How has the press reported on the WTO collapse?

You can find out from me, on Counterspin tonight, trying to break it down for the masses.

I get to hit on a point which I've been making privately since the Obama trip to Europe, which is that foreign correspondents for U.S. media need to get outside the capital cities and executive office buildings and start talking to real people on the street. A lot of the press coverage made it sound as if Obama's critical take on status quo trade policies is somehow anti-European, or anti-other countries. Far from it! As I wrote a few months back, the Irish rejection in a referendum against some corporate globalizing aspects of the EU - along with similar previous rejections by French and Dutch voters - shows that the true internationalist position is a stand for democracy and policy space, and against corporate takeover of our food supply and political systems.

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

RIP Doha Round - for shore!

Another WTO Collapse in 'Make or Break' Talks Shows New Direction Is Required; Victory for Small Farmers, Workers, Civil Society and Developing Nations as WTO Expansion Bid Is Again Defeated in Geneva

29 July - Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach's statement: "Thank God no deal was reached, because the proposal under consideration would have exacerbated the serious economic, food security and social problems now rocking numerous countries.

The moldering corpse of the Doha WTO-expansion Round should have been buried years ago. Hopefully after this latest rejection of the Doha agenda, countries will move on to a new agenda focused on fixing the existing WTO rules.

Read the full Global Trade Watch statement after the jump.

Also check out some of the agency news reports, from Reuters and Bloomberg on the long-awaited funeral, which ironically began to hit the ether before WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy's slow-motion "official" announcement of the collapse...

And for more insight into the Death of Doha, check out what some key civil society groups like CEPR and IATP are saying about it here, and here.

More about the insider gossip and fallout soon....

WTO talks appear to collapse...

We'll have more soon...

Calling it by its name

Judith Warner of the New York Times blogs a little bit more about the horrific double standard in the way we approach gender and work issues, and the JEC's new report:

This week, Congress issued a report, [that] states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out...

Men, of course, were hit hard by the recession and weak recovery, too; in fact, as Louis Uchitelle of the Times reported earlier this week, the workforce participation rates of men aged 25 through 54 have dropped from 96 percent in 1953 to 86.4 percent today.

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed.

The distinction is truly meaningful beyond the neat way it encapsulates our inability to separate ideology from fact when it comes to thinking about mothers and their much-vaunted “choices.” Unemployed people, after all, are entitled to benefits. As a society, we tend to think it’s incumbent upon us to get them working again — for their own good, individually, for the good of their families, and for our collective welfare. Politicians promise to retrain them. Devise policies to retain them. The unemployed still fall under the ever-retracting umbrella of people we consider, to some extent, to be worthy of our care.

Mothers, with their glorious array of post-feminist lifestyle options, have long been seen as something else. They’re individuals, making choices, responsible for the fallout of those choices even if, in point of fact, those choices were made for them by a weak economy, the unaffordability of child care or an inflexible workplace. They don’t need “government handouts” like quality child care, flextime, sick days, family leave and top-notch afterschool programs, because they’ve made their proud choices and, by golly (unless they’re whiners), they’re going to go it alone.

I’m so glad that, at long last, this fiction has been officially acknowledged.

U.S. State Legislatures Slam Colombia FTA – Again

The pro-Colombia FTA forces are getting more and more desperate. Yesterday they tried again to sneak through a resolution at the National Conference of State Legislatures that already got slammed 3 months ago in the same forum. What gives? Well, this time the reaction against their efforts was so strong that it got shot down on a voice vote that made the prospect of a vote tally embarrassing.

Read the full story on our press release, after the jump.

The Thrilla in Mozilla

There's a couple of housekeeping announcements I'd like to make.

First of all, Public Citizen's brilliant design guru, James Decker, has launched the new Eyes on Trade blog header. If you like what you see, show James some love in the comments!

Second, you may have noticed some new names in the contributors list in recent weeks. There will be more to come, as some new members of the PC Global Trade Watch team premiere their own blog posts. In addition to Brandon Wu, Kate Pollard, Lori Wallach and me, you'll be seeing more regular posts from deputy director Bill Holland, organizers Michael Crawford, Sarah Edelman, and James Ploeser, and media/ South Africa expert Ann Eveleth.

Rounds of virtual applause, please!

Offshoring: It's Not (Just) A Dude Thing

Offshoring, downsizing, rightsizing... mention these words, and the image that pops in most people's heads is a hefty Midwestern man grumbling about his economic problems and then voting Republican.

But Lou Uchitelle has a piece today entitled "Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy" that shows this view to be fatally flawed:

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut...

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage...

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.

“Women bring home about one-third of family income,” said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards.”

Remember all the wage stagnation that we talk about on this blog? Well, what Maloney is saying is that the only reason there's not rioting in the streets is because BOTH parents are now working for low pay. Mix this with the Alan Greenspan admission that American paychecks only look good when seen through the flood of imported cheap plastic gadgets, and if you get drunk enough after your third shift, you might almost think your living standards are rising.

It's pretty rare in this town that Congress would be on the vanguard of a scarcely examined idea (even one that affects large numbers of Americans). And official feminism doesn't tend to focus on these working-class issues. Fifty years from now, when we're looking back on how America developed a comprehensive approach to class and gender issues, Maloney's report will register as one of the foundational steps: admitting that there's a problem, and one that's not going to go away by just putting a few rich women in high-paying positions and pretending like that's a victory for the movement.

Stay Tuned... We're Moving Past The Fast Track

Regular readers of the blog will notice that our posting has dropped off a bit in recent weeks.

The reason? We've been busy with several long papers that we'll be releasing soon on Fast Track and what will replace it. One is a history paper of the various mechanisms that the United States has used over 219 years to deal with the executive-legislative branch co-responsibility for trade agreement negotiations and approval. It concludes that Fast Track is not inevitable, necessary, or even desirable to promote trade expansion. A second piece compares Fast Track's treatment of state and local officials to processes used by other federal democracies like Canada.

We think you'll enjoy 'em, and you'll be hearing more about them in the coming weeks.

Genoa Police Convicted of Brutality at Global Justice Protests

15 Italian police have been handed brutality convictions for their role in assaulting protestors at the 2001 G-8 global justice protests in Genoa, Italy. Police killed one Italian protestor, Carlo Giuliani, about whom more info is available here. According to the BBC:

Mark Covell was one of five British anti-globalisation protesters who was injured and has been seeking justice ever since.

"This was not just giving a few hippies a slap around, this was systematic," Mr Covell said.

A journalist with alternative media organisation Indymedia at the time, he was present when police raided a high school where protesters were camping during the summit.

He was left with eight broken ribs, a shredded lung, a broken hand, 16 missing teeth and was in a coma for two days.

The anarchist hardcore punk band Conflict wrote a song about Carlo, posted below. It will not be to everyone's taste, but you can be outraged at the Italian cops' overreaction (and happy about the progress made today) even if you aren't doing the windmill.

Dit Bud is Voor U / Este Bud é pra você

I've loved hearing the stories in recent days about all the righteous working class anger at Budweiser being bought out by the Belgian-Brazilian InBev company. Of course, many of the buy-outs and attempted buy-outs of the last few years stem from the overvalued dollar / trade deficit. If we're giving the world more cash as we consume their products, they've got to turn around and do something with the Benjamins. As it turns out, the acquisition of U.S. companies is one way to do it.

As a lover myself of smaller breweries of the kind profiled in Imbibe Magazine, I don't always have a lot of sympathy for the trials and travails of large corporate beer producers. But unlike Coors, both Bud and Miller are unionized, so hopefully the Bud sell-off will not result in any change in that. The Teamsters are sure to hold ImBev's fat to the fire on that one.

As with many other commodities and services, government efforts to keep beer production local, organic and/or union are seriously hindered by WTO (previously GATT) and NAFTA rules. Here's an NYT article from 1992:

The Canadians say the tax credits that many states offer companies, based on annual production of beer in the state, discriminate against them. The Anheuser-Busch Companies, controlling nearly half the beer market in the United States, for example, gets $21 million of annual tax savings from a brewery in Columbus, Ohio, the Canadians complained to GATT.

Canadian beer executives say a GATT panel has now ruled in favor of the Canadians. The ruling has not been made public, and officials of GATT and of the United States and Canada have declined to comment. If the reports are true, it would be the first time that American state laws were found in violation of international trade laws.

How could this happen? Here's Ruth Walick:

Because of its success in reducing world tariffs and preventing tariff wars, the GATT in the 1970s turned to nontariff barriers (NTBs). NTBs comprise an array of national laws, procedures, regulations, permits, standards and other government requirements. In the American federal system, many NTBs also result from the exercise of powers by state and local governments.

Since state and local governments are bound by the national Supremacy and Foreign Commerce Clauses of the Constitution, rulings by GATT dispute settlement bodies carry the potential for preemption of state and local government laws and regulations. For example, in a 1991 dispute settlement, a GATT panel upheld a Canadian complaint against a constitutionally sound Minnesota tax favoring small breweries (the so-called "Beer II" case), which effectively nullified the Minnesota tax. 

As we rage on in Queens pubs about the Bud takeover, let's also look through our beer goggles at the root causes.

Peruvians Strike Against Familar Bedfellows Autocracy and FTAs

Regular readers will not be surprised at this reminder that despite the rhetoric, there's nothing particularly 'free' or 'democratic' about FTAs. How could deals that require such secrecy to broker and implement be any thing but? No wonder they hide. Forking over the rights of regular working people to corporations and investors isn't the most popular pill these days.

But Peruvian President Alan Garcia's recent power grab in the name of 'free trade' gives yet another reason to sigh dismissively when you next hear the conflation of free markets and democracy. If you're like us, you'll take comfort to see that when the perpetrators act as egregiously as Garcia, a true democratic voice rises up in opposition.

In June, Garcia overstepped his power to implement the US-Peru FTA and unilaterally changed land tenure law, facilitating the buy-up of indigenous and small farmers' properties. Other decrees removed community consultation requirements destructive mining and forestry mega-projects and eliminated a series of rights of workers. Garcia's forking over citizens' rights to corporations and investors, in true neo-liberal style, prompted calls for a national general strike currently underway

According to Inside US Trade:

A broad swath of Peruvian civil society and two leading opposition parties are calling for a nationwide work stoppage next week to protest a flurry of new laws enacted by Peruvian President Alan Garcia in late June under special authority granted by the Peruvian Congress.

That authority, which lasted 180 days and expired June 30, enabled Garcia to enact laws necessary to implement the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement through special decrees without congressional approval.

Peruvian activists have charged that Garcia has abused the special authority granted by the Peruvian Congress -- which only applies to legislation necessary to enact the FTA -- to enact laws that are unrelated to the FTA and that would hasten environmental degradation and weaken workers’ rights...

“We have a clear understanding that the government of Peru has used this period between the signing of the FTA and the implementation to lower social standards, labor rights and environmental standards,” one Peruvian activist said this week in an interview...

In the US press, the better coverage acknowledges Peruvians are striking against Garcia's free trade policies that have failed to deliver benefits of economic growth to the Peruvian people themselves, most of whom are grappling with rising prices as they see their resources and land gobbled up by the already wealthy. But there is scant mention that autocratic methods were used - even necessary - to implement regressive policy package.

Strikers have hit the streets in the name of accountability, democracy and for fair policies on trade, investment and development. For more on US-based efforts to ensure democracy replaces our autocratic, failed Fast-Tracked trade policy, check out the TRADE Act, which makes sure that democracy is at the center of US trade policy.

Obama Channels Sting: I'll Be Watching You

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

According to Doug Palmer from Reuters...

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wants a successful end to long-running world trade talks, but will closely review any deal reached by the Bush administration, an Obama adviser said on Wednesday.

"Sen. Obama believes we need to change our trade focus from the Bush years so there is a true focus on workers, jobs, farmers and on ensuring that we are lifting standards of living overseas," Jason Furman, Obama economic adviser said in a statement in response to request by Reuters.

"That is the focus that as president he would bring to  seeking completion of a successful Doha round," Furman said.

Furman issued the remarks before a meeting later this month in Geneva that World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy has described as the "moment of truth" for the Doha round, which was launched nearly seven years ago.

"While (Obama) would be skeptical of any agreement done by the Bush administration -- especially in the last few months -- it would be premature to comment until there was an agreement and details to review," Furman said...

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, said she doubted this month's meeting would produce a major breakthrough because trading partners know it will be up to the next president to get any agreement through Congress.

"Most countries seem aware of the perils involved in making any deal with a president who has no authority to bind the U.S. legally and is desperate to get any foreign policy win like announcing a WTO breakthrough," Wallach said.

Nice, clean, pure and simple wedge issue

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

The Dayton Daily News had a piece that looked at the role of trade in the elections that cited our 2006 analysis:

Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch said in 2004 and 2000, voters saw little difference between Democrats John Kerry and Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush on the trade issue. So those voters — often white and working-class — voted based on what she calls "secondary" social issues.

This year, she predicts, the vast differences between Barack Obama and John McCain on the issue — McCain defends NAFTA and U.S. trade policy; Obama is critical — will mean voters will consider trade when they cast their ballots.

"It's really a clean, wedge issue," she said.

Brown said the 2006 election is part of the reason candidates now are paying so much attention to the issue. "I think Barack wins the state in part because of trade, pure and simple," he said.

Sen. Brown also had a letter to the NYT Mag about the awful Roger Lowenstein piece from a few weeks ago:

Lowenstein knows that trade deals are not just about tariffs; they are about intellectual property protections and investor protections and labor protections and environmental protections. They can be written to benefit most people or some people. They can be written to give some companies a windfall or most companies a fair shake. They can be written with the best interests of workers and investors in mind, or to favor one over the other. Trade policy is a series of decisions; it’s not black or white.

Outsourcing financial security

The New York Times is reporting a Bush administration push to "harmonize" accounting standards, something that we've been warning about for a long time.

James D. Cox, a securities law expert at Duke Law School who returned this week from teaching corporate law in Europe, said the shift to international rules amounted to “outsourcing safety standards.”

“We would not for a moment tolerate having American auto safety standards set by China or India,” he said. “Why should we do it for financial safety standards? There has to be some accountability.”...

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said the proposals would “weaken the pressure for credible oversight” of the markets and their regulators.

“This is a very, very serious problem,” Mr. Levin said. “We’ve had so many losses to investors based on inadequate oversight. We can’t proceed to give control of regulation — to delegate or cede control — to bodies that are not accountable. If this is delegated to regulators overseas, it weakens our ability to put pressure on the regulators to do what the law requires them to do.”

What's interesting about these quotes is how much we in fact do outsource our food and product safety to less-well-regulated jurisdictions. Some have in fact been quite open about this as an intentional strategy to save money.

Maryland v. The People's Republic of China

It began as an effort to protect the children of Maryland from unsafe toys. Now, thanks to a disgruntled Chinese government and WTO, Del. James Hubbard’s (D-Prince George's County) proposed legislation in the Maryland General Assembly on potentially harmful chemicals has entered the ranks of “barriers” to international trade.

As you may remember, last year saw a slew of recalled Chinese toys, which were found to contain dangerously high levels of lead. Hubbard, dissatisfied with the Bush administration’s response, proposed a bill that would allow Maryland to monitor its own toys. The bill, which will clear Maryland store shelves of dangerous toys, did more than raise international eyebrows. From a recent article in the Washington Post, here’s how it went down:

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative alerted the Chinese government, which sent a letter from Beijing to protest the bill as a barrier to trade. Lawmakers in Annapolis were unfazed and passed the bill, which takes effect next month.

Then came a four-page missive from the World Trade Organization's Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade -- in English and Chinese -- opposing another of Hubbard's bills, to ban a chemical compound called bisphenol A that is central to the plastics industry. Manufacturers in the United States and China use the compound in baby bottles and other products. With testimony on both sides, the bill did not pass out of a House committee.

The Chinese said there is "no specific scientific evidence" proving that products containing bisphenol A are hazardous to children.

Hubbard said he believes both complaints were prompted by lobbyists for the chemical industry, here in Washington.

"I truly feel the [chemical] industry and the toy industry are running to China and saying, 'You ought to oppose these bills, and if you don't you'll lose out on product sales in America,'" he said.

The WTO’s signature 'trade until proven deadly' threat justification was successful, and the bill didn’t make it out of a House committee. In an interview on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on Monday, Hubbard expressed his consternation: "This was a public health issue, not a trade issue."

In the past, international trade rules have stretched an intervening hand into state legislatures on a number of important issues, including health-related environmental regulations. Yet the WTO, not to mention Chinese government's attempts to preemptively intervene in a state's legislative process is taking their vested interest to another level.

Concerned that similar legislation would receive such undesired attention in Maine, the state's Citizen Trade Policy Commission issued a letter to the USTR which received this response. Hardly reassuring, their explanation is that the WTO notification system which "normally calls for us to notify proposed agency regulations" had "inadvertly included certain state legislative proposals." They assure it will not happen again in the future.

As states increasingly feel the yoke of international trade agreements in which they have had virtually no say, legislators from around the country are seeking new ways to work together to improve the process of state-federal consultation when it comes to trade policy-making.

Special thanks to Isaac Raisner for his contribution to this post.

More fruit from the poll tree

It doesn't get a whole lot more self-explanatory than CNN's headline, Poll: Majority against free trade.

According to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, 51 percent of Americans view foreign trade as a threat to the economy -- the first time in a CNN poll that a majority of Americans report holding negative views on free trade.

That compares with only 35 percent of Americans who felt free trade posed a threat to the economy in 2000, and 48 percent who felt it was a threat in 2006.

...Nearly six in 10 voters say the country's poor economic conditions will be extremely important -- ranking the economy as the No. 1 issue in this campaign out of 15 issues tested in the poll... That finding represents a clear change from the beginning of this year, when the war in Iraq and the economy were tied as the top campaign issues.

McCain in Mordor

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

McCain is a life-long supporter of NAFTA-style trade deals, while Obama has a better but less consistent record on the fair trade side. Is McCain trying to force Obama into a corner? That's the only explanation of why McCain would fly to the union murder capital of the world (Colombia) to promote a trade deal that Americans hate. Here are some reactions from Bloomberg reporting (guess which one is at a Democratic-backed group):

"McCain does have the opportunity to take the optimistic, pro-trade mantra,'' said Ed Gresser, a trade official in the Clinton administration and now an analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute, a research group in Washington affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council that supports trade...

McCain's support of trade will help Obama, said Lori Wallach, president of Global Trade Watch, a group which opposes free-trade agreements.

"It's one thing to have that view, it's another thing to wave it around like a pair of red underwear,'' Wallach said, calling trade a "wedge issue'' that may push factory workers toward Obama.

Baucus chief of staff joins Obama team (slightly old news)

It's old news, but seems to have flown under the radar a bit. Courtesy of WaPo's The Fix: "Jim Messina, who is currently serving as chief of staff to Montana Sen. Max Baucus, will join the presidential operation of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in a senior advisory role -- the latest addition of a longtime party operative to the Illinois Senator's political inner circle."

What to make of this? Baucus, of course, is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. In the Senate, Finance has jurisdiction over trade. This is, shall we say, inconvenient for fair trade activists since Baucus deep down (and not so deep down) thinks the NAFTA-WTO model is just fabulous (with a few labor and environmental carrots thrown in). For instance, at a speech he gave to the centrist New Democrats last year, he said:

I have long called for negotiations with commercially significant economies.  The Korean Free Trade Agreement is a good start.  But we should not be afraid to think bigger.  We should continue to pursue negotiations with Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and Japan.  We should not shy away from more daunting measures like regional agreements with ASEAN or APEC.

...Behind every American strength and success are American ideas.  We should take ambitious measures to enhance their protection and enforcement domestically and globally.  We should begin to negotiate a plurilateral intellectual property agreement in the World Trade Organization that goes beyond our existing TRIPS obligations.

More NAFTA expansion! More protectionism for pharmaceutical companies! Hooray!

So, the appointment of Baucus' chief of staff to a high-level position within the Obama campaign should rightfully put fair traders on their toes just a little more.

Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.

McCain's Brain

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is on his way to Bogota to push Bush's NAFTA expansion to Colombia. And it appears like, much like Clinton with her Mark Penn snafu earlier, McCain has a ton of advisors with links to the murderous regime there. According to Sam Stein at Huffington Post:

McCain's chief political adviser, Charlie Black, represented the oil-giant Occidental Petroleum from 2001 through 2007, in the process earning $1.6 million in fees for his firm, according to lobbying records. Among the issues on which he lobbied included the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (though also general energy topics concerning Middle East countries). Occidental gained a certain amount of political infamy when its security company was accused of bombing a Colombian village and killing 17 civilians in 1998. The company, which works with the country's military forces to protect an oil pipeline, denied involvement in the attack. But in 2007, Occidental again found itself in the midst of a human-rights mess, this time accused in congressional testimony of being "complicit" - with several other major corporations - in the murder of three labor leaders.

Black isn't the only McCain confidante with connections to companies pushing for free trade with Colombia. Kirk Blalock, a bundler who has raised at least $250,000 for the Senator, lobbied on behalf of American Forest & Paper Association, Ford Motor company, General Pharmaceutical Association, and Miller Brewing, all of which have championed the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Peter Madigan, another top fundraiser for the presumptive GOP nominee, was described as a lobbyist who "works for the government of Colombia" to "promote a U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement" by ABC News. A lobbyist at Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart, Madigan's clients include Philip Morris, Arthur Andersen, Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs, Shell Oil and Verizon. His firm, ABC wrote, has "distributed papers defending Colombian President Alvaro Uribe against allegations of ties to paramilitary groups, and promoting the controversial anti-drug program 'Plan Colombia' as achieving 'strengthening human rights.'"

Meanwhile, Susan Nelson, McCain's finance director, and Tom Loeffler, the recently resigned national finance chairman, both lobbied in the past for the Colombia FTA on behalf of Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America. In the process they earned tens of thousands of dollars for their firm, The Loeffler Group.

"It seems that McCain's entire brain trust is pushing for these trade deals," said Bill Holland, deputy director of Global Trade Watch. "And after the primaries, when we have seen that Americans are overwhelming rejecting the current model, to have all these advisers pushing it is a bad sign."