They say that if you get up in the morning and swallow a live toad, nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. Well, we Americans have just been fed a live toad by the World Trade Organization.
Last May, the WTO – an oligarchic, autocratic governing entity essentially run by and for multinational corporations – ruled that a US consumer protection law called “COOL” violates one of WTO’s obscure trade rules. COOL stands for “country-of-origin labeling,” a straight-forward requirement that meat sold in the US be labeled so consumers can know where it came from.
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This was passed by our Congress, signed by our president, upheld by our courts, and is supported by 92 percent of our people. But corporate meat processors in Canada and Mexico (including US meat conglomerates with operations there) do not want you and me to know this basic information. So they got Canadian and Mexican government officials to do an end run around our sovereign people and government by filing a claim against COOL in this shadowy corporate trade organization. WTO’s May ruling dutifully put the profits of these few global meat purveyors over the democratic will of some 300 million Americans – COOL must go, decreed these faceless, unelected servants of the corporate order.
Now for today’s toad. To enforce this demand, the WTO dictated on December 7th (Ironically, Pearl Harbor Day) that Canada and Mexico may now punish us by imposing import bans against products we make. How big is this toad? It bans more than a billion dollars a year in foreign sales of US products – unless and until Congress guts our people’s consumer labeling law.
Who’s in charge here? Why are our congress critters and president meekly swallowing this? For answers and action, go to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch: www.citizen.org/trade/.
“WTO Authorizes Over $1 Billion in Sanctions Unless U.S. Guts Popular Country-of-Origin Meat Labels,” www.commondreams.org, December 7, 2015.
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