Free Trade and Investment

A Peoples Guide to PACER
Prof Jane Kelsey (PDF file)

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Their Hands in Our Pockets
UK accounting professor bemoans capitalist morality
Prem Sikka, The Tribune

New Treaties Establish Special Relationship
Australia begins to replace the UK as US partner in Asia
Ashok Kapur, The Record

Don't Flog off Auckland Airport
TranzRail was a train wreck (quite literally, in some cases) and an object lesson on why vital transport infrastructure needs to be kept in New Zealand public ownership. Hands off Auckland Airport!
by Murray Horton, CAFCA Media Release

WTO Talks Go Round in Circles
Senior officials of the G4 - Brazil, the European Union, India and the United States - are meeting in Paris, Monday to Wednesday (2-4 April), in a renewed attempt to better understand one another's positions.
by Martin Khor, SUNS

Private Equity 'a Plague of Locusts'
Suddenly Britain has woken up to the power of private equity - clinically selling off assets, slashing costs and jobs to boost short-term profits and fuel massive windfalls. It now employs about one in five people in the private sector.
by Nick Mathiason, Observer

Gaddafi says fear drives world economic system
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi criticized the world financial system as a dictatorship based on fear on Friday but said Libya's only pragmatic choice after sanctions was to accept the unfair reality of world trade.
By William MacLean, Reuters

Not Under the Same Sky
Bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), Agriculture and Food Sovereignty
an initial report on the spread of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) throughout the Asia-Pacific and their impacts on agriculture and food sovereignty, in the context of the current state of play of the WTO, and the devastating legacy of agricultural liberalization through World Bank/International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programme.
Link to a report by Aziz Choudry

The Recolonization of NZ
Waitangi Day is the appropriate date to reflect on colonization. Because, although we are no longer formally a colony, New Zealand is being relentlessly recolonized. Not by any nation state but by the modern colonizers, transnational corporations (TNCs), many of which are bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of NZ and exercise much more power in this country than the elected government.
Murray Horton, CAFCA

Crude Designs: The Rip-off of Iraq's Oil Wealth
While the Iraqi people struggle to define their future amid political chaos and violence, the fate of their most valuable economic asset, oil, is being decided behind closed doors.
(Exec Summary of and link to) Major report from Unravelling the Carbon Web

ALBA: Venezuela's Answer to Free Trade
The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) represents the first attempt at regional integration that is not based primarily on trade liberalization but on a new vision of social welfare and equity. Alternatives are often either theoretical to the point of impracticality, or so micro that scaling up presents huge challenges; ALBA is both large-scale and, to an increasing degree, taking concrete shape. While many aspects of the project are still unrealized or only in the process of realization, and despite some apparent contradictions between theory and practice, ALBA is an important case study
Diego Azzi and David Harris, Focus on the Global South