[mgj-discuss] NEW WTO BOOK: Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch releases definitive book on WTO

[Timi Gerson]

CHECK IT OUT AT YOUR FAVORITE BOOKSTORE OR ORDER COPIES ONLINE AT: 
https://www.citizen.org/trade/forms/purchase.cfm

Public Citizen Announces Publication of New Book -- the Definitive
Guide to the World Trade Organization

As Trade Emerges as Key Issue in Fall Elections, Whose Trade
Organization? Examines Nine Years of WTO with Case-by-Case Accounts

	WASHINGTON, D.C. - Public Citizen, the national consumer group,
announced the release today of Whose Trade Organization?: A
Comprehensive Guide to the WTO. Published by The New Press and
distributed by Norton Books, the new publication by Global Trade Watch
director Lori Wallach and colleague Patrick Woodall is available in
bookstores nationwide today.

	Whose Trade Organization? tracks the outcomes of the WTO during
its nine years of existence, with chapters on the WTO's impact on the
economies and employment of rich and poor countries, as well as on the
environment, food safety, public health, service sectors, agriculture
and human rights. The book also details the WTO's controversial dispute
resolution system and connects WTO rules with U.S. job losses, unsafe
food, attacks on domestic laws and burgeoning international inequality
that makes headlines daily. 

The book also provides insight into the underlying factors that caused
the collapse of the 2003 Cancun Ministerial and the ongoing crisis at
the WTO. It offers alternatives to the failed WTO model.

	"This book comes at a critical time, when Americans and their
elected representatives are examining the corporate managed trade agenda
that has delivered more than 2 million job losses and attacked hard won
consumer health and environment laws," Public Citizen President Joan
Claybrook said.

	Added Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade
Watch, "This book makes clear and accessible to people that trade is
only a small element of what the WTO's 900 pages of rules actually
control. Trade is the least of it. This book shows how the WTO chills
government actions to fight sweatshops, make life-saving drugs available
and protect endangered species - and even limits our elected
governments' ability to maintain policies on everything from meat
inspection to media concentration. Nine years of WTO shows us that this
model of global governance is not working."

Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch was created in 1995 to promote
government and corporate accountability in the globalization and trade
arena. A Harvard-trained lawyer, Wallach has testified on NAFTA,
GATT-WTO and other trade issues before U.S. congressional committees,
other countries' legislatures, the U.S. International Trade Commission
and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Patrick Woodall has been a public interest researcher in Washington for
more than a dozen years and served as research director at Global Trade
Watch from 1999-2003.

 "If you think trade, globalization and the WTO aren't your business or
are boring, read this clear, compelling and downright scary account,"
said U.S. Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.).

Added Naomi Klein, columnist and author of No Logo, "A crucial guide -
devastating and highly readable. Wallach and Woodall are warriors for
democracy against its most powerful opponents."

 
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