Word: frees
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Trade negotiations? Oh, please--wake us when it's over. Tariffs. Subsidies. Antidumping measures. Multilateral investment agreements. The eyes glaze over. Even free trade's First Cheerleader, Bill Clinton, confesses that most people think the World Trade Organization is "some rich guys' club where people get in, talk in funny language and make a bunch of rules that help the people that already have and stick it to the people that have...
...abstract, free trade is feel-good fellowship. Trash the tariffs and, globally, consumers profit from lower prices. Political enemies turn into economic friends--who trades together plays together. In the half-century since the WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was founded with 23 members, worldwide trade has expanded some 15-fold, to $6.5 trillion. As the world's largest exporter and importer, the U.S. owes nearly a third of its economic growth in the past decade to trade. "Cooperation is not a choice," says Mike Moore, the onetime meatpacker and New Zealand Prime Minister...
...very least, it could be good theater. Earlier this month, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, in Seattle to drum up support for free trade, was picketed by steelworkers, antinuclear activists, Free Burma advocates--and Anne Kirkham, 26, of the Bicycle Alliance of Washington. "I'm a bicycle activist, but it's all one big thing--globalism, urban sprawl, pollution," she explained. "It's about corporate greed...
...pays $1.50 for ATM cash often pays his own bank a $1-to-$2 fee for the same transaction. Such fees more than cover the cost of the transaction, which opponents put at 27[cents] per withdrawal. Says Santa Monica's Feinstein: "The banks say there is no free lunch for a service, when in fact they are asking us to pay twice for lunch...
Bankers justify the charges by noting that most banks provide ATMs free to their own customers and thus must find some other way to recover the cost of deploying the machines. "In San Francisco," says Bank of America spokesman Peter Magnani, "there is no charge 80% of the time when someone puts a card in a B. of A. machine." Moreover, he says, the cost of the transaction is just a small part of the bank's expenses, which include purchasing, installing and maintaining the machines as well as paying rent at nonbank locations. "Banks are being singled...