Rethinking Trade with Lori Wallach

Greetings from DC!   OK, hope all you 2001: A Space Odyssey fans got a chuckle and no HAL9000 is not joining this edition of the podcast! We have a much better guest, Suresh Venkatasubramanian who co-authored the Biden administration’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights .   We've all seen Artificial Intelligence or "AI" making headlines recently, and it's raising critical questio...

Once you've finished listening to our new episode with Larry Cohen, check out this mini-episode as he discusses the UAW strike. ----- We're thrilled to present our latest episode of the Rethinking Trade podcast. Lori is joined by Larry Cohen, former President of the Communication Workers of America, for a guided tour of the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike. Spoiler alert : There’s a lot mo...

We're thrilled to present our latest episode of the Rethinking Trade podcast. Lori is joined by Larry Cohen, former President of the Communication Workers of America, for a guided tour of the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike. (Spoiler alert: There’s a lot more about this strike and how it could impact all of us than most of us know!) Larry brings his decades of experience building worker power...

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:  Calli Schroeder, Senior Counsel and Global Privacy Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center Jesse Lehrich , Co-Founde...

If you thought the air travel fiasco could not get worse, consider the scary news that airlines are offshoring the maintenance work needed to keep planes safe. It’s the same greedy cost-cutting behind the outdated computer systems and gutted airline staffing that is causing the epic air travel meltdowns upending millions of peoples’ lives. In the race-to-the-bottom offshore aircraft maintenance fa...

Shock waves were sent through Washington, D.C.’s many trade wonks when the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission gave a unanimous bipartisan recommendation that Congress consider ending China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR). Opponents of China PNTR were trashed as idiots, protectionists and doom mongers during a brutal 2000 U.S. national debate about China’s trade status and entry...

The U.S. finally is getting its act together on climate with big new tax credits for people who buy electric vehicles (EVS) and go solar and incentives for companies to do invest in green production.  So why are European and Asian governments steaming mad at us and screaming “trade barrier!!” in numerous languages, instead of cheering our better-late-than-never climate action?   Esp...

Every election is THE most important in our lifetimes, except the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential actually are. How have we come to this crisis of democracy? A team of data scientists, opinion researchers, and strategists spent a year studying the two-time Obama voters who then elected Trump in 2020 and their shattered communities. The resulting “Factory Towns Project” demolishes the conventio...

Your doctor’s not at fault if you don’t know about IPEF. It’s not a new virus. But it could harm billions of people. Or not. IPEF = Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Setting rules for 40% of the world’s economy is the goal of this recently-launched “trade” negotiation. With the public and Congress locked out so far, few people even know about these talks involving 14 nations. Big Tech interests are...

After two years of pandemic and 15 million dead, how did the first big global WTO summit end with WTO intellectual property barriers still blocking global access to COVID meds? This episode exposes how a sham text gavelled through in the middle of the night and produced a worse-than-nothing outcome only Big Pharma can love. How could this happen given more than 100 WTO countries wanted a real fix?...

On this episode of Rethinking Trade with Lori Wallach we’ll expose Amazon’s big little secret — a loophole which allows Amazon and other online giants to import billions of dollars in uninspected, unsafe, tax-dodging goods from China into the United States every year. Only Uzbekistan has a bigger “de minimis” loophole, which is the technical name for this scam. Today, more than two million such un...

In this episode, Lori talks with two trailblazing attorneys: Fatima Hassan at Cape Town’s Health Justice Initiative, South Africa and Sangeeta Shashikant with the global Third World Network. They discuss why after 18 months, there still is no deal to waive the WTO intellectual property rules blocking global access to COVID vaccines, treatments and tests. And the dire threats posed here and there b...

In this episode, Lori talks with a leading public health expert about how we could END the pandemic and how World Trade Organization monopolies for Big Pharma are blocking that. Health GAP director Asia Russell, who helped bust Big Pharma monopolies to get HIV-AIDS meds to people worldwide, lays out the current COVID situation worldwide and what actions can end the pandemic.

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 t...

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 Proper...

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, w...

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 th...

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 rel...

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...

In our very first episode, we looked at how corporate-led globalization has fueled shortages in our medical supply-chains and limited our ability to fight COVID-19 Today, we catch everyone up on the latest, discussing two Biden-Harris Administration initiatives aimed at addressing this mess -- a targeted supply chain-review and an executive order on Buy American procurement rules. We also mak...

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 v...

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...

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...

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 Mexi...

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 administra...