ABSTRACT
In October 1999, the previously obscure meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) sparked mass protests in the streets of Seattle; a few months later, the routine annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were besieged in Washington, D.C. Free trade and the free flow of capital were the centerpiece of the president Clinton administration's economic strategy. Describing the Clinton project, the Wall Street Journal commented that it looked a lot more like patching the plumbing than like "new architecture". Greater controls over capital and currency speculation. Perhaps the most interesting movement has been the campaign for a tax on short-term capital flows, called the Tobin Tax, after James Tobin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who first proposed it. With China admitted to membership in the WTO, that organization will find it more and more difficult to make worker rights and environmental protections part of its agenda.
