Wednesday, April 28, 2004
KickAas has mentioned the WTO ruling in this article:kickAAS: The WTO slams cotton subsidies:

"But hang on – isn’t this the same US administration which, according to an exclusive story in the Guardian today is claiming $1.8 billion through the WTO in compensation for the loss of exports to the European Union because of the latter’s ban on genetically modified crops? What was that about having your (subsidized) cake and eating it?"

At least some of us are addressing this issue. A general silence pervades over this issue in much of the leftist blogging out there. It would seem that either many leftist Americans do not follow international trade enough to comment on this, or do not consider world poverty an important enough issue to address. The impact on world poverty from unfair trading has been well documented and well discussed (see, for example, any report from the UN Economic Committee on Latin America and the Caribbean); but many private individuals do not seem to have understood the impact this has on average citizens throughout the world.

Talking about it is the only way to counter this lack of information.

Do most leftists concentrate only on domestic policies?
International criticism would make it seem so. After all, many international observers have pointed out that whether democrats or republicans are in power, American foreign policy remains much the same. And most Americans remain unaware of this.

This is a decision that affects millions of lives of people in the world, and has the potential to help fight world poverty in the long run. But international issues like this seldom figure in leftist American blogs. All too often, attention is directed at domestic issues only, and foreign policy -- the major qualm the world has with the US -- remains in obscurity.

Several wonderful sites have surged as a response to this. Some examples are American Amnesia or Kick Aas.

But overall this information gap when it comes to international politics has yet to be bridged

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