And we would always say, “If the federal government was protecting us, why have we passed these laws in the first place?” So, it’s come to this, and I’m here to try to work on California legislation that will be a model for protecting states against the WTO.

But I am also here in solidarity with these young activists or rebels who, you know, deserve the commendation of the nation for bringing to the light some of the deeds of this WTO. And if the authorities have failed, again, it’s the youth who have the bravery and the energy and the inventiveness to address the issues. And if they — I’m sure, if they hadn’t stopped the WTO from functioning, it wouldn’t be — it wouldn’t be discussed the way it’s going to be. I think they’ve changed history, or they’ve certainly changed the history the WTO forever.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Tom, you know, this reminds me, more than 30 years ago, you and I were both at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and one of the points that I raised in a column yesterday was that unlike the Vietnam War era, when you saw many labor unions and students and environmentalists on different sides of the fence, the amazing thing is, in what’s happened here in Seattle, is that all these groups are on the same side of the fence. And if the WTO has done anything, it’s managed to unite people’s organizations and movements, not only in this country, but throughout the world. And is there anything else that comes in terms of a comparison or contrast to what happened back in Chicago back in ’68?

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: I think you’re right that the WTO has brought us together. They just couldn’t manage to buy off labor or any other interest group the way they might domestically, and so everybody’s left out. Whether it’s Teamsters, tree huggers, whatever you want to call the spectrum, everybody is left out. I think a lot of these movements were born in the '60s, even affinity groups, these little street activist units, but they've matured. The doors have been opened. They have been at the table. And they’re saying, having been at the table, they’re still being paternalized. That’s very interesting to me. Thirty years of experience being at the table, and the Sierra Club’s feeling excluded. The AFL-CIO is feeling excluded. And so, now I think, hopefully, we get to a point where we go beyond this token reform, where you — it’s all about being at a table. We need real decision-making power, more, not less, vested in these community organizations and human rights and labor and environmental organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to this first point you made about the state laws in California, because this, I think, is beginning to sink home for a lot of people in this country now, who did not understand the World Trade Organization before. You said there are a number of laws, some of which you’ve passed, that could be overruled by this organization, the World Trade Organization, that is not democratically elected, not chosen by the people of this country. How does that work? Can you give us specifics?

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: You’d need a very long program indeed to explain that. But the essence of it is that if California passes a law saying our procurement policy is going to weigh in against apartheid, we’re not going to have any contracts with companies that do business in South Africa, or Burma, Myanmar, or something like that, that would be seen as a infringement on free trade and would be struck down. If you say that we’re going to require labeling on food, or we’re going to require this standard for carcinogens in children’s food, or we’re going to require warning signs in the workplace about this toxic exposure, those would be struck down as being a California standard that is discriminatory.

And this has moved past the hypothetical. The European countries have already started to challenge some of these California laws. So we can’t really rely on the Clinton administration to protect us. We have to have a binding mechanism that allows a state or a local government, elected officials, the reasonable certainty that the laws they pass can’t be overturned, as you say, by an unelected assembly behind closed doors. That’s the next round. It’s got to include local and state government. It’s a democracy issue, Democracy Now!, Amy, not just human rights, environment, civil rights and so on, but just the function. What’s the function of elected government if you turn over trade to a lot of bureaucratic geeks?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to California state Senator Tom Hayden, and we’re here at the Claremont Hotel, which is a block from the Westin Hotel, where President Clinton is supposedly staying. I mean, no one knows quite exactly what he is doing. His schedule is kept top secret. You can’t get any information out of the press office, even as press. As the door opens here in the lobby of the Claremont, the smell of tear gas wafts in and stings our eyes and throats. This is downtown Seattle at the end of 1999. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tom, one of the things that interested me when you’re talking about the people being left out in the process, I managed to talk to several of the delegates in the convention center, from countries like India and Dominica. And they were actually, some of them, very sympathetic to the protesters. For instance, Dominica is being saddled with the fact that this banana crisis, 60% of its total exports is bananas. And yet, as the foreign minister of Dominica was explaining to me, when the United States brought this case against the European Union over the issue of the preferential banana quotas for Caribbean countries, Dominica wasn’t even included in the discussion. It was a debate between the United States and the European Union, and all the smaller countries couldn’t even be considered in the battle that went on to decide the issue. And then, when they appealed it, he tells me it was an American judge who ruled on the appeal. So, many of the smaller countries, and even India, the largest member in terms of population of the WTO, feel that they’re not at the table in terms of the decisions that are being made, so that — I mean, what’s your sense in terms of the implications of what’s happened here for building international ties in terms of popular movements around the world?

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: I never thought that — I never understood how you could build an international movement again, until some of these international forces or international mechanisms started to kind of make it necessary — the Rio Summit on environment, the WTO. I do think, since capital is crossing borders, organizers have to cross borders, and journalists have to cross borders. And it’s going to be very, very hard, because there’s such a disparity, even in perception.

You know, people — I don’t know about the rest of the country, but people in California, including journalists, are very fond of saying the economy is doing well. “Economy is booming,” some of them say. And every time I hear that, I’m thinking, “They’ve managed to define economy, you know, within the border of California, and the suffering in Central America is just deleted. It’s not part of the economy that’s booming.” So, this whole idea that Clinton and others embrace about being more competitive is a mental trap, and it’s a political trap. You can’t really say we don’t want to be more competitive, but if you only say we want to be more competitive, it’s at somebody else’s expense, at some poor guy’s expense or some little country’s expense. So, there has to be these links.

The thing that impressed me at the rally, moved me to tears, really, was, you know, the Mexican woman that worked in a maquiladora, the miner from South Africa, from the labor network in South Africa, and, you know, it was clear that they were wages behind, dollars behind, the American workers on the stage with them, but they didn’t want to be treated like a cheap labor market. We don’t want them treated that way. And for the first time, I think, in my life, I actually saw at least some glimmer of solidarity, or the possibility of solidarity. And when she said, you know, “We need an international minimum wage,” and 40,000 people are cheering for it, I thought I’d never live to see that day in my life. And I think there’s some real possibilities here that people ought to say are positive, are terrific, if we can just stop this lopsided emphasis on privately securing investors’ rights. And hopefully that balloon is punctured. And even the investors may be wondering if they have to cut a better deal for the rest of the world. If we can do that and put all these issues on the table, we have a framework for a very good, very, very good beginning, to take a long time, but I saw some real examples this week.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we had earlier this week on the show farmers from around the world. We had the French guys, José Bové. We had that the head of the Nebraska farmers’ union. We had a head of a Black farmers’ group in the South. And it was amazing, the degree of the same problems that they were all confronting. The family farms all everywhere are disappearing, and it’s the same agribusiness companies that are behind it, wherever it is. So, I mean, it’s been remarkable, the degree in all of these movements, environmental. I mean, there were Koreans in the streets sitting down, blocking the streets, Filipinos who had come here to join this movement. So, that’s why I had got the same sense. I’ve never seen an international — a protest of such international character, in the people, as well as in the ideas that were being brought out.

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: No, it’s too bad that it’s not — it’s not politically being articulated. Bush and Bradley and Gore are probably gone, right? They’re just not going to step up and say, “No further WTO, no further trade pacts, without labor, environmentalists and human rights.” And that leaves you with Buchanan, who is conspicuously missing this week. He’s totally against the WTO, but from a very national, a very narrow nationalist perspective. And frankly, he doesn’t seem to like all the other people willing to join him in the protests. You know, he’s really not big on the people of color, the labor unions or the environmentalists. So, he raised the issue, but he strands himself by being so far over in the corner that he’s not the leader.

So we’ll have to find ways, through all these movements and organizations, to keep these issues alive, but they have to be politically resolved. There has to be somebody better than the Clinton administration to take this on. And it’s not going to be — I don’t think it’s going to be the Republicans. So, the political potential of this movement is stillborn. It’s just not — not a possibility right now. That’s the only thing that disappoints me.

AMY GOODMAN: As a state senator, what can you do? What kind of challenge can you make to the World Trade Organization?

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: Well, I have been on this for a few years, but it’s quickened my focus. And I’ve been talking with Public Citizen, some of the other groups, some of the legal groups, about what can we craft as a model California ordinance that would basically say no to WTO, that California laws will not be overturned. If the WTO doesn’t like California laws, then let the federal government deal with the costs and the — but we are not having a law that we’ve passed overturned by a foreign and international unelected body. That will set off a challenge to the federal system. But that’s already undergoing. It’s very insidious that the Mickey Kantors and the Bill Clintons are collapsing federalism already by saying that — by patting our heads and saying, “We’ll take into account state laws, but we, the feds, will protect you and be there for you in that room, that private room.” So, that’s the collapse of the federal system, except in name only.

And so, we need to find a way for states to assert their rights, even if it then throws it to the courts. And so, I will craft some kind of legislation to try to focus the question. I mean, California, not to toot our horn, but we are the eighth-largest economy in the world, and we’re not present in the World Trade Organization. We’re not there at all. And that would go for all the other regional governments, state and local governments, where a lot of creative things are done. The states are usually called the laboratories of progress. You know, you try to reform, create reforms at that level. And we’ve done a great many things, including the anti-apartheid work in California, that would be erased, that would be not permissible under this arrangement.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: When you mention the lack of political leadership in terms of the issues of the WTO, I mean, two people come to mind who have been very vocal in the past: Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader, both of whom have attacked some of the principles and directions of the WTO. But Jesse was absent from the scene this week. And Ralph Nader was present and participated in debates, but I don’t think he can be seen as — at this stage anyway, as being sort of a leadership force for the popular movement, because he tends to basically lead the academic discourse and the research, but not to be out front in terms of the public battles.

SEN. TOM HAYDEN: And Paul, too, is — to his credit, Paul Wellstone was here, and he had been thinking of running for president. But let’s not — let’s not give up. What’s happened is, in one week, the WTO has gone from something that no one knows anything about to something that everybody is suspicious of.

AMY GOODMAN: Tom Hayden, the California state senator, and we’ll have more of that interview in our continued series on the World Trade Organization. We spoke with him yesterday in Seattle, Washington, as he was holding a wet rag to prevent against the gas mask. Democracy Now! produced by María Carrión and David Love. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, Errol Maitland and Mark Torres, our engineers. Thanks for listening.