Yes, the WTO, and his book Globalization and its Discontents is well worth reading.
I’m just a general reader on this subject, not an expert, but when you have (according to this thread) the Cato Institute and conservative economists agreeing with leftwing economists such as those at the Economic Policy Institute, then there’s got to be more than think tanks with an axe to grind.
Fans of the globalization status quo will point to countries such as India as success stories. (They will sometimes also point to the erstwhile Asian tigers though the truth is that these countries balked the so-called Washington consensus and adopted the same kind of protectionist and nationalist policies that launched Japan’s industrial economy–and also Britain’s and other European countries’ back in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Asian tigers conformed to IMF policies when the mid 1990s crash got them into trouble, and those restrictive policies, in the view of many, made the problem much worse). IMF policies have been extremely unsuccessful in Argentina and parts of Latin America and Africa.
The truth is that, historically, to build up industry you need certain kinds of protection; afterwards you can benefit from free trade. IMF policies, which are driven by conservative econonomic dogmas (practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike) get this backwards and urge free trade policies as a way of developing a new industrial economy rather than growing an existing and already healthy one.
The issue isn’t just loans and therefore debt–it’s the strings that come attached. To receive the loans they need to boost development, these countries have to cease to protect local industries that the population has depended on for generations, and open up their markets to foreign investment. Yet there is nothing to prohibit those investors just coming in for a quick profit and then exiting just as fast. And to borrow countries also have to cut their welfare states: and while these social services were usually provided with much red ink, human lives depended on them in very serioius ways. Stripping them entirely away on the promise of industrial growth that doesn’t happen, and then leaving high debt, ruined or raided local industry, and worthless currency in the wake, is the kind of profile that has made these policies so hated. Typically the local middle class is decimated, the poor get much poorer and a handful of local elites and foreign corporations get very rich.
This is a far-ranging problem that doesn’t only affect developing countries. To sign on to free trade agreements European countries are also put under certain kinds of restraint: they’re forbidden, for example, to subsidize their film industries resulting in the decline of local filmmaking and movie theaters filled with Hollywood stuff. So here there is a kind of cultural imperialism taking place, in addition to economic kind.
In theory free trade is a very good thing and definitely the wave of the future. But it can’t be implemented overnight, and it can’t be entirely unregulated. Note that in the US and Europe industry and trade are often very regulated: regulated to protect the environment and protect workers from harm. So the globalization status quo is also asking third world people to accept levels of exploitation and environmental harm that Western countries wouldn’t allow. In so doing it also hurts Western workers b/c it is cheaper for corporations to shift labor costs to places that allow sweatshop conditions–no fire safety, no minimum wage, no collective bargaining allowed. Opponents will tell you that these countries need and want these jobs: and that’s certainly true, but with no regulatory oversight it ends up being a rush to the bottom. After NAFTA good factory jobs exited the US and went off to Mexico where people would be paid about $2/hr. Now the very same jobs are leaving Mexico for China where people are paid about 50cents and hour (and where, ironically, the existing regime subsidizes these wages). Mexico is another example of where free trade policies have failed dismally to improve the lives of the middle and the bottom, though a few have been made spectacularly rich.
This is supposed to work b/c in theory in the West we don’t need these factory jobs any more: we’re all high-tech and service workers now. In practice we don’t provide enough education and training for everyone who used to work in a factory to become a high-tech service professional and there aren’t enough jobs anyway. And why aren’t there enough jobs in say software production? Because the people in the third world making $1/hr can’t afford to buy computers and software. An until minimal labor standards are in place, they’ll never become consumers in the global economy. So what you have is really very precarious–all predicated on growth which is derived from cost-cutting measures, but with so much cost-cutting that few wage earners can afford to buy the products no matter how much cheaper. Almost a kind of pyramid scheme.
And that’s what’s behind all the overproduction, with the US having served in the last decade or so as the buyer of last resort. A lot of this is achieved via credit card debt and almost no savings.
Neither organization is “for profit,” in that their missions are not to create profits for themselves, as corporations’ missions are. But both do make a profit. There might be a valid reason to distinguish between the two, but that’s not it.