‘These Agreements Depend on Secrecy in Order to Pass’

CounterSpin interviews with Lori Wallach, Peter Maybarduk and Karen Hansen-Kuhn on trade pacts and corporate globalization

By Janine Jackson

http://fair.org/home/these-agreements-depend-on-secrecy-in-order-to-pass/

Janine Jackson: Welcome to CounterSpin, your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. I’m Janine Jackson.

This week on CounterSpin: Few ideas are as hard-wired into corporate media as the notion that so-called “free trade” agreements of the sort we have are, despite concerns, best for everyone—and, anyway, inevitable. Given that the deals are not primarily about trade, and that what freedom they entail applies to corporations and not people, you could say media’s use of the term “free trade” implies a bias—against clarity, if nothing else.

This week, CounterSpin will revisit three clarifying interviews we’ve done on this issue. We’ll hear from Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, whose 2008 discussion of NAFTA is really Trade Pacts 101. Peter Maybarduk from Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program talked with Steve Rendall  in 2013 about the  impact of another deal, the TPP, on healthcare. And last year, Karen Hansen-Kuhn of  the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy talked about the effects of the TPP on food and farming.

Three critical discussions about corporate media and corporate-friendly globalization on today’s CounterSpin.

Janine Jackson interviewed Lori Wallach about NAFTA’s impact for the February 29, 2008, episode of CounterSpin.

MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: The Wall Street Journal had it recently that leading Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have ratcheted up their anti-trade, anti-corporate rhetoric. The Washington Post took Obama to task in an editorial for “exaggerating” job losses due to trade pacts, sniffing that such ideas were “not worthy of a candidate whose past speeches and writings demonstrate that he understands the benefits of free trade.”

But in reporting on the candidates and trade issues, the remarkable thing is not so much Obama or Clinton’s criticism of corporate-driven trade policy as corporate media’s uncritical, at times near hysterical, defense of it. What misinformation still sets the stage for this country’s global trade debate, and how could journalists redirect the conversation?

Joining us now to talk about this is Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch at Public Citizen. Welcome to CounterSpin, Lori Wallach.

Lori Wallach: Thank you very much.

JJ: First of all, as kind of a simple question, isn’t it just a little late in the game for outlets like the Wall Street Journal to refer to arguments that are critical of existing trade pacts like NAFTA as being “anti-trade” arguments? It seems an indication of just kind of the crudity of the whole conversation.

LW: The data is in. We’ve had one model of trade and globalization implemented under agreements such as the World Trade Organization, or NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. We’ve had 15 years to see how that would work. And the data has come in, showing the United States has lost net 3 million of its manufacturing jobs in that 15-year period, and for the first time in our country’s modern history, less than 10 percent of the population is employed in manufacturing.

Why does that matter for all of us? Because the data also show that when you change out higher-paid manufacturing jobs with lower-paid service-sector jobs, wages economy-wide are pushed down.

So the government data show in real terms, US median wages are at about 1972 levels, even though worker productivity has doubled. Now think tanks that supported NAFTA and WTO are writing papers admitting that a significant contribution to that wage suppression is what they call labor arbitrage, having US workers directly competing with workers who make a dollar a day.

Why? Not through an act of God, but because agreements like NAFTA and WTO included foreign investor rules that directly incentivized offshoring—relocation of production from the US to low-wage countries—by removing most of the risks normally associated with businesses going to a developing country.

JJ: Uh-huh.

LW: NAFTA, WTO, they provide guaranteed minimum standards of treatment. They forbid developing countries from applying the kind of policies they used to to foreign investors. Things like: You have to use a certain percentage of domestic content, or you have to transfer technology to us. And they require that foreign companies operating in a place like China now get all the subsidies the domestic companies get, so all those huge energy subsidies. Fully 60 percent of the exports of China come from multinational corporations that have moved there for production.

Those incentives and those agreements have had these outcomes, and the American public has had it. And in fact, for these candidates simply to implement their domestic policy goals—creating jobs, tackling income inequality, dealing with the healthcare crisis and the climate change crisis—will require changes to these agreements.

JJ: Well, in light of that data and that reality, I wonder what you make of the kind of media coverage that takes the tone that it’s a “belief” that NAFTA has affected jobs. The Washington Post said that Hillary Clinton was distancing herself from NAFTA, “which is unpopular among workers in manufacturing, who believe the deal has contributed to the movement of jobs overseas.” What do you make of that kind of psychologizing of what, as you’ve just indicated, is just a hard reality?

LW: Well, as a recovering trade attorney who’s up to her ears in all the government data that proves that these agreements have had these effects, it’s infuriating, actually!

The data is very clear, and the only good news is a lot of politicians, who are having to come face-to-face with Americans who’ve lived the experience, are actually starting to, by political necessity, take steps to change the current policies, regardless of what the elite media are saying to try and convince them otherwise. But there’s still a lot of work to do.

So, for instance, Senators Obama and Clinton, they have been escalating their rhetoric against NAFTA since the Iowa primary. And, in a way, it’s excellent that they have felt the need to respond to the public’s anxiety that they’re facing all across the country. The problem is, to date they really haven’t put forth proposals about what they’re going to do. So they’re sort of feeling our pain, but they’ve only talked about adding labor and environmental standards to NAFTA, mainly, in public.

And, though important, and part of building, in the long term, a social contract for workers in those countries, that could take a hundred years, like it did in our country.  The things that have to be done, which reflect not just NAFTA but the World Trade Organization, China trade, those things, such as removing the investment rules in these so-called trade agreements that directly promote offshoring, removing the ban on local preferences and “buy American” rules, in all of these trade agreements, NAFTA, WTO—that would totally gut the candidates’ proposals for green jobs, or for creating good jobs by rebuilding the US infrastructure. That is what needs to be addressed, and the candidates, just to succeed at what they claim are their own priorities, are going to have to deal with this stuff.

JJ: Is it putting those questions to them specifically? Is it that, and what else do you think reporters might do differently as we go forward, given that it looks like this is going to stay an issue in the election, to improve or uplift, if you will, the quality of the coverage around trade?

LW: Well, certainly asking some of those specific questions. And we put out an advisory about a week ago that listed questions the candidates probably don’t want to hear but will save them from not being able to, in the future, implement their policy goals. And those questions, which get to the actual “changing the terms of globalization by changing the rules” questions the candidates need to address, but also there’s now enormous amounts of data. You can go to our website TradeWatch.org, the Economic Policy Institute, the Center for Economic Policy and Research, that take the government data, have footnotes until you could choke, proving that actually these outcomes have occurred, and then showing how they are specifically connected to the agreements.

And this information may help remedy, cure, the psychologizing that you see in a lot of the mainstream media that makes it seem like NAFTA is some bogeyman that American workers are imagining is under their bed, as compared to—these are specific choices. Interests that wanted to pursue certain strategies for their maximizing of profits got their protections to help them offshore, put in specific instruments called NAFTA, WTO, that deliver a specific version of globalization. It got test run for over a decade. The results are in. It ain’t working. And the good news, there’s some very specific things you could do, were you to be president, to change those agreements to get different outcomes.

JJ: I’d like to thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. Find them on the web at TradeWatch.org. Thanks for joining us today on CounterSpin.

LW: Thank you.

[other interviews follow]