Dear Reader,
Veteran Washington journalist Greg Rushford launched The Rushford Report, which specializes in the politics of international trade and finance, in January 1995. I believed that there was a need for journalists who write about international economic issues to explain the connections between trade, national security, and foreign policy, he recalls. I was also convinced that journalism needed at least one reporter whose basic job was to go around turning over protectionist rocks.Over the years, Rushford has overturned his share of such rocks, usually to be found in power centers that lobbyists and lawyers for special pleaders tend to frequent -- on Capital Hill, along K Street, inside the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Commerce Department, and the U.S. International Trade Commission. He has paid particular attention to the protectionist U.S. steel lobby, the textile lobby, and the usual subsidized suspects in the increasingly protectionist-minded American farm lobby. Rushford has also written a series of articles on anti-globalist activists, observing that many of the same critics who accuse the World Bank and the World Trade Organization of being non-transparent refuse repeated inquiries about the sources of their own financing.
Rushford has frequently exposed the inner workings of the U.S. antidumping regime, documenting from the Commerce Departments internal files how federal officials have used (and often abused) the discretionary powers afforded to them by U.S. trade laws to drive up the prices for American consumers of a long litany of products that are in everyones daily lives, ranging from softwood lumber from Canada to tomatoes from Mexico, salmon from Chile, ball bearings from France, and steel from everywhere. In recent years, many of these imports have come from China: bedroom furniture, the crawfish that goes into jambalaya, shrimp, apple-juice concentrate, school notebooks and backpacks -- even a chemical called sebacic acid that puts the bristle in Americans toothbrushes.
Rushfords reporting over the years has often broken new ground as he looks beyond daily headlines for trends. In the mid-1990s, he was the first American journalist to warn that President Bill Clintons threats to impose prohibitive tariffs on Japanese auto imports at the behest of lobbyists from Detroit were causing strains in the vital U.S.-Japanese security relationship. In 1999, in the months before the now-famous acrimonious collapse of the World Trade Organizations ministerial meetings in Seattle, Rushford reported on how the Clinton administration, with a compliant U.S. business community in tow, was setting the stage for failure.
More recently, Rushford has written a series of articles that explain how the administration of President George W. Bush has made a radical departure from traditional U.S. trade policy by negotiating a series of bilateral, trade-distorting deals with junior American trading partners. These so-called Free Trade Agreements are better known to mainstream economists as Preferential Trade Agreements, as they distort global trade patterns and tend to weaken the U.S. commitment to the World Trade Organizations efforts to promote multilateral trade liberalization. Rushford calls these FTAs Bushs economic coalition of the willing.
Rushford is also a contributor to several magazines: the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Milken Institute Review, and Seafood Business. He has also been contributing columns to newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and its Asian and European editions, for more than a decade. Rushford travels frequently, and has filed reports from such international datelines as Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, Bangkok, Hanoi, Havana, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Guatemala, Cancun, Quebec, Geneva, and Dominica.
Before he began his own publication, Rushford was a senior reporter for Legal Times from 1987-94, where he focused on how Washington lawyers and lobbyists joust to influence trade policy. He is the author of Appointments with Power (Legal Times Books, 1994), which profiled 80 key officials in the first Clinton administration. Earlier in his career, Rushford worked on Capitol Hill, specializing in foreign affairs and national security issues. In 1975-76 he was an investigator for the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and probed a subject that is still very much in todays headlines: intelligence failures fueled by a combination of bureaucracy and political pressures upon the CIA from the White House.
As an undergraduate
in the 1960s, Rushford studied history and international affairs; he is a
1969 graduate of American University. Rushford also served in the U.S. Air
Force in Korea, and did graduate work at St. Johns Law School and George
Washington University. Today, he and his wife live in Rappahannock County,
Virginia, which is in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 75 miles
west of downtown Washington, D.C
What People Say About
The Rushford Report"Greg Rushford's newsletter is a remarkable achievement. Every month, we get in its eight pages stories that blend first-rate investigative reporting with an admirable grasp of economic principles way beyond that on display in the USTR or Commerce. I use the newsletter more than any source to teach my students about trade policy in the real world: The Rushford Report is a national treasure."
---Jagdish Bhagwati, Professor of Economics, Columbia University."On trade, Greg Rushford has the story---and with an attitude. I like both. From a free trader's point of view, nothing tops The Rushford Report.
---Bruce Ramsey, editorial columnist, The Seattle Times"Rushford is the zestiest, hardest-hitting trade policy writer in the business. His work leaves rows of wailing bureaucrats and lobbyists in its wake."
---James Bovard, author of The Fair Trade Fraud."The Rushford Report has less credibility than the National Lampoon."
---anti-globalist activist Lori Wallach, reacting to a Rushford Report article that lampooned her role in misrepresenting a WTO dispute-resolution panel finding against the United States and the "Big Oil" lobby.