Trade wars are easy to win… or so Donald Trump once thought. The political neophyte fixed his political future on an unhealthy obsession with bilateral trade deficits and has since come to realize large swaths of his constituents will be hit hard by the backlash he’s inviting from everyone from China to Canada. He’s come a long, mostly disastrous way from his early opposition to NAFTA and the TPP.
While it’s becoming increasingly clear that he doesn’t fully understand how free trade agreements work or what it would actually take to forge a fair trade deal, his pledge to renegotiate America’s agreements has earned him some begrudging support from forces on the left happy to finally see some cracks in the superficial “it’s a no-brainer” approach to rubberstamping trade agreements that’s defined American policy for decades.
Lori Wallach, Director and Founder of Global Trade Watch (a division of Public Citizen) is one of those left-leaning advocates relishing an opportunity to address what she sees as dangerous poison pills buried in America’s marquee trade agreements. Poison pills that she says have almost nothing to do with “trade” and everything to do with skirting democratic checks on corporate abuses.
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Going to Harvard is supposed to open up a lockstep career path for a young lawyer. The finest law firms come calling, and attorneys climb slowly and surely up the ranks to their eventual partnership. For many, this is a perfectly fulfilling career. Others, however, demand a little bit more out of their livelihood. Wallach falls into the latter category.
When Wallach went to law school in a professional environment even more hypersexist than it is today, she considered a Harvard Law degree “the next best thing to a penis” professionally. But it didn’t take her long to realize that the charted path to Biglaw wasn’t for her. She joined Public Citizen working in a range of areas, employing her law degree in unconventional ways for the public interest.
She came to her life’s work on trade via food safety. While promoting food safety standards on the Hill, Wallach started noticing a common refrain from the agribusiness giants asked about food standards — “we can’t increase those standards according to GATT.” As the excuses kept piling up, she began to sense a comprehensive strategy to gut food safety standards through the back door. No legislature would sign off on bargain basement quality standards, but burying those standards in a massive, executive negotiated, fast-tracked trade agreement would assure the cuts get through.
“It felt like a sneak attack was underway,” Wallach said.
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That revelation led her to working with Ralph Nader on opposing fast track authority, the legislative concession to the executive that allows agreements to be hammered out behind closed doors and then dropped on Congress for an up or down vote without the right to amend. When the calculus for a local legislator is “accept this handout to the pharmaceutical companies or we’ll blame you for the rising cost of other consumer goods,” it’s no surprise that there’s hardly any pushback.
In many ways, the leap from food safety to trade agreements was a natural move. Trade policy is also mostly about keeping people from realizing there’s rat feces in there.
Contrary to the picture of free trade agreement adversaries painted in the media, Wallach is on board with the concept of free trade. “If we want zero tariffs… fine,” she explains. Her beef isn’t with opening up borders to the flow of goods, her problem is with the thousands of pages of poison pills thrown into every trade agreement and pawned off on the public as part of a “common sense” economic policy.
Like the agreements to ban certain health inspection labeling on meats to protect imported meats from facing consumers who worry about lagging agricultural standards. Or financial incentives built into the deal to encourage outsourcing above and beyond wage arbitrage. Or attempts to handcuff environmental standards that could raise the price of imported goods to match domestic output. For Wallach and her staff, bringing these and other poison pills to light is the whole strategy.
It’s not exactly the traditional legal job she sees her work firmly grounded in her legal education. The shorthand she gives her career is the “Dracula Strategy” wading through “absurdly obtuse language” in dense lobbyist drafted trade agreements and bringing the most pernicious abuses to light with straightforward, plain English.
It’s a mission that goes to the core of what it means to be a lawyer counseling a client through the treacherous waters of legalese. It’s just that Wallach’s client is the American public.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.