WTO

The Empire Strikes Back: The Return Of The WTO

December 23, 2015 Polly Jones, www.counterpunch.org Educate! CETA, TISA, TPP, WTO

By Polly Jones for Counter Punch - The last time the World Trade Organisation met was in December 2013. Back then neither the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) nor the campaign to stop TTIP had even started. Trade seemed to be off the agenda and after years of stalled negotiations the WTO was expected to slowly become irrelevant. The WTO is meeting again this week but this time in Nairobi and for the first time in Africa, and I will be there. While there are some obvious similarities to previous WTO negotiations – fears that no agreement will be reached and entrenched positions of the global north and south – many other aspects are entirely different.

WTO Rules US Faces $1 Billion Annually For Meat Labeling

December 8, 2015 Staff, www.foodandwaterwatch.org, www.nfu.org, www.prosperousamerica.org, www.citizen.org, Educate! Canada, Food and Agriculture, Mexico, WTO

By Staff of Food and Water Watch, NFU, CPA, and Public Citizen - The World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled in favor of Canada and Mexico against the United States regarding the labeling of meat. This follows a recent decision on labeling of tuna. The US will be forced to change their laws or face large payments for these trade violatins. The WTO ruled that labeling meat under the Country Of Origin Labelling (COOL) law violates NAFTA and can result in up to a billion dollars in damages annually. Last month the WTO ruled that dolphin-safe tuna labeling laws which are required by U.S. law to protect dolphins from slaughter by tuna fisheries violates the rights of the Mexican fishing industry, also resulting in damages to the US.

Destruction Of US Credibility At WTO

September 13, 2015 Timothy A. Wise, www.livemint.com Educate! India, WTO

By Timothy A. Wise for Live Mint - The tenth ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to be held in Nairobi on 15-18 December, is already mired in discord, with negotiators unable to agree on a mandated post-Bali work programme. At issue are US and European Union (EU) proposals to scrap the texts agreed to thus far in this interminable round of trade negotiations. Yet again, the developed world led by the US and the EU are pitched against developing countries led by India, China and Indonesia, who have over the past two years tried unsuccessfully to move towards the promise—made at the ninth ministerial conference in Bali in 2013—of a permanent solution to the public stock-holding issue in food security, while advancing the stalled Doha development round. The irony that a country such as India, which witnessed more than a quarter of a million farm suicides between 1996 and 2014, has to fight to retain its farm subsidies, which are a fraction of what the US and the EU provide their farmers.

The US & WTO Demolish India’s Solar Energy Ambitions

September 6, 2015 Charles Pierson, www.counterpunch.org Educate! India, Solar Energy, TPP, Trade, WTO

By Charles Pierson for Counterpunch - 400 million Indians - one quarter of India's population - have no electricity. But as far as the United States and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are concerned, they can keep sitting in the dark. Last month, the news was leaked that a WTO dispute panel had found that India's subsidies for solar power contravene WTO trade rules. India must now remove the subsidies or face trade sanctions. The United States filed the WTO complaint in 2013. The US alleged that India's subsidies for the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (NSM) discriminate against foreign suppliers of solar components. The WTO decision confirms yet again that neoliberalism always favors trade over environmental protection. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) contains all the same features which enabled the WTO's decision against India's solar subsidies.

History Is Knocking, Once Again

July 22, 2015 David Solnit, www.indypendent.org Resist! Corporatism, Corporatocracy, TISA, TPP, TTIP, WTO

By David Solnit for the Indypendent - “Seattle,” shorthand for the 1999 anti-WTO mass actions, was a moment when organized protest and resistance became a genuine popular uprising of thousands of ordinary people who successfully shut down the opening day of the WTO meeting, took over and occupied the downtown core of a major American city, and contributed to the collapse of negotiations that would have increased poverty, destruction, and misery around the world. Several years after the Seattle actions, a group of us calling ourselves the People Powered Strategy Project reflected on the key elements that made the one-day mass urban action and week of struggle in Seattle successful. We came up with the following principles in an effort to bring a people-power strategy to the antiwar movement, which had none after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, and I have added a few more. These same principles worked in San Francisco on March 20, 2003 — the day after the U.S. invasion of Iraq — when 20,000 people from the area shut down and occupied the Financial District, 2,000 of whom were arrested.

Huge International Coalition Calls For A Big Change To WTO Agenda

July 15, 2015 Deborah James, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Finance and the Economy, Globalization, WTO

By Deborah James in The Huffington Post - Negotiations in the WTO are heating up -- and they are going badly. In November last year, WTO members agreed to come up with a "Work Program" for resurrecting the Doha Round by July 31. As you may remember, it had been stalled for years, but since the new Director-General, Roberto Azevêdo of Brazil, took over in September of 2013, he has been shaking things up. The first WTO expansion agreement, on "Trade Facilitation," was concluded in December 2013, along with a promise to negotiate to reduce WTO constraints WTO on developing countries' ability to feed their poor. It must be remembered that developing countries only agreed to launch a new round of negotiations in order to address problems with the previous round that resulted in the founding of the WTO in 1995.

Stopping The Biggest Corporate Power Grab In Years

January 7, 2015 Arthur Stamoulis, www.fpif.org Organize! Free Trade, TPP, WTO

The TPP is a deal the United States is negotiating with 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) allegedly to boost “free trade.” However, the pact goes far beyond traditional trade issues, to affect banking regulations, environmental protections, access to medicines, use of the internet, and much more. Most notably, the deal would undermine countries’ ability to make sovereign decisions and instead offer protections to transnational corporate investors. And full information about the TPP is not even available — the level of transparency is so low that all public access to the text has come from leaks.

Seattle WTO Uprising Still A Force In World Events

December 3, 2014 Ben Manski, www.berkeleyjournal.org Strategize! Democracy, History, Protests, Seattle, WTO

“This is what democracy looks like!” has become, since Seattle, more than a momentary expression of an alternative world that is possible. Instead, it has grown into an ongoing direct challenge to corporate capitalism and elite government. To be clear, the cost of that challenge has already proven high. And the past fifteen years have brought not only increased popular resistance but also greater social control in the form of police militarization and violence, security state expansion, unending war, and the legalization of corporate rule. Yet the fact remains that we have witnessed the birth of a global democracy movement that is constitutionally subversive and antagonistic to the institutions, laws, acts, and culture it seeks to transform.

15 Years Ago Today, Seattle WTO Shut Down

November 30, 2014 David Solnit, www.PopularResistance.org Educate! Environment, Labor, Movement, Seatlle, WTO

I’m thinking about 15 years ago in the rainy streets of Seattle, but even more about farmworkers in the fields of Immokalee and the roads of Burnaby Mountain, British Columbia where First Nations-led mass blockades against Kinder Morgan’s tar sands pipeline are currently happening. After not writing about the Seattle WTO protests for many years, I realized that what people think and know about the past shapes what they do now and thus the future. It’s important to keep some continuity between movements and generations, so new movements and generations can take what is of use and understand what really happened and why from the past and continue to innovate. When Hollywood actor Stuart Townsend called me and told me he was going to make the film Battle in Seattle, I started writing analysis and reflections about Seattle to combat the false myth’s about the Seattle WTO mass direct action shutdown. At this time each year I think and write reflections and analysis around this time.

Deepening TNCs Gains From The WTO

November 12, 2014 Mary Louise F. Malig, www.tni.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, WTO

The “historic” first agreement of the WTO at the December 2013 Bali Ministerial, after years of stalemate in multilateral trade negotiations, is a prime example of how WTO trade rules favor TNCs. The Bali Package has several elements but the centerpiece is the legally binding agreement: the Agreement on Trade Facilitation. The deal on agriculture is a weak and watered down peace clause – a temporary measure – that grants a short-term reprieve for developing country governments to provide support to their poor farmers and constituents without getting sued under the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). The entire section on special and differential treatment and concerns of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are all declarations and promises for future action. The Agreement on Trade Facilitation, however, in stark contrast, is legally binding and once it hurdles the current stalemate in Geneva will be legally adopted, ratified and included as an Annex into the “Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO,” and thus will be legally enforced and guaranteed by the all-powerful WTO DSM.

Ten Reasons To Say ‘No’ To North Over Trade

August 5, 2014 Ravi Kanth Devarakonda and Phil Harris, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Food Security, India, Trade, WTO

India’s decisive stand last week not to adopt the protocol of amendment of the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) unless credible rules were in place for the development issues of the South was met with “astonishment” and “dismay” by trade diplomats from the North, who described New Delhi’s as “hostage-taking” and “suicidal”. It obviously came as something of a shock for representatives of Northern interests that any party should have the brass neck to place the interests of its constituents on the negotiating table. After all, why should such banal issues as food security and poverty get in the way of a trade agenda heavily weighted in favour of the industrialised countries? New Delhi was demanding nothing more than credible global trade rules to ensure that “development,” including the challenges of poverty, in the countries of the South take precedence over the cut-throat mercantile business interests of the transnational corporations in the North In fact, it was India’s firm stand for permanent guarantees for public stockholding programmes for food security that turned this trade agenda upside down at the World Trade Organization (WTO) last week, putting paid to the adoption of the protocol of amendment for implementation of the contested TFA for the time being.

People Unite In Protest Across The Continent To Stop TPP

January 29, 2014 Benjamin Gerritz, www.labornotes.org Resist! NAFTA, TPP, Worker Rights and Jobs, WTO

Workers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico will unite in an Inter-Continental Day of Action Friday to stop a massive new trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership—commonly referred to as “NAFTA on steroids.” In the U.S., the immediate fight is to block a bill that would grant the president “fast track” authority to sign off on the TPP. Defeating fast track would likely stop the TPP. Fast track is designed to swiftly pass trade deals, circumventing the standard Congressional procedures of hearings, debates, and resolutions. But there has been considerable backlash against the undemocratic concept. In November, anticipating its introduction, 151 Democratic Representatives signed a letter to the president stating they were opposed and would vote no on fast track; 21 Republican Representatives also submitted an opposition letter.

The Roots Of Global Revolt: The 20th Anniversary Of NAFTA & Zapitistas

December 31, 2013 David Solnit, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! NAFTA, TPP, WTO, Zapatistas

January 1 is the 20th anniversary of the enactment of NAFTA and the beginning of the Zapatista movement in Mexico. One year later on January 1 1995, the WTO took effect. In this article, David Solnit looks at the many campaigns and movements that have developed as a result of corporate globalization and the organizing in response to it by a wide variety of movements and networks of people. We can see the roots of the ongoing struggle in the United States as well as the global revolt against neoliberalism, corporatization and big finance capitalism. Corporate globalization attempts to put forward but is faltering while the movements from below seem to be rising. Knowing that makes a commentary by one writer ever more valid: "[The] global corporate system isn't a triumphant monster, but a brittle, ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption whose managers are vainly scrambling to hold it together against a rising tide of crises. See the issues that engage your activism in that light, not as though you're desperate, but as though the system is."

Seattle Shows Impact When Labor ShiftsTo Community

December 18, 2013 Paul Bigman, www.labornotes.org Strategize! Democracy, Occupy, Worker Rights and Jobs, WTO

Lynne Dodson, secretary-treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, believes these developments reflect a cultural shift in labor. A former co-chair of statewide Jobs with Justice, she says labor is recognizing the need to work with community allies. Seattle labor has particularly strong ties with environmental groups, economic justice organizations, communities of color, the LGBT community, and immigrant rights groups, including a day labor organization affiliated to the state labor council. Dodson relates this fall’s victories to social movements of past decades, starting with the 1999 Seattle action against the World Trade Organization. The WTO protests forged unusual alliances that remain to this day. Washington’s union density is also the fourth-highest in the nation. Freiboth believes Seattle labor has an unusually strong ability to “minimize dysfunction and leverage unity” despite differences—thanks to local labor’s democratic traditions and the city’s progressive politics. Both credit the Occupy Movement with “changing the conversation”—“a general uprising of young, displaced workers trapped in low-wage jobs,” as Freiboth saw it. “People looked at the wage disparities and saw that, as a simple matter of fact, the system isn’t working.”

WTO Pushes Bad Deal Through In Final Hours

December 12, 2013 End WTO, www.smaa.asia Educate! Corporatism, WTO

Hailed as a victory by the WTO for unlocking the deadlocked negotiations, the Bali Package delivers a legally binding agreement on Trade Facilitation that is costly to developing countries and ensures easier access and profits for Transnational Corporations (TNCs). Trade Facilitation, or the easing of customs procedures and borders, clearly benefits only the big TNCs that already control exports and imports. As the 2013 World Trade Report data shows, “80% of US exports are handled by 1% of large exporters, 85% of European exports are in the hands of 10% of big exporters and 81% of exports are concentrated in the top 5 largest exporting firms in developing countries.” Added to this, is the hypocrisy that this Trade Facilitation deal will open borders in all Member countries except Cuba, as it does not effectively cancel the 60-year long US blockade against Cuba.

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