Ive been working with the program for two years, though this program has been around for 16 years now. Its an Amazing Program working with 200 interns at 60 organizations in new york and d. C. Were really excited to have a speaker with us today. Her name is lori wallach and she is the director of Public Citizens global trade watch. Public citizen was founded in 1971 and is a nonprofit research, lobbying and litigation organization based in washington, d. C. Global trade watch is the newest of Public Citizens five divisions. It was launched by mrs. Wallach in 1995 and global trade watch is the leader in the Global Citizen movement for fair trade and investment policy. Over the course of the past decade, wallach has helped create a new Public Awareness around globalization. The emerging issue of our time. Working closely with n. G. O. s, scholars and activists in developing countries and with u. S. Congressional environment, environmental, labor and other allies, wallach has played an Important Role in the growing debate about the implications of different models of globalizations on jobs, livelihoods and wages. The environment, Public Health and safety and dramatically accountable governance. Please help me in welcoming lori wallach. [applause] lori pretty short of stature. Its great to be here. Thank you all for coming. And many kudos to the everett Internship Program generally. Not just for having the great opportunity for internships in the Public Interest but for setting up these programs where you get to actually hear a variety of interesting presentations and speakers and thanks to n. P. R. For hosting you guys. Its kind of cool to be in this building because a lot of you at home have heard National Public radio shows and so heres the mother ship. Public citizen as you heard described is a diverse organization. Were founded by ralph nader, who then promptly in 1981 left us, as he does when he found s something and it is on its own feet. He sort of does the fatherhood thing, youre out of the house im off to something else. So starting in 1981 we had a new president , different people on the board and global trade watch is the newest division of Public Citizen. The one thing i want to say before i Start Talking about the w. T. O. And globalization is just to give the twosecond pitch for careers in the Public Interest. And because you all are in this Internship Program you already are hip to the notion that a person can actually have a career, a job doing stuff you really care about that makes a difference. But to some degree, anyway when i was in college, i think that was the piece of information a lot of people really werent that hip to. You actually get paid for doing something you loved that is going to make a difference. For all of you just to keep in mind when you get done with school the notion of actually coming back to the Public Interest world but spreading the word. Because right out of law school the notion was you went to a firm and if it hadnt been for actually hearing ralph nader speak about how you could have a job working on the things you cared about, i mean, every day i go to work and i love what im doing. And, yeah, you dont get paid as much as people in the private sector but the bottom line is you make a living wage and youll love what you do. Its what youll spend most of your time doing. So my buddies from law school who make a lot of money and work for vacation, they get their month of the year they really enjoy but if you take a career in the Public Interest, and every day you get to walk out of the house and say all right. Today im going to kick some ass. Whats on the agenda for today . Its really worth spending such a big piece of your life, your work life, in something you really love. The twosecond version of that and sorry for sounding so nasal as ive picked up a cold, and now onto the very small topic not of globalization, the World Trade Organization. So Public Citizen is based on a concept that nader came up with of the Public Citizen. And the idea is that everyone as well as their day job should have a job, a role as an active participant in the life of their community and in the governance of their community, their state, their country. And the Public Citizen is such a person but of course its obvious when people are really busy doing their daytoday stuff that sometimes its hard to get the information you need to be able to do that effectively. The idea of the organization was sort of to be the peoples lobby. To snoop out the information, track policies over the long term to see how they worked and then to make the information a person needs to engage in the life of their community accessible. So, a, people can make informed decisions but, then, b, they have to participate. Not everyone can figure out when is congress in session and when is the vote on the issue i care about . But we can make the information available. So global trade watch was the extension of that philosophy of empowering individuals around the country to be able to be involved. It was the translation of that into the era of globalization. And a lot of people say, well, did you guys get into the trade issues . No, we did not. In fact, the socalled trade issues, globalization, started to touch on, in fact started to undermine the 30year agenda of a Consumer Group like Public Citizen. We were seeing a tax environmental laws, food safety , laws, medicine prices going up linked to trade agreements. And so we started to get involved basically because things we cared about were being undermined and work we had done over decades was being rolled back. And the most recent element of our work to try and help people be Public Citizens is our new book on the w. T. O. Called Whose Trade Organization . And the idea with this book basically was to take something, the w. T. O. , the World Trade Organization agreement that is very complicated and complex, intentionally written, in a Foreign Language i jokingly call g. A. T. Ese because one of the agreements is the old general agreement on tariffs and trade and unless you have a fair fluency with gatese you can read lines of the text and a lot of opinions and it may not really be understandable. So our job basically was to translate from gattese into your life what the World Trade Organization was about. And the reason we did that, to give a little context before talking a little about what we found, is because the w. T. O. Is one of the key instruments of a broader phenomenon, globalization. Now, everyone hears that word kicked around. What does globalization mean . It means a lot of different things. But the current version of globalization would probably be best described as corporate globalization. And it is comprised of a specific set of policies that have been implemented through different instruments that are connecting the world and creating rules of order for the world according to one set of interests and rules. Now, a lot of people hear globalization. Its inevitable. Theres actually nothing about globalization that is for instance related to the moons pull on the tides. That and gravity inevitable, current terms of globalization just one version. One choice. Theres the old saying anyone who is working in the policy area has heard. He or she who writes the rules rules. And in this instance, our current instruments of globalization, the World Trade Organization, w. T. O. , which is global, regional agreements like the north American Free trade agreement, nafta, finance institutions like the International Monetary fund, the i. M. F. , or the world bank, these are sets of rules with International Enforcement that have been set by one set of authors. Now i suspect if i was at the table and a handful of you who care about human rights, labor rights, the environment, Food Security development, we were all sitting down writing the rules, wed have a rather different set of rules. Because the thing that folks need to know and this is one thing we found in our book, this is the World Trade Organization agreement. People think, you know, its some inevitable thing, maybe moses actually got it down mount sinai direct from god. It could be like that. But, no, in fact, its 900 pages of rules and regulations written by whom . Well, ostensibly, my countrys trade negotiators. In fact as our Research Found and we have this documented in the book at the time it was being negotiated or its evil small sister nafta, 800 more pages of specific rules and regulations, nothing inevitable here, my book would be very different. When these two were being negotiated, the u. S. Had as official advisors 500 Corporate Advisors, some of them not even from u. S. Corporations, organized by sector so there is the chemicals one, the wood one. When youre trying to figure out the u. S. Trade policy, say, on wood, otherwise known as our forests, you might want to have the environmental perspective, the Invasive Species perspective, the clean air perspective, given that trees suck up a lot of pollution. But, no, that committee was all the forestry, paper, timber, pulp and building interests. And so 500 Corporate Advisors with 19 labor advisors and zero environmental advisors, zero health advisors, zero folks from human rights, basically it was all those corporations, a handful of unions, and you wonder why you got a particular set of rules. Again, its just one version. If its not working, they need to be changed or replaced. Thats why we wrote the book because we now have a nineyear track record of the actual real life playout of the w. T. O. And 10 years plus of nafta. So you know, back in 1992, 1993, when these agreements have been negotiated but they werent implemented, a lot of people made a lot of promises, a lot of people made a lot of predictions and at this point the time for predictions and promise is over. You just have to cut to the chase and look at the data. And so the idea with the book, which is long but is written actually with kind of a sense of humor, because the findings are pretty depressing, the idea of the book is section by section to go after each of the different promises but also for that matter just to do the most conservative test which is the status quo ante. Are things better or worse . Even with the rules in effect . Even if the stuff you promise doesnt come to fruition, as long as its like a net neutral maybe it doesnt have to be changed. So we went section by section and in the book what we literally did is we broke it up according to how it affects your life. So we have the chapter on environment and then we have the chapter on food safety and then theres whats happened to the u. S. Economy and we break it down whats happened with jobs, wages, distribution of jobs, whats happened with the trade balance, what that means, with different other indicators like what are our real wages. Why is the growing why is there growing inequality of the u. S. Of income and what is the trade element . We have a section on human rights and on agriculture and we talk about whats happened in developing countries because obviously the movement against more corporate globalization, against expanding the w. T. O. Is based in the global south. Its based in the developing countries because theyve gotten the worst of it and we have a chapter on Public Health. And as a way to describe findings we actually revealed we did two things to make it more accessible. One, it all had to pass the mother test which is to say someones mother had to redo those chapters that had nothing to do with the trade or policy issue and have the ha ah moment. If we didnt have someones mom going ha ah, thats how that worked, then the book wasnt going to cut it. The flip side we wanted everyone once they had the ha ah moment, i. E. , we translated the technical jargon but kept it very accurate, we put in 1,700 footnotes. Now the book looks gruesome thick because the whole back is footnotes which you never have to go to but if you want, to actually learn in detail what the w. T. O. And corporate globalization has done, say, for food safety, and you decide you want to go talk to your member of congress because youll be a Public Citizen or you want to educate your uncle or aunt the skeptic, then youve got all the original sources, most of them websited, so you can go back and say, aunty, its true that you prayed to the idol of adam smith and David Ricardo but i just hate to give you this footnote. Let me print out some of these documents. Folks, love you dearly, but World Bank Data shows the developing countries who have liberalized fastest have seen huge income inequality and their growth rates declined. And id like to share with you the 400 page will banks study ive printed out jamming the entire computer. But that kind of information, so that when you want to make the point, hey, this is whats happened, so you have actually the muscle to go back and say, or to read more about it. If you read it and you say, im skeptical about that. Those folks must have gotten that wrong. Go back to the original source and actually read it. We have the pages pinpointed so you dont have to read the whole 300page study to get to the data were talking about. The other thing we did is we made it a little sarcastic because its a little depressing. So, for instance, the chapter on the environment is called, the w. T. O. s environmental impact. First, godzilla ate flipper because in fact the first trade case was a case against the u. S. Marine mammal protection act, which is the law that everyone knows from the dolphin safe tuna label on everyones tuna fish can and that particular u. S. Law was ruled to violate the trade rules. Now, you might say, what is flipper labeling . In my country on my tuna can in my kitchen, have to do with International Trade . You think trade you have vision of commodities in the ocean, not the flipper label on the tuna in your kitchen. Therein lies one of the great revelations of this book which is the contents of the World Trade Organizations rules, the contents of the naftas rules, theyre only about 10 about trade. And so the introduction to this book is actually its not really about trade. Its true the trade rules in here are lopsided too. Ill give you examples. But what else is in there is an entire whole agenda that basically such parameters for every signatory country that they have to conform all their domestic policies to these other nontrade policies. Now, let me just take one step back for context. From the end of world war ii, a lot of folks at the bretenwood summit. Therein was created three global institutions the International Monetary fund, the world bank and the general agreement on tariffs and trade. They had three particular roles. The i. M. F. Was not like your current i. M. F. It was to actually keep the Gold Standard, the Currency Exchange and the Gold Standard going and to give very shortterm loans to float trade. So when you send out something before the money comes back, so you can finance that float, they would give very short, with no conditions loans to countries. The world bank, which everyone knows now for these mammoth, bad for the environment projects, was actually set up to reconstruct europe and japan after the bombings of world war ii and then it was supposed to go away. The gatt, general agreement on tariffs and trade was a trade agreement that was supposed to set up multilateral rules, very basic ones, most favored nation, sometimes called m. F. N. , that means any trade status you give to one trade partner you have to give to everyone in that same agreement. Seems fair. National treatment, nondiscrimination. What that means is you cant treat a product differently for regulation, for taxes, according to where its actually produced. So, if you have the three pesticides per pear rule on your domestic farmers then the imports have to have that same treatment. You cant make them the zero pesticide rule and keep out imports according to some other regulatory mechanism. And then, there were tariffs. Cut and quotas cut. It only covered goods. When you see the image of the ships that was the gatt. That was what we had as the trade system with rounds of negotiations for 50 years. About 40 years. Wherin we come to the reagan and thatcher era. So, i hate to bring up the guy in the context of his recent funeral when he was roasted and toasted as the great leader but he was frankly also behind the brainstorm of this so called neoliberal agenda, which is a whole set of policies you see embodied in the current w. T. O. , which replaced the gatt which you see in the current world bank, which is a whole formula that basically translated the conservative vision of reagan, of thatcher, and implemented it. Now, heres what is very interesting about it. Its a set of policies that in domestic legislatures in numerous countries had been rejected. I mean, theres the stuff we know about. Theres trade liberalization. Ok. But theres also investment liberalization and what that means is not allowing governments to reg