Read the interview here.
Read the interview here.
Trade wars and tariffs are in the news, thanks to President Trump’s populist protectionism. However, readers of ICN are probably already well aware of the moral arguments surrounding trade. The wealthy world’s trade policies have had a devastating effect on the developing world. This timely book explains how the US and EU subsidise their agriculture, and then dump their surplus production on poor countries. Through the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and sundry trade agreements, the rich world insists it has access to global markets, while ignoring its own track record of subsidising its industries and agriculture for decades.
Read the full review here.
Author and policy maker Yash Tandon challenges the West’s ideas of both free and fair trade, and explains how colonialism’s newest form is a consolidated, intergovernmental apparatus with the same goals as ever – resource extraction and labor exploitation.
To listen to the interview, visit This is Hell!.
I discovered that the World Trade Organization provided a set of regulations worked out by the United States, Europe and Japan to their advantage. [Africans] were not party to the making of those regulations. The decision making in the World Trade Organization is by consensus. That means even one state can object, and there is no decision. Yet, [the United States, Europe and Japan] were able to manipulate the entire decision making process, year after year, to bring about decisions that favor the big countries and disadvantage the smaller countries.
To read the rest of the review, visit Arise News.
To watch the segment, visit RT.
In an exclusive TruthDig excerpt, Yash Tandon explains how multinational corporations and NGOs use the rhetoric of progress to push a free trade agenda:
It is a battle. The corporations play out their macabre war dance on the soil of Africa. They are aided by state agents and Western donor agencies pushing fertilizers and pesticides on the people to ‘hurry, hurry, hurry’ to some dubious destination called ‘growth,’ and the ordinary people (the more enlightened among them) urge the rest to pause and reflect on what they are doing and where they thought they were going.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.
But in fact, the rich have gotten richer, the poor poorer, and the planet has been thrown into peril. And while international trade does not manifest in lethal bombs, its impact on communities is similar to that of war, as detailed in a new book by Yash Tandon titled “Trade Is War: The West’s War on the World.” Tandon, who has decades of experience as a high-level negotiator at the World Trade Organization (WTO), said in an interview on “Uprising” that he agrees with Warren, and that she is “on the right side” on the TPP.
The fact that trade deals are negotiated behind closed doors speaks volumes. The draft of the TPP is so secret that one trade expert, Michael Wessel, who was privy to the details, wrote that “anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents.” He does admit, however, that “[w]e should be very concerned about what’s hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice.”
To read the rest of the article, visit TruthDig.
To watch a clip of the program, visit Uprising Radio.
Not understanding history, one can’t know where one is. Not deeply. Thus one is – in a very real sense – lost. Lost to the real. Lost in the superficial understanding, intellectual laziness and blithe regard of dreamstate consumerism chewing cud somewhere between now and a gluey intermediate utopia – nowhere – as a planetary collapse orchestrated, choreographed and enabled by the language of trade policy unfolds before the sleepy wet eyes of herdstock that can no longer see. That’s not hyperbole; its a warning. This is no time to be lost or asleep.
If you are, then Yash Tandon’s scrupulous work is the cure. Buy it, read it, hi-lite it and make it an essential part of your personal reference library. And then buy a copy for a friend.