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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 3, 2014)
A conversation with NAFTA critic Lori Wallach Lori Wallach — one of the foremost critics of today’s NAFTA-style trade treaties — will be in Portland Oct. 18 as the keynote speaker at the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign’s 10th anniver- sary fundraising dinner. Wallach, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is a founder of the Citizens Trade Cam- paign and author of two books on trade policy. She’s been a guest on CNN, ABC, Fox, CNBC, C-SPAN, Bloom- berg, PBS, and NPR, and has testified before Congress more than 30 times. Labor Press associate editor Don McIn- tosh interviewed her by phone Sept. 17. LABOR PRESS: You’ve been campaigning for decades against NAFTA-style trade policy. What brought you to the cause, and why have you stayed with it? LORI WALLACH: It was by acci- dent. I was sitting in [Congressional] hearings on food safety when these re- ally unpleasant agribusiness guys from big beef and the chemical manufactur- ers said things like “Sorry, Congress, you can’t do that, not under NAFTA.” I started thinking: “What the hell are these guys talking about? I studied trade in law school. It’s about tariffs — bor- der taxes. Why are they talking about NAFTA and its children North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), approved 1993 Permanent normal trade relations with China, 2000 U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement 2003 U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement 2003 U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement 2004 U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 2005 U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement 2006 U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement 2007 U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement 2011 U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement 2011 United States-Korea Trade Agreement 2011 PAGE 12 meat labels and pesticide standards?” I started to realize there was this sneak at- tack. The big corporations had taken it to a different venue —trade agreements — to get the same agenda they couldn’t achieve at home implemented and locked in forever. This was 1991. I con- nected to people from around the world, and we realized we had to stop this. Why have I stayed at it? Because it af- fects everything. These so-called trade agreements shut down the future for progress on good jobs and income in- equality and a livable environment and safe food and products. It is the one sin- gle instrument that actually undermines and rolls back everything a progressive person would care about. All in the dis- guise of a trade agreement that’s not re- ally about trade. Most people, when they think of trade, they’re visualizing manufac- tured goods, agricultural products, or raw materials. They assume trade agreements are mainly about reducing tariffs. Is that still accurate? The phrase “trade agreement” has become false branding to cover up what now is a totally different agenda. The agreements have become like Trojan horse mechanisms where we’re all sold about expansion of exports, but really inside the agreement, there’s either nothing that creates that outcome, or it undermines it. And the guts of what’s in there has to do with locking in perma- nently a set of extraordinary corporate rights and privileges: new rights for Big Pharma to jack up medicine prices, new rights for the financial sector to escape regulation, new rights for agribusiness to be able to use pesticides and additives and hormones and process meat in ways that are unsafe. All that stuff has nothing to do with trade. It’s actually “investor rights” — constraints on do- mestic regulation that actually remove most of the risk for offshoring jobs, in- centivizes manufacturing job loss, and takes away the risk of having to use a foreign court. trade” when it’s used to describe agreements that expand government- enforced monopolies on patents, trade- marks, and copyrights? I would imagine that the English philosophers Adam Smith and David Ricardo who created that concept are rolling in their graves to see the term free trade attached to agreements that create protectionism for a class of multinational corporations, that expand monopolies in patents, and that have re- sulted in some of the worst trade imbal- ances in the history of man. When today’s “trade” negotiations focus on investor rights and intellec- tual property, do those things benefit American workers, or any workers? Around the world there’s a growing rebellion against the extreme investor rights and investor-state dispute settle- ment, because they only benefit a very narrow category of multinational cor- porate interests. Not even small- and medium-sized businesses benefit. In fact they’re hurt, because the big guy who leaves gets privileged treatment. The investor rules in these agreements have absolutely no benefit for workers, communities, or the environment. In South Africa, business, labor and gov- ernment went through a three-year stakeholder process and came to a con- sensus that it was not in the public or national interest to continue in those agreements, and they’ve given notice to get out. They join Ecuador and Bolivia, who’ve done the same. India is doing a review: Half the government is saying they should get out now; the other half says they should renegotiate them all. Either way, it’s not going to be the status quo. NAFTA turned 20 this year. How do you think the United States, Canada and Mexico are different be- cause of it? After 20 years of NAFTA, unfortu- nately, we can see empirically that none of the promises of benefits occurred, and in fact in many instances, exactly the opposite outcome occurred of what was promised. So the United States for instance went from close to a trade bal- ance to an enormous, chronic, almost $200 billion trade deficit with our NAFTA partners. If you do the math, that’s millions of U.S. jobs lost, mainly through offshoring of manufacturing and some agriculture. But simultane- ously we have seen in all three countries a spate of these investor-state attacks: $350 million has been paid out to cor- porations over toxics bans, water use rules, timber rules, for public interest policies. In certain very sensitive sec- tors, like corn, the NAFTA rules allow the dumping of subsidized U.S. pro- duction such that even while we lost millions of manufacturing jobs to Mex- ico, Mexico’s wages are down. Inequal- ity has increased in Mexico, just like here, in no small part because NAFTA has wiped out some 1.5 million campesino families’ livelihoods. This (Turn to Page 13) A lot of these agreements set up something called “investor-state dis- pute settlement.” Can you explain what that is? In investor state dispute settlement, individual foreign corporations are ele- vated to equal stature with a whole na- tional government — in that they have the right to privately enforce an agree- ment between sovereign nations. They are empowered to skirt domestic courts and laws and directly sue our govern- ments in front of foreign tribunals of three private-sector attorneys, where they can demand compensation from taxpayers for any government action that they think violates their extraordi- nary new investor privileges and under- mines their expected future profits. What do you think of the term “free NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS OCTOBER 3, 2014
