If international trade policy is your thing, we’ve got the data center for you

Are you a reporter writing about a local factory closing? Are you writing about trade as an election issue, jobs, the economy or the trade deficit but don’t know where to get good information or how to localize it? Look no further.

Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch today launched its Trade Data Center, a new and exciting tool for researching and illustrating the impacts of trade policy on local communities. It’s free and contains previously unavailable information packaged in an easy-to-understand, customizable and user-friendly format.

“Whether you are a seasoned trade hand or just beginning to look into globalization, or whether you are for or against fair trade, the Trade Data Center will have something for you,” said Travis McArthur, trade and finance researcher for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and lead Trade Data Center creator. “We hope that this will serve as a resource for journalists, policymakers, researchers, students – anyone with an interest in the impact of trade policy. It really is your one-stop-shop, and we’ll be updating it frequently with new features.”

The Trade Data Center is available at http://www.citizen.org/TradeDataCenter.

Cross-posted at Eyes on Trade.

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Pressure on Obama to deliver campaign promises for new trade model

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, talks about the trade talks that are beginning today in Australia. For a detailed look at what is at stake, visit www.EyesOnTrade.org, Public Citizen’s globalization blog.

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A decade after Seattle protests, will Obama do the right thing?

Ten years after protesters shut down the WTO ministerial in Seattle and halted WTO expansion, Obama faces a choice. Will he help modernize the global economy? Or will he continue the agenda of the past, which has fostered devastating economic, food and climate crises? Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, explores the issue in a recent piece in the Nation magazine.

She also paired up with an unlikely ally – a longtime promoter of trade agreements – to pen a Washington Post op-ed explaining how a treaty on global warming could require new trade rules and that allowing the WTO to handle trade disputes over climate matters is a recipe for discord.

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Both ends of political spectrum agree: WTO must change, for climate’s sake

(Cross-posted from Eyes on Trade)

If you opened the Washington Post this morning, you might have been surprised to find an opinion piece on the barriers that World Trade Organization (WTO) rules pose for climate solutions. More surprisingly, the authors were a rather odd couple – our own Lori Wallach (longtime fair trade reformer), and C. Fred Bergsten (longtime trade agreement promoter). Here’s a snippet:

There is a real danger that a collision between climate policy and trade agreements could derail two critical goals: controlling climate change and expanding trade.

But this danger is avoidable.

We are an unusual pair of advocates for this message. For a long time, we and our organizations have been on opposite ends of the debate over trade agreements, disagreeing about their effects on economies, livelihoods and domestic regulations.But we agree on a surprising number of aspects of the climate-change debate and on the related need to overhaul global trade negotiations, which are stalled by disagreements and the worldwide financial crisis.

They go on to warn that “Implementing a treaty on global warming could require

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Hey G-20: Just say no to de-regulation

Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach talks to Democracy Now! from Pittsburgh where she’s attending the G-20 economic summit. Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch program, warns that the World Trade Organization has long advanced extreme financial deregulation under the guise of trade agreements and could undermine the current push for increasing regulation.

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Countdown to Pittsburgh: Will the G-20 re-regulate global markets?

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch program, talks about what’s at stake at the G-20 economic summit to be held Thursday and Friday in Pittsburgh, Pa. Public Citizen was one of the many groups that wrote to President Obama last week, urging him to “advocate a global regulatory floor, and oppose any efforts to impose a ceiling” on re-regulation in the upcoming G-20 Summit.

You can prep for the G-20 over at the Public Citizen Web page.

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In the news

As the debates surrounding climate change, trade and health care legislation heat up on Capitol Hill, Public Citizen has been busy urging lawmakers to craft bills that truly benefit the public. News highlights below.

 Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, was quoted in a Reuters story on the “cap-and-trade” climate legislation that is fast approaching a House vote. Slocum spoke on the weakened bill, expressing doubts on the measure’s ability, in its current form, to benefit low-income energy consumers: “Language tailored to retail rate payers was absent any sort of specific language that set aside a certain amount of benefits for household ratepayers… we’re not satisfied with the way the current language is structured,” he said.

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Say no to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement

Photo by Brandon Wu

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was in D.C. today, lobbying Congress and the media in support of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Uribe’s pitch included a speech at the National Press Club where protestors and human rights activists, including members of Public Citizen, the Association of Internally Displaced Afro-Colombians and International Brotherhood of Teamsters gathered outside to protest the trade deal.

Public Citizen field organizer James Ploeser (pictured above with the megaphone) blogs about the protest over at Eyes on Trade.

We made it clear: the only ones to benefit from the US-Colombia FTA will be the the corporate elite and their paramilitary proxies who terrorize already impoverished people for their own profit.

More than 450 unionists have been killed by right-wing paramilitaries – and in some cases by the Colombian army – during President Uribe’s reign. You can learn more about the Colombia FTA and why it would be a disaster on several human and environmental fronts on the Global Trade Watch section of our Web site.

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Join the Battle in Seattle

A new film about the historic 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization opens Friday in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Minneapolis (You can buy tickets and see the opening dates for other cities here). While director Stuart Townsend’s film “Battle in Seattle” follows a dozen fictional characters over five days of protests in November 1999, the events depicted are real. Public Citizen was there and was one of the groups that helped organize what started as a peaceful protest against corporate globalization.

We’re hoping the film will do more than entertain. We hope it wakes people up to the the negative impact so-called “free trade” has on workers, consumers and the environment. You can learn a lot more about the WTO at the Global Trade Watch section of our Web site.

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Bringing the ‘Battle in Seattle’ to the conventions

From Ann Eveleth @ Eyes on Trade: If the presumptive presidential contenders and their advisors have still not figured out – ahem – the political costs of surrendering to so-called “free trade” policies of the NAFTA/WTO variety against the interest of, well, almost everybody, they might be surprised to find some people getting a little riled up about the issue at convention time: delegates to both the Democratic National Convention (August 25-28 in Denver) and the Republican National Convention (September 1-4 in St Paul) will be treated to a “sneak peak” viewing of the latest Hollywood indie extravaganza… Continue Reading »

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