Just Livelihoods

In 2006, Karen Chacon and eight of her co-workers at a Guatemalan apparel factory decided to organize a union. Chacon, 21, had struggled to support her mother and a nephew on $244 per month sewing zippers on dress pants for Jones Apparel Group, a major U.S. retailer. The plant managers refused to provide workers with clean drinking water and often demanded unpaid overtime, sometimes locking in pregnant workers until dawn. The workers' first step was to file a petition with the Guatemalan Labor Ministry to set up a labor committee. The workers were hopeful. After all, the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which went into effect in 2006, was supposed to strengthen labor rights in the region. But the very day after they filed the petition, all of the workers were fired. They later learned that they were blacklisted from other factory jobs as well. 1

Chacon and her fellow workers tried to achieve more justice in their lives—fair wages and safe working conditions—and ended up suffering more injustice." I believe that CAFTA can spread opportunity, provide jobs, and help lift people out of poverty," President George W. Bush stated in his March 2007 visit to Guatemala. Yet even U.S. embassy personnel in Guatemala concede a lack of improvement in labor standards. If anything, employers now have even more leverage to fight unions. Guatemala, like many other poor countries, is losing jobs to China, where independent labor unions are officially banned. The China factor is one reason Guatemala's exports to the United States actually fell during the first year of CAFTA.

U.S. policy towards the poorer two-thirds of the world is based overwhelmingly on textbook theories about the wonders of the free market. Lifting barriers to trade and investment and giving special privileges to large corporations are supposed to create benefits that trickle down to workers like Karen Chacon. Market-based remedies have also been touted as solutions to the global health care problem. But the result of U.S. policies has been rising poverty and inequality. Health care around the world has deteriorated sharply and the risk of global pandemics has increased, despite the rising amount of U.S. and international aid devoted to treating sickness. And entrenched conditions of inequality have forced many people to leave their land to flood into cities and to leave their countries to become immigrants.

This widening disparity in health and wealth between the haves and the have-nots has undermined both justice and security, for the South and the North. Poverty and poor health care in the global South can be solved but only by supporting policies that empower people in the global South to secure just livelihoods.

Core Misconceptions

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have largely been wedded to core misconceptions about richer and poorer, sickness and health. While the Democratic Party has become more critical of current "free trade" policies, a substantial bipartisan consensus still holds that such deals help the poor and promote democracy in developing countries. Both parties are convinced that increased aid is the central tool to end poverty and cure the major diseases afflicting the global South. And they are more focused on trying to slow immigration flows into the United States than on addressing the reasons why people leave their countries in the first place.

Until we address these core misconceptions, workable alternatives cannot replace the current failed policies.

As implemented by both parties over the past two decades, free-trade policies in fact contribute to poverty and inequality. These policies, which are really corporate-managed trade not free trade, increase the power of corporations to bargain down wages and benefits by pitting workers from different countries against one another. They encourage governments to export the very natural resources on which the livelihoods of so many of their citizens depend. And by protecting the patent rights of giant pharmaceutical firms, they reduce access to affordable medicines.

But perhaps the most devastating effects of free trade have been in agriculture, which employs about 70% of the developing world's poor.2 Current trade rules restrict a government's power to control imports. As a result, cheaper foreign goods flood in and undercut local farmers. In Mexico, more than a million small farmers have lost their livelihoods due to an influx of subsidized U.S. corn. In sub-Saharan Africa, according to Christian Aid researchers, "trade liberalization has cost an estimated $272 billion over the past 20 years," which is about what the region received in aid over these years.3 World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressure on developing country governments to slash supports for small producers only compounds the problem. In areas where eco-systems are still intact, rural communities offer greater food and human security than life in urban slums.

The total number of people living on under $2 per day actually increased worldwide over the past two decades, particularly in countries that were victims of free-trade policies. While large countries like China and India have indeed reduced extreme poverty, they've not done so as a result of the types of trade and investment liberalization policies that the U.S. government has promoted. For example, the Chinese government has applied extensive restrictions on foreign investment and tightly controlled trade flows through quotas and import and export licenses. According to economist Dani Rodrik, poorer nations with high import barriers did better in the 1990s than those with low barriers. His works suggests that openness to the global economy is usually a result of economic development, not a cause of it.4

Trade is not an explicitly partisan issue in Washington. President Clinton relied on Republican support to push the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress in 1993, just as Bush peeled off 15 House Democrats to push through its successor CAFTA in 2005. However, the Democrats have recently moved in a more critical direction. In early 2007, the Democratic Caucus approved a "New Trade Policy for America" that emphasizes the need to raise living standards at home and abroad. While short on details, the proposal differs in some significant ways from the Bush administration's model, for example requiring compliance with internationally recognized labor rights and environmental accords and attempting to balance the need for access to medicines with protection of pharmaceutical patents.5

Not surprisingly, though, elected officials' criticism of our trade policies is driven mostly by concerns over U.S., not overseas, impact. Sen. Max Baucus, who is now chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, explained on the Senate floor that he would vote against CAFTA because he did not expect it would benefit the United States. With regard to developing countries, however, the Montana Democrat said that such deals could "generate the wealth they need to lift their people out of poverty. We can spread the values of democracy and promote the rule of law."6 Similarly, Bush continues to contend that free trade is "the best hope to lift millions out of poverty."7

A study by the United Nations University found that:8

• The richest 2% of adults own more than 50% of global household wealth;
• The richest 1% of adults (those worth at least $500,000) control 40% of global assets;
• The richest 10% of adults own 85% of global assets;
• The poorest 50% of adults own 1% of global wealth. Over the past 35 years, these gaps have grown rapidly.

The U.S. government's approach to trade is explicitly anti-democratic in both process and substance. An elite few make the decisions about trade policy. Trade negotiations are conducted behind closed doors, with little opportunity for citizen input. Under "fast track" authority, Congress has
limited time for debate and cannot make changes in trade deals concluded by the executive branch. And although U.S. trade negotiators must by law consult with independent groups, representatives of big business dominate the official advisory committees.

Trade rules also undermine the authority of governments at all levels to regulate trade and investment to support the public good. Investment provisions slipped into NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements and treaties, for example, give private foreign investors the power to sue governments over laws, including public interest regulations, which might diminish their profits. The U.S. government is currently facing a corporate challenge over a California law aimed at reducing environmental damages related to gold mining. European investors are suing South Africa over affirmative action policies aimed at redressing historic racism in hiring.9

Both Democratic and Republican leaders are guilty of employing empty rhetoric equating free trade with democracy as part of their sales pitches. In his State of the Union address in 1997, President Clinton declared that "by expanding trade, we can advance the cause of freedom and democracy around the world." In the wake of September 11, the Bush administration declared that free trade policies were good for democracy and hence global security. The White House's National Security Strategy claims that free trade "reinforces the habits of liberty." Yet, both Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Suharto in Indonesia pursued export-oriented growth strategies and opened their economies wide to foreign investment. This didn't stop either dictator from ruling with an iron fist.

Since 1997, most Democrats and some Republicans have made it tough for the White House to renew fast-track authority (a mechanism that allows the president to submit trade legislation to Congress and get an up-or-down vote without amendments within 90 legislative days). In fact, fast track has become so controversial that the Bush administration renamed it "trade promotion "authority and is facing a tough renewal fight. But the Democrats have not united in opposition to the excessive powers given to corporations through the investment provisions in trade agreements, and it remains unclear whether they will push for substantial changes to open up the negotiation process.

For the past 25 years, the U.S. government has supported World Bank and IMF demands that developing countries seeking loans or debt relief must privatize: sell off government enterprises to private corporations. More than 100 countries have privatized some or most of their state-owned companies, including everything from telecommunications and road-building to essential services like education, health care, and water.

U.S. officials have also promoted privatization through the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services, which sets rules to open up local service markets to foreign businesses. The Bush administration insisted that Costa Rica privatize its telecommunications system as a condition of trade negotiations, despite the country's strong record of providing nationwide telephone service at relatively low rates.

The argument behind privatization is that public entities become bloated and corrupt as a result of being insulated from competition. Indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of government waste in the developing world—or for that matter, in any country. However, when profit-driven corporations take over, they typically slash jobs, bust unions, and favor customers who can pay the most. As a result, privatization has consistently failed to deliver good quality, affordable services to the poor.

Senegal is just one example of privatization gone awry. International financial institutions forced the government to sell part of its electricity system to a Canadian firm in return for debt relief. Promised investments did not materialize. Frequent power outages caused an estimated 1.5-2% drop in GDP. Even though service improved after the government took back control of the system in 2001, the World Bank continued to push for a renewed privatization. The World Bank and IMF also pushed Senegal to privatize a state company that handled the buying and marketing of groundnuts, an important food crop. As a result, less than 30% of the country's groundnut crop was collected, resulting in millions of dollars of lost income and a rural hunger crisis.10

Water privatization projects have been particularly prone to failure. Under pressure from the World Bank, the capital of the Philippines sold its water system to private corporations in 1997. An international consortium won the contract for the east side of Manila, based on its promise of a 74% rate cut, but jacked up rates by nearly 500% by 2003. The west side of the city went to a French-Filipino consortium that not only broke its rate cut promises but also stopped making payments on its debt to the government in 2001. After the company abandoned the contract in 2002, the government had to take over the system.11

Rather than reducing corruption, privatization has expanded opportunities for graft. "In country after country," writes former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, "government officials have realized that privatization meant that they no longer needed to be limited to annual profit skimming. By selling a government enterprise below market price, they could get a significant chunk of the asset value for themselves rather than leaving it for subsequent officeholders."12 Russia is an extreme example. In the 1990s, the government used rigged auctions to sell off the country's crown jewel enterprises, including its oil industry, to political insiders at fire sale prices. This impoverished the country, while creating a class of so-called oligarchs who now dominate the economy.13

In response to widespread protest, the World Bank and IMF have in recent years advised governments in some limited cases to maintain ownership of infrastructure while hiring private firms to manage services. However, this has done little to improve the impact of private sector involvement on services for the poor.

Democratic and Republican leaders alike tend to view scandals of corporate corruption and incompetence as anomalies. Even the Iraq reconstruction fiasco does not appear to have resulted in a fundamental re-thinking of policies that promote privatization. While Congress, under Democratic leadership, is finally aggressively investigating the rampant fraud, waste, and abuse of the Iraq contractors, there are no calls yet for a broader review of the appropriate role of private corporations in providing public services.

Misconception: More aid is the panacea for poverty.14

Under the right conditions and with the right framework, aid can help mitigate disease and natural disasters. But it has seldom reduced poverty or inequality in any sustainable fashion. Former World Bank economist William Easterly estimates that rich countries "spent $568 billion (in today's dollars) to end poverty in Africa" between 1960 and 2003. Yet, over these years, the ranks of the poor in Africa rose steadily.15 Often, aid has exacerbated poverty and inequality. In the 1970s, researchers Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce studied an aid project that was supposed to deliver tubewells for irrigation for some Bangladeshi small farmers. They found that invariably, the richest people ended up owning the tubewells, which enhanced their power over the supposed beneficiaries, the poor farmers.16

The political and ideological nature of U.S. aid has exacerbated these problems. Strategic allies have garnered the lion's share of assistance (regardless of need). Aid contracts often do little for the target communities. Food aid, for instance, helps enrich U.S. agribusiness at the expense of local farmers in the recipient country. In 2004, the Bush administration created the Millennium Challenge Account that links aid to free-market criteria, including trade liberalization. In 2006, the administration aligned the U.S. Agency for International Development more closely with the State Department. This would create, warned The New York Times, "tremendous political pressure to take money away from effective antipoverty programs, which have very small political constituencies and divert it to the State Department's geopolitical goals, which have little to do with development.17

Debt relief, rather than aid (most of which consists of loans requiring repayment), is a much more effective tool for reducing poverty, in part due to the politicization of aid, but also because debt relief provides direct budget support with low transactions costs.18 And yet, while the Bush administration has taken some initial steps toward reducing the developing world's debt burden, much more needs to be done. A bill that would grant further cancellation has languished for years in Congress. While its prospects of becoming law rose considerably with the power shift, Democratic leaders have not yet mustered strong support behind it.

During his March 2007 trip to Latin America, President Bush announced that a U.S. Navy medical ship would visit 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries to offer treatment and perform surgeries. His offer symbolized much of what is wrong with the overall U.S. debate on global health. The offer treated the symptoms but not the underlying causes, and it relied on U.S. doctors rather than hiring or training local medical staff. Treat a person for a toothache and you solve the problem for a day. Teach a person proper dental care and train local people to become dentists, and you solve the problem for a lifetime.

There is a welcome and growing understanding in public and elite debates that global health is important to U.S. national interests and to our foreign policy.19 But the U.S. government still stands in the way of just and effective global health policies. For instance, a focus on prevention through abstinence, rather than through distribution of condoms or better-funded treatment programs, has hampered efforts todeal with the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. U.S. government concerns about protecting the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies have reduced the impact that generic drugs could have in countries where the sick cannot afford the more expensive medicine.

More importantly, the U.S. government has placed an overwhelming emphasis on increasing financial aid for treatment of specific diseases rather than on developing comprehensive health systems. While money for treatment is critical in addressing the current AIDS crisis, developing countries would benefit more in the long term from a greater emphasis on preventive care and health-care training.

There are models of how to do this. In Haiti, the NGO Partners in Health trains community health workers who distribute AIDS medicine and spread information about preventive care. The United States could also learn a great deal from the Cuban model, which has produced excellent results at far less financial cost by investing in preventive care and training new generations of public health professionals.20 At present, there are 28,000 Cuban doctors in 61 countries, and Cuba has started 11 medical and two nursing schools in other countries. In contrast, according to the World Health Organization, there are 57 countries with critical shortages of public health professionals, adding up to a global deficit of 2.4 million doctors, nurses, and midwives. Both the Partners in Health and the Cuban models of training health care workers are inexpensive and replicable in other nations. Indeed, Partners in Health has adapted their model for Boston.21

The U.S. debate also overlooks the fact that the market fundamentalist approach of the international financial institutions undermines many well-meaning health initiatives. According to the Journal of Health, Population, and Nutrition, World Bank and IMF-promoted spending cuts, such as the elimination of food subsidies, have increased the vulnerability of women and children to the sex trade and hence to HIV/AIDS exposure. Such social spending caps and cuts and the attendant push toward the privatization of health care means that, even in countries with enough doctors, governments can no longer hire them to provide health care for the poor. Although both the Bank and Fund now require borrowing countries to generate poverty reduction strategies, the World Health Organization found that this has not led to significant increases in health spending.22

Underlying this discussion is a fundamental question: is health is a human right? In fact, several countries have written the concept of health as a human right into their constitutions. Most European countries have not done so, but their commitment to national health systems with equitable access for all, which is free at the point of delivery, means that, de facto, they are accepting that proposition. The U.S. government has never accepted the concept that health is a human right either for U.S. citizens or for people anywhere else in the world. Access to health care is considered a marketable commodity to be exploited for profit. Hence, the United States suffers a health care crisis, with over 45 million uninsured citizens. The United States spends more on health care than any other country and yet the quality of care often lags behind that of our industrialized allies.23 The Democrats and Republicans have both largely refused to challenge the insurance companies that maintain a stranglehold over the U.S. system and the pharmaceutical companies that have tried to block the spread of cheaper generic drugs in the global South.

Given a choice, most people would prefer to stay in their home country. People everywhere are fighting for the right to adequate housing, income, security and other basic needs to allow them that choice. But millions in the developing world are forced to leave in search of better opportunities. They leave for many reasons. But the poverty, inequality, and insecurity related to U.S. trade policies are clearly push factors.24

For instance, NAFTA almost certainly contributed to the sharp increase in the number of Mexicans living in the United States without authorization, from two million in 1990 to an estimated 6.2 million in 2005. With barriers to agricultural imports lifted, Mexican farmers have found themselves competing against an influx of cheap, heavily subsidized U.S. agricultural commodities. Facing dire poverty in the Mexican countryside, millions have made the wrenching decision to leave, often crossing the border in the dead of night or putting their fates, and often their life savings, in the hands of smugglers. The phase-out of remaining import barriers on corn and beans in January 2008 is expected to cause a further surge in Mexican migration. And yet neither Congress nor the White House has seriously considered a waiver of that NAFTA requirement.

U.S. politicians are fighting over a wide range of immigration proposals that all have one thing in common. From the muscular plans to deploy National Guard and build extra fencing on the border to the softer guestworker visas and paths to citizenship, they are all purely domestic measures. No one in the debate has acknowledged that reducing poverty, inequality, and joblessness abroad is the only long-term solution to immigration concerns in this country.

A Just Security Alternative

Any program to improve livelihoods must acknowledge the connection between U.S. foreign policy and the lives of U.S. citizens. Rising poverty and inequality in developing countries boomerangs back to hurt Americans in a number of ways. The ever-expanding global pool of desperately poor workers who lack basic labor rights means that U.S. workers face increased competition from cheap imports and job loss to lower wage countries. The U.S. trade deficit has skyrocketed, and the number of Americans employed in manufacturing has declined sharply, from 18 million in 1989 to only slightly more than 14 million in 2006.25 Meanwhile, the growth areas of the U.S. economy are overwhelmingly in the service sector, where wage levels are much lower on average than in manufacturing. Even in the service sector, a wide range of jobs, from X-ray readers to software engineers, are being sent overseas. An estimated 14 million U.S. workers—11% of the workforce—are at risk of being outsourced.26

Moreover, current trade and aid policies encourage the rapid and uncontrolled development of export industries in developing countries. This boomerangs back to hit Americans by contributing to global warming that threatens all of us. Leading developing country exporters all have massive environmental problems related to export-oriented policies. Just as U.S. greenhouse gas emissions hurt Bangladesh, pollution from China's coal-burning power plants, which service the country's booming export industry, is already reaching cities on the West Coast of the United States, making it difficult to meet air quality standards.

When economic policies pushed by the U.S. government make the world's rich richer and the poor poorer, they are not just. And when they have negative effects on U.S. security and welfare, they are ultimately not pragmatic either. A Just Security alternative rests on four pillars. Debt cancellation will allow governments to increase spending on basic services. Reformed trade and investment policies must set a floor for basic labor and environmental standards. Investment must be made into comprehensive health care infrastructure. And we must address the root causes of immigration in developing countries.

Debt and aid

A just security alternative for the global economy should start by answering the Jubilee movement's call for cancellation of impoverished country debts owed to international financial institutions. On average, low-income countries spend about $100 million per day just to pay the interest on their external debts, precious resources that could otherwise go toward health care, education, and other basic services.27 In many cases, these debts were accumulated under dictatorships and have already been repaid through high-interest payments over several decades.

The Bush administration has set an important precedent by supporting debt relief for about 20 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, these offers have come with onerous policy conditions, including rigid budget caps and privatization demands, which could undermine the benefits of debt relief. Moreover, an additional 50 or so countries require immediate debt cancellation if they are to have any hope of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals on poverty reduction.

Lifting these debt burdens will not solve all of the developing world's problems. Efforts to promote social goals through debt cancellation will be vastly more effective if combined with good governance. But even the small amount of debt relief given so far has led to promising results, such as more than doubling school enrollment in Uganda, eliminating fees to allow 1.6 million Tanzanian children to return to school, prompting a 50% increase in education and health spending in 10 African countries, and successfully stabilized HIV rates in Burkina Faso.28

Foreign aid should be largely focused on building strong public health infrastructures and ensuring universal access to primary health care, as well as dealing with natural disasters. It must also be applied to helping developing countries build clean and efficient energy infrastructure. Just as aid programs should be delinked from onerous policy conditions, so too should aid be delinked from any requirements to purchase goods for the United States.

Trade and investment

Further debt cancellation would also loosen the stranglehold that now pressures so many developing countries to attract foreign investment and boost exports by any means necessary. Truly healthy trade and investment relations, however, require a total overhaul of our current trade policies.

The Democrats' proposals to date do not go far enough. Their agenda would require adherence to international labor standards, which is critical. Countries and corporations should not be allowed to compete on the basis of violating basic human rights. But many other changes are needed in our trade laws to make them pro-worker and pro-healthy communities. For example, under global trade rules our trading partners are no longer able to require foreign investors to use a certain amount of local content in their production. Without this provision, job creation and other local benefits are limited. Nor can they impose controls on capital flows, even though such measures have helped insulate countries from devastating financial volatility. NAFTA, CAFTA, and other trade pacts also contribute to high unemployment by stripping governments' authority to protect small farmers from being displaced by unmitigated competition with northern agribusiness.

Thus, while setting a floor for basic labor and environmental rights and standards, our trade and investment laws should also give governments sufficient policy space to pursue their own national economic strategies. This means going further than either the Democrats or Republicans have ventured thus far to allow countries to use trade and investment restrictions to protect sensitive products, like staple foods, or to advance other social and environmental goals. Last year, the Bolivian government prepared a set of guidelines for a "fair trade and cooperation treaty" with the United States.29 This document should be seriously considered as part of a broader dialogue toward a more equitable and sustainable approach to trade. U.S. officials should also use their influence within the World Bank, IMF, and other international financial institutions to end efforts to impose trade liberalization and other free market reforms on developing countries.

Health

On health, the U.S. government, other governments, and private foundations such as the Gates Foundation are pouring tens of billions of dollars into fighting HIV-AIDS and other high-profile diseases. While this is laudatory, there is an urgent need to shift from this almost exclusive emphasis on specific diseases to a far more comprehensive approach that recognizes the interrelationship of health with many other issues raised in this report. Debt cancellation would free precious resources for struggling public health systems. Eliminating World Bank and IMF budget caps for public sector wages would encourage many health workers not to emigrate. Addressing global warming will help to reduce the spike in malaria cases. Access to clean water will reduce diseases such as dysentery that are most important causes of child mortality.

"Many national health systems are weak, unresponsive, and inequitable," notes the World Health Organization.30 At the core of more robust health systems is a massive commitment to public health overall and specifically, to training new public health professionals.31 Africa, with just under a quarter of the global burden of disease, has only 3% of the world's health workers.32 Because of the lack of health workers, combined with weak public health infrastructures (hospitals, clinics, labs), much of the outside infusion of health aid is leaking away. The United States adds to the crisis in another way by recruiting hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses from the Philippines and other poor countries to attend to our aging population.

The challenge remains: how to train sufficient health professionals to meet the population's needs. A large-scale, global plan to train the four million new health workers around the world is the most effective single response to the plagues of HIV-AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Targeting these diseases is the one area where the United States and many other countries have increased their generosity over the past decade. But health expert Laurie Garrett has identified the problem of "stovepiping" that channels aid to specific diseases without any concern for the larger public health infrastructure.33 Countries like Costa Rica and Cuba demonstrate that it is possible to train at relatively low cost massive numbers of health professionals, who then become the lifeblood of vibrant health systems.

Immigration

These debt, trade, finance, and health reforms should be part of a broad agenda to address the root causes of immigration. The European Union offers some important lessons. When Spain and Portugal wanted to join the EU in the 1980s, there was widespread fear in member states that migrants from these poorer countries would flood eastward, stealing jobs and straining public services. Instead of militarizing and fencing the borders, the richer nations focused on leveling the economic playing field through resource transfers and setting common (and high) social and environmental standards. As a result, there was no exodus after borders were opened, and all EU member states benefited from a more cohesive union. While the United States can't expect to copy the EU model, it could apply the same basic principles, beginning with a major initiative developed with our neighbors in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

At the same time, the U.S. government should reduce the economic insecurities that are fueling the anti-immigrant backlash in the United States by strengthening labor laws to protect unions, expanding public health care, and increasing training benefits—particularly for those displaced by economic globalization.

To secure liberty and justice for all—in which people can meet their basic needs and live in a stable, healthy environment—is not just an American dream but a global requirement. The welfare of workers like Karen Chacon in Guatemala is linked to the welfare of workers in Cleveland and Los Angeles and rural South Carolina. As long as she and other brave workers in the developing world are denied their rights and tossed out into labor markets that offer few opportunities to escape grinding poverty, workers here and there will continue to struggle for their fair share of the benefits of a globalized economy.

Endnotes

1. Story of Karen Chacon drawn in part from Peter Goodman, "Labor Rights in Guatemala Aided Little by Trade Deal," The Washington Post, March 16, 2007.
2. Oxfam, "Europe's Double Standards: A Policy Briefing Paper," 2002, p.8. Available at: http://www.oxfam.org/en/files/pp0204/Europes_Double_standards.pdf.
3. "The Economics of Failure: The Real Cost of 'Free' Trade for Poor Countries," A Christian Aid Briefing Paper, London, June 2005, p.1.
4. Dani Rodrik, "Trading in Illusions," Foreign Policy, March/April 2001.
5. On labor, the Democrats are asking for a requirement to comply with the core standards laid out in the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. These include the rights to collective bargaining and freedom of association and protections against workplace discrimination, child labor, and forced labor. On the environment, seven multilateral environmental agreements would be presumed to override the FTA obligations in case of a conflict. These include the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances, the Convention on Marine Pollution, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Convention, the Ramsar Convention on the Wetlands, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, and the Convention on Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources.
6. Floor Statement of U.S. Senator Max Baucus Regarding CAFTA, June 30, 2005.
7. See: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/03/20070313-1.html.
8. James Davies, et. al., "The World Distribution of Household Wealth," United Nations University, December 5, 2006.
9. Sarah Anderson and Sara Grusky, "Challenging Corporate Investor Rule," Institute for Policy Studies and Food and Water Watch, April 2007.
10. Dembe Moussa Dembele, "Debt and Destruction in Senegal: A Study of Twenty Years of IMF and World Bank Policies," World Development Movement, November 2003.
11. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Water Barons (Washington, DC: Public Integrity Books, 2003), pp.54-69.
12. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p.58.
13. See: Forbes, July 18, 1994 and March 15, 2004.
14. Some of the ideas in this section, the aid section, and the alternatives section are further developed in Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, "Hijacking the Development Debate: How Friedman and Sachs Got it Wrong," World Policy Journal, Summer 2006.
15. William Easterly, "Tone Deaf on Africa," The New York Times, July 3, 2005.
16. Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce, Needless Hunger: Voices from a Bangladesh Village (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1979); and, A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village (London: Zed Press; and San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1983).
17. Editorial, "Wrong Fix for Foreign Aid," The New York Times, February 6, 2006.
18. Working paper by CAFOD, Christian Aid, and Eurodad, "Debt and the Millennium Development Goals," September 2003.
19. See the 2001 Council on Foreign Relations/Milbank Memorial Fund study on "Why Health is Important to U.S. Foreign Policy." The lead piece in the January/February 2007 Foreign Affairs reinforces the link of failing health systems overseas with U.S. national security
20. Jerry M.Spiegel, "Commentary: Daring to learn from a good example and break the 'Cuba Taboo,'" International Journal of Epidemiology, 2006, 35; John Harris, "Keeping Cuba Healthy," BBC News, August 1, 2006; Diane Appelbaum, et. al., "Natural and Traditional Medicine in Cuba: Lessons for U.S. Medical Education," Academic Medicine, Vol. 81, No. 12, December 2006.
21. Paul Farmer, "Intelligent Design," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007, p.156.
22. Both studies are cited in the Action Aid report "Changing Course: Alternative Approaches to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals and Fight HIV/AIDS," September 2005.
23. Christopher Lee, "U.S. Lags in Several Areas of Health Care, Study Finds," The Washington Post, November 3, 2006. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110201621.html.
24. Sarah Anderson, Oscar Chacon, and Amy Shannon, "Inviting Immigrants Out of the Shadows," Yes Magazine, Summer 2006.
25. Jared Bernstein and L. Josh Bivens, "Manufacturing on the Ropes," Economic Policy Institute, September 20, 2006.
26. Cynthia Kroll, "Offshore Moves, Outsourcing, and the Bay Area Economy," Bay Area Economic Pulse, Summer 2004.
27. Sarah Anderson and the Global Economic Task Force of the Institute for Policy Studies, "Debt Boomerang: How Americans Would Benefit from the Cancellation of Impoverished Country Debts," Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C., March 6, 2006, p.12. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/boomerang.
28. "Debt Relief Works," Jubilee USA Network Congregations Handbook, February 2006. Available at: http://www.jubileeusa.org.
29. Alliance for Responsible Trade, "Bolivian Government Guidelines for a Fair Trade and Cooperation Treaty with the U.S.," September 2006. Available at: http://www.art-us.org/bolivia_guidelines.
30. World Health Organization, "Working Together for Health," The World Health Report, 2006, p xv.
31. See Laurie Garrett, "Do No Harm: The Global Health Challenge," Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007.
32. World Health Organization, "Working Together for Health," The World Health Report, 2006, pp.xviii, xix.
33. Garrett, p.22.