she was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with its place. welcome back to the special edition of the big picture last month lori wallach joined me for our conversations with great minds or is the director of public citizens global trade watch and is an expert on trade policy and international trade relations in our conversation we talked about the new and highly controversial trans-pacific partnership a deal with the united states is close to signing despite its harmful effects there's my conversation with your wall.

for tonight's conversations of great minds and i'm by lori wallach or has been director of public citizens global trade watch division for nearly twenty years she's an expert on the outer operations and outcomes of trade policies like nafta in the w t o and currently is leading her organization's efforts to reveal the truth behind the trans pacific partnership or is appeared on a variety of television networks including c.n.n. the b.b.c. and p.b.s. she's also the author of numerous articles and books including her most recent book whose trade organization or joins me now in the studio welcome thank you very much thanks so much for joining us first tell us about. your organization the global trade watch and he said public citizen was founded by ralph nader in one nine hundred seventy one and now has six divisions routh left us in the eighty's and has as a president robert weiss men i direct the division called global trade watch which was created twenty years ago basically when we realized today's. trade agreements

are actually invading domestic policy space creating new corporate power and just to maintain the organisation's forty year history of fighting for safe food reasonable consumer rights access to courts affordable energy safe medicines we were going to go have to take the fight to this new venue where the corporations have gone so that's what we're doing a global trade watch that's great going back to the to the beginning to the elf nature beginnings in seventy one was a seventy two that unsafe at any speed was published so anyone sitting right around there somewhere who is paul wrote his infamous memo in seventy three to his best friend next door neighbor the chairman of the u.s. chamber of commerce saying we're under attack and he cited ralph nader and rachel carson wrote silent spring earlier and said we've got to create an infrastructure to push back you know to take over the judiciary to take over colleges or schools etc etc etc what part of that infrastructure created the need for global

trade watch and what part of that infrastructure survives to this day or has grown you are. doing combat with lousy metaphor but when i was in law school i thought of ralph nader as a hero he and the nader raiders have done all these amazing things creating all these laws we all rely on we just think of them as being there the clean air and the clean water act the fact that we have the ministry of procedure act so if we think there's an arbitrary decision every citizen has the right to appeal the decisions the government the sunshine act all the openness rules food safety rules and drug safety rules all these great things that i got out of law school and i started working for public service and it's great it's the people's lobby and people need to and that's what i was going to go do lawyers litigators researchers economists. and i was about a year into it working on food safety one of the things that we fought for for years and i was at a hearing and a congressman. i said to the industry guy you're going to have to clean up your act

we're going to stronger policies and the guy said go and pass it but you can't do that under the current trade rules and i thought wait a minute i've studied trade law that's tariffs quotas and then i realize something is going on here which gets to the structural issue the corporations had created a structure where they were the official adviser oars to the u.s. trade negotiators hundreds of them had special access they had worked actually with richard nixon to get congress cut out of the process so congress didn't have oversight even though the constitution gives exclusive authority over international commerce to congress article one eight exactly so they had basically gotten this huge power grab and gotten all the power into the white house and gotten all these official corporate advisers so these guys had seen this tax that they were talking about but of course the public was going to live with the result had no idea so i started snooping i remember going back to my boss of the time saying i'm the person

who is responsible for guarding the vault of food safety and i'm standing at the front door of the bank very much on the alert and someone's taken all the loot out the back door and is connected somehow to trade agreements and my boss of the time said you need to take a break that's working too hard that's crazy so i took the week off and i went to actually found someone who had liberated the first text of the world trade organization he had it but couldn't read it because it was in. jargon i read it and thought slow motion coup d'etat what a genius elegant strategy and that was the beginning of global trade watch that's extraordinary summation story the the. i think was the humane society it was the s.p.c. one of those groups worked over twenty years to get the dolphin safe to the laws. and you know this this is i'm sure one of the stories that you were involved with certainly knew about at that time. where. we actually buy was ok you know the

dolphins swimming the tuna and so they were killing the two male the dolphins want to do and can't do that anymore you got to catch two in the way it was. and then as a result of these trade laws it was nafta it was this was gallacher the general agreement tariffs and trades tell me about that and how and when that happened and how we've gone from. where we are here so at the time we had this you know taxed and we could read it and yeah there's a chapter that strictly limited food safety pesticide sounds because i knew the best but i met people from developing countries who cries another chapter of what became the world trade organization with jack up medicine prices by extending drug monopolies another chapter would even get into the business of limiting sort of technical standards safety standards and products another one would do regulate banks all of these non trade issues or serve being rolled in trojan horse style and so i was running around washington as a relatively new entrant to the world of washington to the different organizations

who pass the laws that are right steak and i would say look at this thing that leak this is horrible and we translate what this means for you it means you can't do and they would look at me and think it's gross a protectionist in the. protection of she's against trade or she's crazy well then in one thousand nine hundred one get zero eight flipper the marine mammal protection act we finally had the smoking dolphin sort of speak no one would believe this could happen because you know i'm paper it's so extreme the notion that you could have a domestic law do we passed by congress signed by the president signed by the president and the industry to challenge it in u.s. courts and so it had been all the way through the court system and they've lost this was a law that was staying and had been in effect already at that point and was very very successful there had been horrible co-writes the dolphins to the point of extinction of some species and they were coming back so this was like the best story and this tribe you know i kept running around folks read this chapter there's this this there's. tribunals that meets in geneva can second guess all of our laws

and if we don't change them when they say we have to. we suffer perpetual trade sanctions and people thought this is just fanciful she's wrong and i was very young i was a woman in this town at that point and these kind of ignored it and then the case happened and everything changed and in fact suddenly there was the evidence that this wasn't just about trade anymore so the environmentalists were the first entrants into the fights in short order after that they became more and more threats also related to nafta which was starting to be negotiated and that text started to get around and we all started to realize this is really just a corporate power grab trade was the smallest piece but yes there are real issues about trade but that was on the side the vast majority of these rules were just a delivery mechanism for many of the things we'd already won as citizens movements as activists as advocacy groups in congress so one glaring example the agreements that increased patent lengths so you know drug company used to have

a seventeen year monopoly when if they discovered a new medicine they could charge anything they wanted for seventeen years they tried to get a twenty year monopoly the consumer groups year after year for decades on gramma's drugs were expensive enough. the next day we have a twenty year monopoly patent just posters regulation as part of the green mint and if you don't conform to domestic laws you end up in these tribunals and they hit you with trade sanctions so i remember you know ralph nader and i tried joe over capitol hill during the time of the again even with the dolphin case members couldn't senators couldn't believe it and i remember one particular senator who's a big advocate of affordable medicines who had been our champion in these fights and he voted for the w t o and he called ralph up the next week the wall street journal article drug patents twenty years how did you let that happen you've been so focused on the w t o thing you miss this when i said no sir we told you that is what was in the deputy o. thing and here are thirty others. things that you've sweated blood to pass in your

career as a consumer and environmental human rights champion that are also on the chopping block and it's not just it's not just those things i mean this country has been credible history of protecting trade and protecting domestic industries from foreign assault and seven hundred ninety one george washington as to alexander hamilton to come up with a way to industrialize america pays them in the wash we did use that word use the word manufacturers going back then and in seventy nine three hamilton presented his eleven point plan for american manufacturers prefaced by a long rant about his debate with jefferson about whether we're going to be in a very in society but you know it was basically this program of of trade policies the that gave benefits to important industries that put tariffs on particular products to the point that one hundred percent of the funding for the federal government from the terror from until the civil war hundred percent two thirds into

world war one one third until world war two when did so we've always been a protectionist nation we built this nation on protectionism how and when did it become dirty. it's very interesting i mean you asked how we got to where we are right now so on top of all of those constraints and regulation the other thing that that do is actually relate to investment and they make it much easier to move investment offshore so a big part of how we became a free trade nation is when the really big manufacturing companies realize they could make a bigger profit if they were producing with cheap wage offshore now if you're going to want to relocate your production to name your place first it was mexico now it's china then you have to bring it back into sell it to your consumers so suddenly the companies that used to fight for you know what's good for g.m. is good for america so we want to make sure we have strong manufacturing here we want the trade policies that give us this glorious rich market for our manufacturing instead sadly was much more interesting i think. we should make it

over there and then we need no tariffs to bring it back in here and will maximize our profits that way and that trends really what were u.s. companies are now u.s. brand names that are producing elsewhere and by the time we got to them is like now beyond the gaps they had to actually put into the agreements that explicitly incentivize and protect offshoring so you do very few leave. and you know and you can see how ross perot i mean you know there was that sense of it in ninety two people saw it you know twenty percent of only one basically just on that well we'll have more conversations with great market worrywart brokers for.

welcome to the capital account i'm lauren lyster. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry is a big. worry but just burn gerard is right right i mean it's like. actually it's

a food product essentially. this is much stronger than anything it's used by a lot. thousands of times stronger than any kind of ever put. into the military. to do the work to bring justice or accountability that. i have the right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism.

well go back to conversations with great minds with lori wallach has been director of public citizens global trade watch division for nearly twenty years she's also the author of numerous articles and books including her most recent book whose trade organization let's get back to it laura we have a you know we were talking about the gap general going to tariffs and trade b.t.o. nafta all that you know this whole history of trade agreements there's a new one that this administration and i'm assuming that the bush administration before it has has been negotiating in secret called the trans-pacific partnership first of all we've got a graphic of of the countries this is the map of who's involved is is this is this accurate these are the countries that are going to be involved in this you trans-pacific looking now at canada and mexico will be joining in december a real so so canada mexico and which which kind of places nafta well

it's now down steroids plus all of asia all of asia and what is this what is the trans-pacific partnership how would you describe i would say it's the ultimate progression of this corporate hijacking of trade to deliver this whole other agenda of policies and lock them in because unlike a law that doesn't work well when you have these agreements you have to get all the other countries to agree to change a single comma so we let's say we pass a law told disaster we get rid of it now with one of these agreements for the corporations this is like super glue you get all these things that could not pass scrutiny and sunshine in public debate you lock them in and it is like nafta and steroids not just because it's nafta plus all the other countries but because the provisions that are included here is really over the top i mean the gap to the original gentlemen tariffs and trade was really about trade or nothing was covered by. gak you can drop in your foot was about physical products going across borders

and what the border tax was so you could have a debate about high border taxes lower taxes it was about trade t.p. is the ultimate corporate power tool so it's chapters for instance cover every element of domestic policy that you mean your listeners readers viewers around the country think we're deciding with our state local and federal legislatures so just for instance the whole fight about sopa and internet freedom was we have a graphic number three here. we can pull this. as the son of so congress just you know public whatnots what do you mean i could have a ten thousand dollar fine because my computer makes a temporary buffer copy when i open up a video and i'm going to be fine for copying or looking for looking to google i send my mother a recipe one time to my mom noncommercial small scale i took out a cookbook side i paid for by send it to her and i get

a funny he's crazy over the top basically money grabs congress said no went down public went nuts congress said no so all of those kinds of crazy rules are revived in the copyright chapter of the t p p so this is the billion dollars worth of music on your on your i pod exactly or you've got president obama running around talking about rebuilding american manufacturing romney the outsourcing of the offshore i'm for buy america this agreement is a chapter that bans buy american carrots now to buy america by america actually has a truly noble in the history of one thousand three hundred thirty five the buy america act was passed by franklin roosevelt were so that any federal agency and any federal procurement had to first source to american had to get a specific waiver if they didn't grab my recollection is that it was during the reagan administration that they just started with the granting those waivers and it just we just stopped doing that no actually. obama's actually been pretty good about it there's no waivers and there were problems actually george w.

bush was doing waivers clinton wasn't doing waiver has become very partisan or interest but there's no rule it's a price differential so you buy american and last it's x. amount of percentage more expensive that's the waiver but in this agreement you would have to treat products coming from any company so a chinese company in vietnam in this agreement as if it were american for the sake of our tax dollars so instead of having the tool of taking your tax dollars and reinvesting them in the community either as we have with technology after technology to create a market for the new energy technologies i mean fuel efficiency the first thing we do is we are preparing standards with higher fuel efficiency than it went into the private sector once we create the market so as a policy tool for the green energy future but also just to create us jobs with our own tax dollars by putting our money back into our communities really important policy tool under this agreement forbidden for big and this is has nothing to do with trade one of the big problems that obama had with his stimulus versus for

example eisenhower spending is that when eisenhower spent money it stayed in local communities and it got recycled in local manufacturing obama spent the money and you know god was there i mean it got us out of the disaster but two or three iterations down the road you know the local restaurant and then the local bank and then when somebody goes to wal-mart and boom the money is off to china. this could take a much faster and what's what's the difference between a treaty and an agreement in the context of all the stuff in the constitution that explicitly says that the treaties become the wall of the land so if we signed a treaty that said you know anytime somebody says the word can everybody has to jump up that would become the wall of the land. that's pretty serious stuff so are these treaties or the agreements are they and treaties have to be explicitly authorized by. congress and by the size superman i started by two thirds. the answer as i learned the hard way during the debate is there is

a legal answer and their state department has a series of tests which the w t o agreement that has a treaty but the reality the political answer is what trumps and that is if you have enough senators to vote no that's not an agreement that they insist on a treaty approval you have a treaty which is to say if there had been a simple majority which is what's needed for approval of the agreement fifty senators and said this is an agreement we're not approving this is the treaty go through the formal process it would have a tree larry tribe professor larry tribe very famous harvard law school constitutional scholar a long memo to various of the senate committees saying if this is not a treaty what the heck is a treaty it's permanent it's a lasting it's a broad scope u.s. is legally bound it has the ability to enforce and create new rules it has its own legal personality and it does not directly preempt but the way the tribunals system works if you do not conform all of your domestic laws regulations the ministry of

procedures that's the rule country shall ensure the conformity of then you get dragged to the tribunals the tribunals sanction if you know change the law so it's one step removed from we automatically preempting but it has the same effect so that should've been a treaty so it's really going to senators could have essentially filibustered as. they failed to with with nafta with with these produce some degree with those previous agreements so many of these members of congress were thinking it was no trade agreement so they were having a debate about are we for protection only for free trade important debate different debate or they had not realised that what they were basically doing was ceding their control and our democracy and sovereignty to a top down imposition of one size fits all rules and this is true of all these agreements the colombia free trade agreement the panama of all there's very. little in the ma. keeps getting worse and worse so for instance at the time i read now

after i thought i've never seen anything more crazy because it's even worse than w t o is even more extreme and then comes along. and it's even worse then you look at t p p and there are chapters in there there's one called regulatory coherence which is to harmonize all the regulatory systems of the countries involved so it just takes us down to the level of vietnam for example or. chapter i.i. that's of course all secret but that is the industry go they want one set of global standards that are lower for the whole world and this is a lot of people this this deal was not about trade this is church it's shows that the number of the g.d.p. of the of the t.p.d. nations that are all this everybody can see it australia singapore chile peru. always you do and this is this is mind boggling amount of money but what's really interesting about that chart is it's evidence that this isn't really about trade per se because if you look at the countries the ones that actually have the

most g.d.p. we already have agreements with so the u.s. has agreements with all the ones that are bold so over eighty five percent of the of the combined g.d.p. we have free trade agreements with them so let's just assume the free trade agreements work just as an odd factoid our export growth rate is half the rate with the countries we have free trade agreements with relative to the ones we go so it doesn't work b. it's a scam but with a t p p let's just assume it works we've already done that with every country whose economy does not have a tiny size so what the hell are we spending all this time and effort of our negotiators getting into this agreement and this is where you know i sort of put up that slide for senator sometimes i say you know what are they really doing if the trade part was done already even if you don't like that or if you like it this is not what we're actually after so what's the. genda what is it's this set of

corporate locking rules and the thing is congressman my congressman senator by senator congressman my congresswoman you go through the issues that they care about you pinpoint what they care about this is actually for everyone at home we can stop this by making clear what it really is if it is brought into the sunshine and the sneaky branding as are you for free trade or not is destroyed you go to what the center the congressman cares about and you say you know congressman you are the leader on buy america safe food labeling name your thing. and this is what this agreement does to and then ridgeley they'll say you must be kidding that can't be in there now it's all secret text because t.p. is basically the previous one plus for most of the chapters you can pull out another old agreement and say well i hate to tell you can see voted for this one but would it be would it be reasonable to characterize these things as just a complete or complete a largely largely a usurpation overthrow of democratic processes national sovereignty and we would

play seen that with an infrastructure that is controlled by years benefit to work for the benefit of transnational corporations that's a fairly accurate description i mean i call it a quiet slow motion coup d'etat because if a military came in and took over that much power of your congress to make decisions about their day to day lives there'd be up in arms oh my goodness we've been invaded but this is so quiet it's by paper in so many members of the public and of congress really are being. bombarded with the corporate branding of it's a free trade agreement what's not for trade we have just thirty seconds left will any of these other countries look at this and go wait a minute we don't want to surrender our sovereignty well here's the interesting thing in a bunch of these countries actually the growing citizens movement so saying no so in australia. there's a it's politically impossible for australia to submit self to the corporate

tribunals that could dig into the treasury that the us has signed up for in brunei they will not give up their energy system in different countries different issues the problem is the us is the pusher of this so as americans we have to expose it we have to say no because these other countries right now are getting steamrollered in our name when this is not for us and you're doing a brilliant job of it thank you so much for being with us and i thank you keep up the great work to see this in other conversations the great minds go to our website of conversations and great minds start. that's it for tonight's special edition of the big picture don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag your it.

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