Peoples' Forum On The Korea-US Free Trade Agreement
Comments from the participants of the June 11 2007 event.
- Christine Ahn is the national coordinator of Korean Americans for Fair
Trade and a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute. She writes
and speaks frequently on trade, globalization, hunger and militarism.
She is the editor of Shafted: Free Trade and America's Working Poor.
Listen >>
- Myoung Ja Ban was elected as the First Vice President of the Korean
Government Employees' Union (KGEU) in February, 2006. She got into
civil service in 1979 and has worked as an official in charge of
sanitization and environment administration in the municipal government
of Kwangju Metropolitan City. However, she had to leave civil service
when she underwent heavy discipline in 2004 as she was among the
leaders who led government employees' trade union activities and has
actively involved from the beginning. Government employees in South
Korean have long been denied their basic labor rights for more than 50
years. When they first organized themselves in 2002, she played a
critical role in organizing women workers as the chairperson of KGEU
women's committee. Although dismissed, BAN is still active in union
activities at workplace level as well serving as vice chair of KGEU
Kwangju Dong-gu District Chapter.
Listen >>
- Sameer Dossani is the Director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for
Global Economic Justice. Sameer has been part of people's movements for
environmental and economic justice in Canada, Australia and Asia, where
he led the campaign against the Asian Development Bank. Sameer
contributes to a number of online news sites such as Foreign Policy in
Focus and Counterpunch.
Listen >>
- Young-Koo Heo was elected as Vice President of the Korean Confederation
of Trade Unions (KCTU), the largest national trade union center in
South Korea, in January 2007. HEO directs working areas around trade
issues, including FTAs, within the KCTU as well as coalition-building
with other social movements on trade and FTA issues. Originally from
the union at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, a government-sponsored
research institute, HEO played a critical role in building the
KCTU-affiliated public services federation, the Korea Federation of
Public Services and Transportation Workers' Unions. A respected and
longtime leader in not only the public sector but also the overall
democratic workers' movement in Korea, HEO served as the 1993-1994
chair of the executive committee that paved the way for the founding of
the KCTU. On the strong support of KCTU members, HEO was elected Vice
President in the first, second, and third KCTU executives prior to his
most recent election in January 2007.
Listen >>
- Michael Greger, M.D. is Director of Public Health and Animal
Agriculture at The Humane Society of the United States. An
internationally recognized lecturer, he has presented at the Conference
on World Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bird Flu
Summit, among countless other symposia and institutions, and was
invited as an expert witness in defense of Oprah Winfrey at the
infamous "meat defamation" trial. Dr. Greger is a graduate of the
Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University
School of Medicine.
Listen >>
- Thea Lee is Policy Director at the AFL-CIO, where she oversees research
and strategies on domestic and international economic policy.
Previously, she worked as an international trade economist at the
Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. and as an editor at
Dollars & Sense magazine in Boston. She received a Bachelors degree
from Smith College and a Masters degree in economics from the
University of Michigan. Ms. Lee is co-author of A Field Guide to the
Global Economy, published by the New Press. Her research projects
include reports on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on the
impact of international trade on U.S. wage inequality, and on the
domestic steel and textile industries. She has testified before several
committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate on
various trade topics. She serves on several advisory committees,
including the State Department Advisory Committee on International
Economic Policy and the Export-Import Bank Advisory Committee. She is
also on the Board of Directors of the Worker Rights Consortium, United
for a Fair Economy, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Listen >>
- Tom Loudon is the Director of the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART),
a national network of labor, family-farm, religious, women's,
environmental, development and research organizations that promotes
equitable and sustainable trade and development. ART is the
representative coalition to the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), a
hemispheric wide organization of coalitions challenging the dominant
models of power.
Listen >>
- Douglas S. Meyer is the Deputy Director of International and Government
Affairs at the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement
Workers of America (UAW). The UAW is one of the largest and most
diverse unions in North America, with members in virtually every sector
of the economy. UAW-represented workplaces range from multinational
corporations, small manufacturers and state and local governments to
colleges and universities, hospitals and private non-profit
organizations. The UAW has approximately 640,000 active members and
over 500,000 retired members in the United States, Canada and Puerto
Rico.
Listen >>
- Mike Palmedo is the Research Coordinator for the Program on Information
Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) at American University's
Washington College of Law, a program promoting social justice in law
governing intellectual property. Much of his work focuses on trade
agreements affecting drug prices and access to medicines, as well as
trade pressures by the US government and drug industry on nations
seeking to expand access to lower-cost generics. From 2000 to 2006,
Mike Palmedo worked as an advocate at Knowledge Ecology International
(then called the Consumer Project on Technology), winner of the
MacArthur Award for Creative Institutions for its influence on the
access to medicines debate. He has advised policy makers in the US and
abroad on international trade rules governing drug patents, sui generis
data protection, and licensing. He has pressed for greater access to
medicine at multinational fora such as the World Trade Organization and
the World Health Organization. Additionally, he has researched domestic
drug policies affecting drug pricing at home and advocated for changes
to laws here that block generic competion.
Listen >>
- Geun-Tae Park was elected to the national leadership of the Korean
Metal Workers' Union (KMWU), the biggest union in South Korea, in
February 2007 from the ranks of the Hyundai Motors union members.
Before serving as KMWU National Vice-President in charge of activities
relating to the Kor-US FTA, at Hyundai Motors he had previously served
as a shopfloor union representative, a local union steering committee
member, and the local union chair of the Namyang section which
represents mostly the workers at Hyundai Motors research and
development center.
Listen >>
- Yvette Pena-Lopes is the Legislative Affairs Director of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union with over 1.4 million
members.
Listen >>
- Sofia Plagakis works as Program Associate for the Trade and Sustainable
Development program of the Center for International Environmental Law.
Prior to CIEL, Sofia worked as Associate Editor for the World Bank's
Environment Matters (2004 edition). She was also a Research Assistant
at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, where she worked on the implementation of the Aarhus
Convention and access to information laws in the former Soviet
republics.
Listen >>
- Seo Joon Seop is Deputy Director of Policy Planning and Research Team
of the Korean Alliance against Korea-U.S. FTA (KoA). He has been
conducting analysis of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement for both
policymakers and social movements.
Listen >>
- David Waskow is the International Program Director at Friends of the
Earth, a national environmental organization dedicated to preserving
the health and diversity of the planet for future generations.
Listen >>
|
|
