WTO

It is being reported that tainted food from Fukushima, Ibaraki, Gumma, and Chiba is making its way into local supermarkets in Taiwan due to the irresponsibility of mislabeling. What’s more, these food products were banned in Taiwan since March of 2011.
The first question is: Why are food products from the concerned Japanese prefectures surrounding Fukushima mislabelled?
The second question is: Why is Japan attempting to foist its unsafe and inferior radioactive foods on Taiwan?

As it turns out, Jean Ziegler – author, lecturer, and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 2000-2008 – writes a far more concise review of Yash Tandon’s latest book, Trade is War, than I can. Fortunately for me you’ll have to buy the book to read Ziegler’s powerful assessment as it serves as the preface to Tandon’s vital, timely, and unflinching chronicle of world trade as one of the West’s most violent weapons used in its tireless campaign of imperial warfare on the global South.

The pro-big business President Barack Obama and his corporate allies are starting their campaign to manipulate and pressure Congress to ram through the “pull-down-on-America” Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and foreign investment treaty between twelve nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam).

By COLIN TODHUNTER | CounterPunch | April 3, 2015 Prior to last year’s national elections in India, there were calls for a Thatcherite revolution to fast-track the country towards privatisation and neo-liberalism. Under successive Thatcher-led governments in the eighties, however, inequalities skyrocketed in Britain and economic growth was no better than in the seventies. Traditional manufacturing was decimated […]

RT | September 18, 2014 President Vladimir Putin has said that sanctions against Russia directly violate World Trade Organization (WTO) principles, and that Russia will continue to defend its economy with protective measures. The sanctions violate the main principles of equal access for all WTO members to economic activity and access to goods and services […]

It seems we in the west no longer believe in ourselves, and our capacity to generate prosperity for all. Is this surprising given the dismal state of the European and American economies? In other words, since the 2008 financial crash people around the world but especially in Europe and America, don’t see the future as being any better for the next generation. There is a loss of trust in the system itself it seems. In this sense 2013 is the year Globalisation has gone bust.

Trading Away the Future

By Flynt Leverett & Hillary Mann Leverett | The Hindu | May 6, 2013

By once again blowing the chance to close a nuclear deal with Iran, the U.S. and its western partners have set themselves up for escalating the conflict with the Islamic republic