Rethinking Trade with Lori Wallach

Greetings from DC!

In the latest episode of Rethinking Trade, our guests unpack the specific policies safeguarding Europeans’ privacy, busting Big Tech monopolies, and banning the most risky uses if AI. Yup, all of the policies Big Tech has managed to evade here so far…  We’re joined by: 

In Part 1 we discussed some of the big issues at stake at the World Trade Organization’s 12th Ministerial conference, which was scheduled to take place last week in Geneva. That meeting, however, was postponed after the introduction of travel restrictions related to the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

Ironically, WTO countries enacting the waiver to get WTO IP barriers out of the way of making the meds to end the pandemic is what many people would consider to be the number one issue for the WTO to act on. A temporary suspension of WTO intellectual property barriers is needed so qualified producers in developing countries can produce more vaccines, tests and treatments for COVID-19. But while the WTO has again failed to deliver such a waiver, and with a new variant spreading fast, a number of WTO member nations somehow found time to make a new agreement limiting environmental and consumer regulation in the service sector.

On today’s show, we discuss the status of the TRIPS waiver, dig into this dangerous and potentially illegal agreement on services deregulation, and ask what could and should happen between now and the next WTO general council meeting to help end the pandemic.

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Music: Groove Grove by Kevin MacLeod.

Will the WTO get out of the way of global production of COVID-19 vaccines and meds so we can end this pandemic? Whether Big Pharma or humankind will win is the biggest question as the WTO’s major biennial ministerial meeting starts the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.  But Big Tech also has a play…

More than 120 countries support waiving some of the WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) rules that are limiting production of COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests. But the European Union, UK and Switzerland are blocking. A waiver wont happen without more leadership from the Biden administration.

With all this as a backdrop, Big Tech corporations are also vying for influence at MC12, urging the body to push so-called “digital trade” proposal that would close domestic policy space on issues of great importance, including gig economy worker protections, discrimination and algorithm transparency, competition policy and anti-trust, corporate liability, and consumer privacy. Big Tech wants the WTO to formalize what have beeb rump talks in violation of its own rules.

The stakes could not be higher for the WTO or for the world: Failure to enact a waiver will prolong the pandemic, leading to more death, illness, economic hardship, and social and political disruption. And rushing through a “Trojan Horse” set of “digital trade” rules will only further erode democracy worldwide.

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U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai’s recent speech about the World Trade Organization was shocking. Why? Because she openly and frankly discussed the yawning gap between the WTO’s expansive rules and what is right and good for people and the planet. And she made clear that the rules of the global commerce agency need a major redo.

That sort of tough love may be the last chance for the WTO, which has suffered a deepening legitimacy crisis for decades. Today WTO intellectual property barriers empower a few pharmaceutical corporations to limit how much vaccine is made, prolonging the pandemic.

In this episode we unpack USTR Tai’s recent comments and what they mean for the future of the WTO.

Right now, Apple and Google are lobbying the U.S. government to attack South Korean anti-monopoly policies. They claim that a recently passed Korean law requiring app stores to allow consumers to use diverse payment systems violates the US-Korea trade deal. Big Tech corporations want to hijack trade pacts to outlaw as a “barrier to trade” anti-trust, labor, environmental or consumer protections that could cut into their profits. 

On today’s show, we discuss this case and Big Tech’s current attempts to quietly thwart domestic digital governance and pro-competition policymaking now underway in the U.S. Congress, in various U.S. agencies and in countries around the world by misbranding such policies as “barriers to digital trade.”

Getting the world vaccinated and ending the pandemic is a political choice: World leaders have the medical, technical and financial capacity. To produce enough vaccines involves three clear steps: getting intellectual property monopoly barriers out of the way through a temporary WTO TRIPS waiver, technology transfer through sharing the recipes, and funding global production so the world is not reliant on a few monopoly sources.

With this year’s United Nations General Assembly now underway and President Biden’s upcoming COVID Summit around the corner, the U.S. has a powerful opportunity to end the pandemic. Unfortunately, the targets for Biden’s COVID summit exclude making a final deal on the TRIPS waiver or any others steps to share vaccine recipes with the world so more shots can be produced.

To discuss all of this, we are joined by longtime HIV and social justice activist Matthew Rose, who leads U.S. policy and advocacy work at Health GAP and has been deeply involved in the fight for the TRIPS waiver.

On August 19th, workers at the massive General Motors plant in Silao, Mexico participated in an historic vote that ousted the corrupt and undemocratic protection union that had long controlled labor relations there. The effort to win such a vote was made possible by the labor rules and Rapid Response enforcement mechanism of the USMCA trade deal.

In this Labor Day special, we sit down with Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch Research Director Daniel Rangel and long-time labor organizer Jeff Hermanson, who has been supporting the General Motors campaign through the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. We discuss the situation at Silao, its significance in the context of trade policy and what it says about the prospect for workers to utilize the USMCA to fight for labor rights in North America.

Music: Groove Grove by Kevin MacLeod.

The world celebrated when President Biden announced the U.S. would support a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization “TRIPS” intellectual property barriers to boost global production of COVID-19 vaccines. But months later, Big Pharma’s monopolies remain. 

The administration has failed to deliver on the waiver or to get vaccine makers to share their recipes. That means dire shortages of vaccines continue and with the vast majority of people worldwide exposed, COVID is on a murderous, variant-spawning rampage.

Now the delta variant first detected overseas is burning through the U.S. Public health experts are warning that lockdowns and perhaps other measures, like postponing in-person learning, may be necessary. The U.S. must act now to end the pandemic. Every moment of further inaction enables COVID-19 variants to develop and spread.

Within hours of taking office, President Biden revoked the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. The project, which would worsen the climate crisis, also posed major health and safety risks to indigenous people whose land it crossed. Now the Canadian corporation that wanted to build the pipeline is using a NAFTA Investor-State Dispute System (ISDS) tribunal to demand $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

ISDS allows multinational corporations to sue governments before a panel of three corporate lawyers, who can award unlimited sums to be paid by taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits. A years-long civil society and labor campaign got the original ISDS rules whacked out of the revised NAFTA. But that fix is phased-in over three years. This means legacy cases like TC Energy’s can be launched until 2023.

In this episode, we look at the Keystone XL NAFTA ISDS case, the new rules governing investor rights in North America, and the future of the ISDS regime.

On July 1, 2020, following a lengthy campaign by unions, civil society groups and congressional Democrats to win key improvements, the revised North American Free Trade Agreement, or United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), went into effect.

Unlike the original NAFTA, the USMCA requires its signatory countries to respect workers’ rights. And it has a special Rapid Response Labor Enforcement Mechanism. The revised deal largely gutted the disastrous Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system. But recently-filed labor enforcement complaints and a “legacy” ISDS case with the corporation behind the XL pipeline demanding $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers provide a stark warning that if and how the USMCA improves life and work in North America will depend on activism in all three nations.

This May 27th webinar “The Fight for Workers’ Rights in North America: Major Recent Developments Under the Revised NAFTA,” featured Mexican labor leader Susana Prieto Terrazas (Sindicato Nacional Independiente de Trabajadores de Industrias y de Servicios), Ben Davis (United Steelworkers), Rachel Micah-Jones (Centro de los Derechos del Migrante) and Daniel Rangel (Public Citizen). These US and Mexican labor and civil society leaders discussed recent labor enforcement cases under the revised NAFTA.

The event coincided with the release of a new Public Citizen analysis of the delayed phase-in of Mexico’s new labor justice system, which was one of the key commitments undertaken by Mexico when NAFTA was renegotiated in 2018. The report reviews which Mexican states will be in compliance and by what date, based on states’ share of foreign direct investment, industrial activity, labor conflicts and more. 

On May 5th, the Biden administration announced its support for an emergency COVID-19 waiver of “TRIPS” intellectual property barriers at the World Trade Organization. As we’ve detailed in previous episodes, 100 mainly developing countries have pushed for a TRIPS waiver to facilitate more production of COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments around the world. 

By reversing the Trump administration block against waiver negotiations, the Biden-Harris administration created momentum for a waiver to be adopted. And made clear saving lives is the priority. 

But while we celebrate this historic U.S. announcement and the efforts of people around the world to get a waiver, the Pharma lobby is gearing up to derail, weaken or delay any waiver. In this episode, we reflect on the U.S. campaign for a TRIPS waiver, and the fight still to come as we work to secure the fastest possible agreement on a waiver covering all intellectual property barriers for COVID-19 vaccines, tests & treatments.

The National Trade Estimates report is an annual wish list of other countries’ laws, policies and practices that corporations want labeled as “trade barriers,” in hopes that the U.S. government will turn their elimination into policy goals.

Like our trade agreements, however, this seek-and-destroy list of so-called trade-barriers is largely not about trade. Instead, legitimate public interest policies, from environmental protections to consumer health regulations, are targeted for elimination.

Millions of people around the world may not get COVID-19 vaccines until as late as 2024 due to World Trade Organization rules that protect medicine monopolies for the Big Pharma giants. What do these WTO rules require? How do they implicate access to essential medicines? How do countries escape these WTO-imposed barriers that protect corporate profits for vaccines developed with boatloads of tax-payer money?

On this episode, Lori gives us a guided tour through the thorny thicket of intellectual property monopolies, the “trade” agreement rules that oblige countries to enforce them and the WTO waiver needed to boost production of COVID vaccines, treatment and tests worldwide.

Our tax dollars should support green jobs with fair wages, not a global race to the bottom that exploits workers and poisons the environment. But thanks to corporate-rigged trade policies, “Buy American” government purchasing requirements are waived to include purchases from 60 other countries. This means our tax dollars are exported instead of being recycled at home to develop electric car and domestic solar, wind and other renewable energy manufacturing.

With the COVID-19 relief bill currently being implemented and another major spending bill on the horizon, the president must take a simple but important action to keep trillions in taxpayer dollars circulating in the U.S. economy to build a green future. Thankfully, the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan acknowledges this as a problem for both climate justice and economic justice, but obstacles still remain.

Audio from a live Public Citizen webinar featuring Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-ILL), South African Counsellor to the WTO Mustaqeem De Gama, and Senior Legal and Policy Advisor at Doctors Without Borders, Yuanqiong Hu. 

The event discusses how millions of people around the world may not get COVID-19 vaccines until as late as 2024 unless President Biden reverses the Trump administration’s deadly position at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Biden administration inherited a political and trade policy landscape transformed since the end of the Obama presidency by both the Trump trade strategy and the COVID-19 pandemic.

To deliver on its Build Back Better promises, the administration must create new approaches to trade that prioritize good jobs, promote the environmental and energy policies needed to counter climate catastrophe, protect consumer health and safety, and promote small business by breaking up monopolies.

Millions of people around the world may not get COVID-19 vaccines until as late as 2024—unless President Biden reverses the Trump administration’s deadly position at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Biden administration inherited a political and trade policy landscape transformed since the end of the Obama presidency by both the Trump trade strategy and the COVID-19 pandemic.

To deliver on its Build Back Better promises, the administration must create new approaches to trade that prioritize good jobs, promote the environmental and energy policies needed to counter climate catastrophe, protect consumer health and safety, and promote small business by breaking up monopolies.

With Georgia’s run-off elections shifting control of the Senate to the Democrats, the party will have a lot more room to pursue progressive reforms than in previous years. What does this mean for fixing our rotten trade rules, and what kinds of policies should we be pursuing?

In this episode, Lori is joined by Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chaves of the United farm Workers and renown civil rights activist, to discuss our Trade Discrimination report. This new research reveals how decades of corporate-rigged trade policies have disproportionately impacted Black and Latino workers.

In her decades of labor and civil rights activism, Huerta has witnessed how corporate-rigged globalization has gutted Latino and Black livelihoods and communities nationwide.

World Trade Organization (WTO) rules undermine access to COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. That’s why scores of countries are demanding that the WTO’s monopoly protections for pharmaceutical corporations be temporarily waived so COVID-19 vaccines and treatments can be produced worldwide. This is essential to ensure enough affordable doses to end the pandemic and save lives.

But U.S. trade officials are blocking the waiver, insisting that even during this deadly global pandemic, Big Pharma profits should come first. The question is: Will this position change under a Biden administration?

President-elect Biden’s appointment of the next top U.S. trade official has taken on enormous political and symbolic value. In just a few weeks, the White House is going to look a lot different – but what about U.S. trade policy? 

On this episode, we examine whether the new president’s political commitment to fixing some of the worst aspects of the old corporate-rigged trade agenda will become reality, or if the office of the U.S. Trade Representative will function as a gateway for big corporations to write the rules.

Donald Trump makes a big deal out of what he calls his “big deal” with China. But Trump’s “Phase 1” China trade deal actually encourage U.S. companies to outsource jobs to China. Meanwhile the Chinese government is not following through on its promise to increase purchases of U.S. agricultural goods.

The second phase of the China deal is MIA. And that’s the part that was supposed to bring down the trade deficit by getting China to stop subsidizing it exports. Not on the agenda at all were stronger labor protections and other rules that would’ve actually made a difference for working people here and in China. That’s a real problem, because labor conditions in China remain bleak.

On this episode we break down Trump’s China trade deal and how it became yet another one of his broken promises to working people.

The most damaging U.S. trade agreements were hatched using the same process: “Fast Track.” Fast Track empowers the executive branch to unilaterally select partner countries for trade deals, decide their contents and negotiate and sign them – all before Congress gets to vote on the matter. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of official U.S. trade advisors representing corporate interests have special access to texts and negotiators. Under Fast Track, when Congress finally has a say, it is limited to a “yes” or “no” vote with limited debate and amendments forbidden. 

The result? Wide swathes of U.S. law and policy entirely unrelated to trade get rewritten with the public and Congress locked out, and the U.S. is locked into corporate-rigged agreements with trade sanctions imposed on us if Big Pharma does not get special protections, food imports that do not meet U.S. safety standards are prohibited or foreign investors do not get better treatment when they offshore investment. 

But there’s good news: Fast Track only exists if Congress grants it. And the last grant ends on July 1st, 2021. That means soon, we will have a chance to create a new process with the public and congress playings the lead role in the formative stages of trade deals with more accountability over trade negotiations.

Chemical, oil and gas companies face plastic bags bans and other policies to fight the plastic waste that is clogging rivers and choking our oceans. Since China banned plastic waste imports in 2018, the industry has sought a new place for the garbage as vital to maintaining demand for sales of more single-use plastics. 

A recent New York Times exposé identified the U.S.-Kenya Free Trade Agreement now being negotiated by the Trump Administration as the chemical and oil industries’ vehicle to gut Kenya’s cutting edge plastics policies and establish a gateway to make Africa a new dumping ground for plastic waste.

In this episode, we discuss the Kenya plastics case as sadly just one of many examples of how corporate-rigged trade rules can undermine and gut a country’s domestic environmental protections.

Donald Trump pledged he would swiftly eliminate the huge job-killing U.S. trade deficit, end job outsourcing and rebuild manufacturing. Did he? The government collects data on each issue, and it’s been a triple fail. 

Many Americans are confused – does any U.S. political party stand for trade policy that puts working people first? Since the late 1980s, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have systematically sided with corporate elites in support of “free trade” deals like NAFTA. 

While most Congressional Democrats have sided with working people against them, a few have joined the overwhelming majority of Republicans who support and pass corporate-rigged trade deals. Trump railed against such deals, and then pushed new ones packed with giveaways for Big Pharma and Big Tech corporations.

In this episode, we untangle the confusing politics of trade. 

Online retail giants like Amazon have been quietly stuffing trade agreements with terms that handcuff governments from protecting consumers or breaking up the online behemoths. What these corporations and their government co-conspirators call “digital trade” rules are in fact designed to forbid governments from protecting our privacy, holding the online giants accountable for dangerous or fake products they sell us, and empowering us to control our personal data. 

“Digital trade” rules being pushed in U.S. trade deals give some of the world’s largest corporations further control over our personal data and the online-retail market.

China has 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic-minorities locked up in concentration camps in western China. Others are being shipped all over the country as forced-laborers to a network of factories supplying Nike and a slew of other U.S. companies, including those producing PPE. You may be buying these products thanks to loopholes in U.S. trade laws that are supposed to ban the sale of forced labor goods.  

Despite Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promises to “bring back jobs,” trade-related job losses have continued under the Trump administration. Under the Labor Department’s narrow Trade Adjustment Assistance program alone, 176,982 workers have been certified as losing jobs to trade since 2017. Trade-related job losses have been especially high in California, Michigan, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, and Washington state. 

Last week we discussed the new North American Free Trade Agreement and some of the key improvements we won after years of organized public pressure. The new NAFTA took effect on July 1st. The text requires significant new labor rights and includes strong enforcement. But corporations paying Mexican workers starvation wages are conspiring with right wing Mexican state officials to thwart any real change. The Mexican national government is not stepping up, and the new Mexican labor law is pinned down under a barrage of legal attacks. 

In this episode, we breakdown some of these hurdles and discuss how political pressure, grassroots campaigning, and civil society monitoring efforts are needed to translate the new NAFTA’s improvements on paper to real material differences in workers’ lives.

After a multi-year campaign by unions, civil society groups and congressional Democrats won critical improvements to the bad NAFTA 2.0 deal Trump signed in 2018, the new North American Free Trade Agreement goes into effect on July 1. 

But it’s a bad start: a leading Mexican labor lawyer, Susana Prieto Terrazas, has spent weeks in jail on trumped up charges for helping workers use USMCA’s labor rights, and Mexico’s new USMCA-compliant labor law is bogged down by hundreds of lawsuits aimed at derailing it. 

In this episode we discuss the decades-long movement against the original NAFTA, that pact’s outcomes, the recent Replace NAFTA campaign and the cross-border effort to free Susana Prieto Terrazas.

Governments are taking emergency action to fight COVID-19, counter economic disaster and ensure peoples’ basic needs are met. Now corporate law firms are targeting those actions for outrageous Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) attacks. 

ISDS law firms are actively recruiting multinational corporations to sue governments before a panel of three corporate lawyers to obtain unlimited taxpayer compensation for government actions related to the COVID emergency. These ISDS tribunals can even order compensation for multinationals’ loss of expected future profits and there is no outside appeal. 

In this episode, Lori explains the immediate ISDS danger and breaks down the regime’s history of attacking environmental protections, consumer safety regulations and democracy itself.