SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 9, 2011 — Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch in Washington, D.C. and a worldwide leader of the effort to shape globalization and international trade to meet human needs, will be a featured speaker Nov. 15 at Santa Clara University School of Law’s Center for Global Law and Policy.
Wallach will speak from noon to 1 p.m. in Santa Clara University’s Bannan Hall Room 135. Her talk is entitled “From the ‘Battle of Seattle” to ‘Occupy Wall Street’ – ‘Free Trade’ as a tool of global corporate power." The event is open to the public.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Wallach helped organize both the effort to block passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and the anti-globalization movement that peaked at the Seattle WTO meetings in 1999. Her work on the free-trade issue led the Wall Street Journal to describe her as “Ralph Nader with a sense of humor.” Global Trade Watch is part of Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group founded by Nader.
Wallach is the co-author of Whose Trade Organization? Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy, published by Public Citizens Group in 1999. She represents Public Citizen in promoting the public interest in international commercial agreements in every forum: the U.S. Congress, courts, and government agencies; other nations’ parliaments and governments; international institutions; and in the news media.
“The work that Lori Wallach has done over many years has helped lay the groundwork for today’s protests about inequality such as Occupy Wall Street,” said Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Stephen Diamond, who is helping to organize the event. “Her perspective is a welcome contrast to the conventional Silicon Valley wisdom that ‘free trade’ is really free. In fact, it has significant social and human costs.”
Wallach has worked closely with congressional, environmental, labor and other allies and with an international network of citizens’ groups to foster a debate about globalization and its effects on jobs and wages, the environment, public health and safety, and democratically accountable governance. Most recently she was active in lobbying to shape the new bilateral free trade agreements between the United States and South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
