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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

"When it comes to trade policy, political influence often trumps economic logic. Greg Rushford does a marvelous job at getting the inside story on the politics of trade policy and exposing those seeking special political favors. The Rushford Report provides an important public service and his investigations often yield astounding stories. The Report provides the specific examples of trade politics in action that enliven the classroom discussion, and wake students up to political reality."
---Douglas Irwin, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College

"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.

"While there are many publications that report on international trade issues, most of these offer only quick summaries of trade disputes and regulations. The Rushford Report is a unique voice in the international trade world, digging deep to find the real story behind the headlines. Simply put, the insights and perspective provided by the Rushford Report are not available anywhere else."
---Simon Lester. A former lawyer with the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva, Mr. Lester is currently president of WorldTradeLaw.net. LLC, which analyzes WTO dispute-resolution panel rulings.

Read More . . .

Dear Reader,

Veteran Washington investigative reporter 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, which loves to bash foreign competitors while buying all the cheap foreign raw materials--including steel--that it can find for itself. Another regular theme of Rushford's writing involves the arch-protectionist U.S. textile lobby, members of which stay up late at night working on schemes to drive up the cost of clothing for all Americans.

Of course, Rushford follows 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.

His targets are bipartisan, as both Democrats and Republicans accomodate protectionist lobbies. He also frequently lampoons corporate special pleaders, and has been critical of big business for failing to put necessary effort into explaining the benefits of international trade to the American public.

As a senior reporter for Legal Times, Rushford frequently analyzes trade litigation before the U.S. Court of Inteternational Trade in New York. He also follows the World Trade Organization dispute resolution cases.

Rushford has frequently exposed the inner workings of the U.S. antidumping regime, documenting from the Commerce Department’s 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 everyone’s 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.

Rushford’s 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 Clinton’s 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 Organization’s 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 Organization’s efforts to promote multilateral trade liberalization. Rushford calls these FTAs “Bush’s 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 today’s 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. John’s 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