Rethinking Trade with Lori Wallach

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 poli...

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-p...

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 do...

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 pos...

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, pro...

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). SIGN THE PETITION: https://rethinktrade.org/actions/urge-biden-reverse-trumps-deadly-obstruction-of-global-covid-19-vaccine-access/ Learn more at rethinktrade.org . Music: Groove Grove by Kevin MacL...

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, pro...

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 part one of this episode, we address this question by discussing the TRADE Act of 2009 . Co-sponsored by 135 members of...

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 corpor...

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 offi...

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 becom...

Lori "sat down" recently with The Friendly Troll host Dr. Melissa Omino and Dr. Isaac Rutenberg from Kenya's Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law to discuss the US-Kenya free trade agreement currently under negotiation. Listen to the full episode here.

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...

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...

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 Agree...

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.  Learn more at rethinktrade.org . Music: Groove Grove by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3831-groove-grove License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

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 majori...

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 pro...

Since the 1930’s, “Buy American” rules have required that the U.S. government purchase goods – from cars and computers to planes and paper –  that are made in the United States.  But these rules that recycle our tax dollars to support jobs and promote domestic innovation have been severely undermined by our trade policies in the last few decades. Today, “Buy American” really means that c...

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 fo...

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 Was...

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 c...

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 labo...

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 taxp...

Hong Kong is at a significant crossroads—and its special trade status with the US has become a central point of leverage in determining the outcome of this crisis.  One year ago, millions took to Hong Kong’s streets in response to the Chinese government’s attempts to limit free speech, protest and unions rights. The protests would become one of the largest sustained protest movements in recen...