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