Marcy Kaptur: “I just wanted to draw my colleagues' attention to yesterday's New York Times, the front page. There are some stories…”

“I just wanted to draw my colleagues' attention to yesterday's New York Times, the front page. There are some stories there that bear an interrelationship that is important. There was a major story about the World Trade Organization's upcoming meeting in Qatar in the Middle East, the first meeting that the WTO will be holding since Seattle; and the story talks about the World Trade Organization and some of the difficulties that it has been having in gaining broad-based public support for its activities and deliberations; and in fact, the story implies that if these meetings in Qatar are not successful, it might spell the demise of the WTO and the type of globalization initiatives that have ensued since this Congress passed GATT just a few years ago when the WTO was set up. One of the reasons it says that these talks are having difficulty is because of the fact that the world trade system has resulted in widening disparities between the very rich and the very poor, and it is very interesting that the meeting is being held in a part of the world which demonstrates the wide disparity in incomes between the very rich and the very poor.”