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News: Human Rights |
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Sell-by date of war crimes about to expire in Somerville, MA? |
Submitted by: TimL / 17 Nov 2004
Publisher: Tom Wallace, The Electronic Intifada, 16 November 2004
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Tension and apprehension filled the air in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts on the night of Monday November 8, 2004. The Somerville Board of Aldermen held a public meeting to consider a non-binding resolution to divest from Israel bonds and from companies who profit from the human rights abuses carried out by Israel against Palestinian people. If it passes, it will be the first such resolution in the world to be passed by a city. The Presbyterian Church and the National Lawyers Guild have already voted to divest and The Anglican Church is considering it.
Companies targeted include Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin Corporation. Caterpillar has been the target of numerous boycott campaigns since American Rachel Corrie was killed by a D-9 bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier. She was trying to protect the home of a Palestinian pharmacist from demolition at the time. Caterpillar's D-9 is used by Israel to destroy homes (sometimes with people still inside). It is also used to destroy land, uproot olive trees and build the so-called separation barrier/apartheid wall. When complete, the wall may appropriate up to 45% of the occupied West Bank, including much of its most arable land and water resources.
For the past 18 months, the Somerville Divestment Project (SPD) has been educating residents of Somerville, Massachusetts about the 37-year long Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem. SDP members have knocked on doors, stood outside mass transit stations, hosted film nights, and had individual meetings with many Aldermen in their homes. Through the process, they collected almost 1,200 signatures in support of the Socially Responsible Investment resolution.
Their hard work paid off last week when, on Tuesday, November 2, eight of eleven Aldermen cosponsored the resolution to divest. Though it almost passed, the resolution was sent to the Legislative committee for further discussion. Thus the hearing for Monday, Nov. 8 was set and the Aldermen invited the Israeli Consul General and representatives of the companies whose stock would be sold to present their case.
Hundreds filled the chamber Monday night as tension mounted. Supporters of the resolution held small signs that read "Somerville for Human Rights". There was extra security at city hall and absolutely no backpacks were allowed into the building. The Israeli Consulate arrived with a police detail for body guards.
The hearing began with a display of power by opponents of the resolution that was clearly designed to intimidate the Aldermen. The Israeli Consul General, the Mayor of Somerville and State Rep. Tim Twomey expressed their opposition before the actual hearing began. Following this display there was one hour for each side to present speakers at 2 minutes each.
Supporters of the resolution, excited by the possibilities raised by such a hearing, were cautiously optimistic about the prospects of success. Opponents were incensed that such a hearing was taking place at all, that the Aldermen would even consider divesting from Israel, and that it almost passed the week before.
The Israeli Consul General, Meir Shlomo, began by saying that he was "insulted" by this resolution. "Israel is a country that was based and founded on social justice and respect for human rights". He touted Israel's sterling record on civil liberties, which he boasted, extended to gay people. On several occasions he noted its freedom of the press. He talked about the Israeli Supreme Court, freedom of speech, and reiterated Israel's claim to be the only democracy in the Middle East. He did not talk about occupation, collective punishment, house demolition, land confiscation, settlement expansion or targeted assassinations, except to reassure the crowd that Israel has no Capitol punishment, even for the worst terrorists.
As far as I could ascertain, his case against the resolution was that Israel was being singled out unfairly. Others would assert that it was anti-Israel.
Next up was Somerville Mayor, Joseph A. Curtatone, who had not participated in any of the previous meetings on divestment and who had declined opportunities to meet with Somerville residents and members of SDP to discuss the resolution. Mayor Curtatone concluded that the issue was "too complex", that it "went back centuries" and that the aldermen should reject the resolution. With emotions already high, those opposing the resolution seemed exhilarated by the mayor's guarantee that he would veto the resolution if it passed. The mayor then left before hearing from supporters of the resolution.
As Somerville residents spoke one after the other Monday night, they made clear that they do not want their money used to oppress and violate the human rights of others. Neither do they want to support companies that profit from those violations.
State Representative Tim Twomey called for a more constructive resolution that endorses the roadmap. But he made no suggestion as to what the City of Somerville could do to push the roadmap forward. Ariel Sharon's senior advisor Dov Weissglass recently put to rest any notion that Israel had any intention of implementing the roadmap or creating a Palestinian State, which the roadmap calls for.
The aldermen have wrangled with these types of issues before when they passed resolutions against Burma, the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq However, never had they encountered such support for human rights violations. As one opponent of the resolution put it, "according to Donald Rumsfeld, the United States has determined that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to its war on terror, why should Israel be obliged to abide by them?"
More opposition to the resolution came from local labor leaders and from leaders of Brit Tzedek and Meretz USA. They claimed that the resolution would "demonize" Israel and once again we heard that Israel was being singled out unfairly. Steve Grossman, the local head of the Anti Defamation League (ADL) and former head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which is currently under investigation for passing American top secret material to Israel, claimed that the resolution was anti-Semitic. Others went so far as to call for an investigation of SDP members.
Marty Federman, a Jewish educator and former board member and chair of the Social Action Committee of Congregation B'nai Brith in Somerville, pointed out that tactics including accusations of anti-semitism and personal attacks are commonly used against anyone who dares to speak out against policies of the Israeli government. He strongly supported the resolution based on its merits.
Larry Miller is a former president of Congregation B'nai B'rith, a congregation well represented on both sides. The outpouring highlights the deep divisions created by the issue within the community.
Mr. Miller was embarrassed by accusations of "anti-Semitism" by some of his friends toward people who support divestment. He told them that they should be ashamed of themselves. With that, supporters erupted with applause while Dr. Annique Kaplan, another of the Jewish supporters of the resolution, shouted "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for saying that"!
As supporters of the resolution spoke, the actual issues surrounding it began to focus. First and foremost, the only foreign country that the City of Somerville is invested in is Israel. Thus, Israel had been "singled out" and given "special treatment" long ago. The purpose of this resolution, Liz Monin pointed out, was in fact to end the special treatment and demand that Somerville stop taking sides. She dispelled the claims that the resolution was "one-sided," by quoting from the language of the resolution which she said "seeks to stop taking sides and instead take a stand for human rights for all people".
The atmosphere in the room began to shift as proponents of the resolution and therefore of divestment, spoke eloquently about why they had become involved with the project. We began to hear about human rights violations and the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli army and government. They explained why they support socially responsible investing.
Somerville resident Kevin Qazilbash spoke about the effects of collective punishment on children, and he said that, as a father and a teacher, he could not look his students in the eyes if he was not doing everything he can to work to end the violence against innocent Palestinian civilians. Qazilbash also made the point that he is against the violence perpetrated by both sides of the conflict, as did many people from the other side.
Hilary Rantisi, a Palestinian American now living in Somerville with her American husband, spoke in a very personal way about her family and about her life. She acknowledged that as painful as her story sounded, that she has been privileged. Many more Palestinians have suffered much more than she. Many more continue to suffer. We met 15-year-old Khalil, who is an exchange student presently living outside of Boston. When home in Gaza City he cannot visit family members living just 18 miles away due to roadblocks and curfew. Several of his cousins have been killed over the past year and he was unable to attend their funerals. Just last week, his 16-year-old cousin, Hanin, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper while she played with her little brother inside her house. She died instantly.
Lana Habash, another Palestinian American and Somerville resident spoke of the racism upon which the occupation is based. Last summer she traveled to the West Bank as an International. She relayed her eyewitness account of an Israeli soldier who shot a young Palestinian woman in the stomach and genitals right in front of her. "If this is what they do in front of us, you can only imagine what they are doing when we're not looking," said Habash.
Almost all of the speakers supporting the resolution, both Jewish and gentile alike, had in fact, traveled to the West Bank and witnessed first hand the "horror" of occupation. The only opponent who had been to the Occupied Territories was a former Israeli soldier who claimed that any killings of children or civilians were "mistakes". Meir Schlomo had also acknowledged that "mistakes" are made by democracies but claimed Israel second to none in rectifying them. He did not cite any examples of such rectification.
Shamai Leibowitz, an Israeli attorney who had come in support of the resolution, quickly dispelled that myth. He recounted that as a young Israeli soldier he was ordered to commit war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. "My platoon meted out collective punishment on whole Palestinian communities, arrested and detained Palestinians without charge, demolished their homes, shot live ammunition at unarmed civilians, killed women and children, and arbitrarily destroyed crops and property". Leibowitz now refuses to serve in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
As a former Israeli soldier and an Orthodox Jew, Leibowitz felt compelled to emphasize the urgent need for divestment. "The flow of money that facilitates Israeli war crimes and gross human rights violations which have been going on for nearly 40 years in the Occupied Palestinian Territories must be stopped". He, like many others, made the point that "only through divestment will Israel be forced to end the occupation and therefore achieve peace and security for both Israel and Palestine".
During the hearing last week, five of the aldermen thanked the SDP for bringing the plight of the Palestinian people to their attention. They had known little about the issue. Many of the people in the room on Monday had probably never listened to such impassioned and honest descriptions of the West Bank and Gaza, or heard an honest explanation of why divestment is important.
When I got up to speak, I addressed the question of why the aldermen had known so little about the issue. I explained how the media works in the US on this issue, that after 22 years of badgering by CAMERA and now "Honest Reporting" as well, the US media is afraid to report on anything Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza. Just last week, international observers watched as CNN filmed an Israeli soldier shoot a Palestinian child who was throwing rocks. CNN refused to air the footage or even talk about it. I also told the crowd that "because of this experience you no longer have the luxury of ignorance. Now that you know what is being done with your money, you have a responsibility to stop it, to approve the resolution and support responsible investing".
As if to underscore my point on media bias, the Boston Globe ran a story Tuesday, November 9, entitled "Proposal to Divest Israel Funds Sparks Outrage". Roughly 80% of this story was on the opposition to the resolution. The author, Benjamin Geden, does not even appear to have read the resolution.
The vote has been put off until Dec.9 , 2004. No doubt, attempts to influence the Aldermen by both sides of the issue will continue. Regardless of the outcome, people had a real opportunity to hear each other, not a common occurrence on this issue. Nancy Murray of Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights saw this night as a watershed in the struggle for peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis. Let's hope so.
Related Links
BY TOPIC: Divestment and Boycott
Tom Wallace is the former Media Coordinator for the International Solidarity Movement, and the Executive Director of MidEast Focus, a communications awareness project. Contributions can be made to Somerville Divestment Project, PO Box 441259, Somerville, MA 02144, USA, or visit our website at www.divestmentproject.org and click the 'Contributions' button. |
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News: Globalization : Labor |
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Over 400,000 jobs to shift overseas this year- full report |
Submitted by: John Henry / 16 Nov 2004
Publisher: Cornell U
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ITHACA, N.Y. -- A just-released report to a bipartisan Congressional commission documented 48,417 U.S. jobs outsourced to other countries or publicly announced as being scheduled for outsourcing, from January through March 2004. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had reported that only 4,633 private-sector jobs in companies with more than 50 employees were lost during that time period, a gross underestimation, warn the report's authors.
The new report is from two labor experts at Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who obtained their information through online tracking of media reports, corporate research and the creation of a database of information on all production shifts announced or confirmed in the media. Their report was commissioned by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which sought the information because there is no government-mandated reporting system to track production shifts from the United States to other countries.
The authors believe their methodology only captures one-third of all production shifts in most cases, which, if true, would bring the actual number of jobs lost to outsourcing in 2004 to 406,000 by year's end, compared with 204,000 in 2001. "We know we're not capturing all the numbers because companies are wary about the negative publicity and often don't share it fully with reporters," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and co-author of the study, along with Stephanie Luce, research director and assistant professor at U.Mass.-Amherst.
The researchers, who also studied U.S. job outsourcing from Oct. 2000 through April 2001 for a predecessor commission of the bipartisan Congressional group, saw these important differences in their new, 2004 study:
(linked story includes link to full pdf) |
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News: Globalization : Labor |
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Osram lighting factory in Maine moves to Czech Republic, eliminates 130 jobs |
Submitted by: Woody Guthrie / 16 Nov 2004
Publisher: Boston Globe
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WALDOBORO, Maine -- Osram Sylvania said Tuesday it plans to phase out production at its factory in Waldoboro by next September, putting 130 people out of work.
The company said global competition was forcing it to shift most of the plant's production to the Czech Republic, where labor costs are cheaper. Some of the work will be moved to Osram Sylvania plants in New Hampshire and Kentucky.
The announcement came two years after the company said it was closing its Bangor plant, which had 97 workers, and moving its production to Mexico.
Citing the fate of the Bangor plant, employees at Waldoboro said elimination of their jobs came as no surprise.
Osram Sylvania said it will provide workers with severance pay and continue health insurance coverage for a period of time. |
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News: Technology |
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Mozilla takes bite out of microsoft |
Submitted by: Sneeky / 16 Nov 2004
Publisher: Salon.com
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Nov. 16, 2004 Â |Â To misquote F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of software projects.
Oh sure, the developers sometimes move on to bigger and better things. When it comes to the created works, however, the trajectory is depressingly consistent: Functional simplicity gives way to feature bloat, followed by brittleness, unreliability and, barring certain monopoly-friendly market conditions, oblivion.
For the bulk of its six-year existence, the Mozilla project has been the unwitting victim and symbol of this truism. Like Jacob Marley's ghost in "A Christmas Carol," the open-source browser seemed doomed to bear the sinful weight of its earlier, proprietary incarnation -- Netscape Communicator -- for eternity.
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A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion, however. With no employer to guide them and no market to punish them, Mozilla developers stubbornly kept plugging. After delivering a stable 1.0 release of its Mozilla suite of applications (including a browser and a mail client) in 2002, four years after the project's launch and about two years beyond initial estimates, they proposed an even more ambitious, ground-up overhaul of the underlying source code. Given the steady half-decade flameout of the original Netscape user population, developers went with the obvious code name: Phoenix.
"Team members wanted to do a reset," says Mozilla engineering director Chris Hofmann, looking back.
The end result has been arguably the biggest comeback story in software development since Steve Jobs retook the helm at Apple. Trademark issues have forced the Mozilla team to redesignate the project Firefox, but the browser itself has met few obstacles. The 0.9 version, released over the summer, registered more than 5 million downloads. WebSideStory, a Web analytics company, puts the combined October Mozilla-Firefox market share at 6 percent, a 71 percent jump over June market share. To cap it all off, the Mozilla Foundation, official overseer of the project since its spinout from Netscape last year, officially released the 1.0 version on Tuesday, Nov. 9, and has set itself a 10 percent market share target by the end of the year.
"This is a first," says WebSideStory analyst Geoff Johnston. "Until July, Microsoft had never lost market share. They'd had spikes, sure, but it never trended down. The bigger news now is that the trend has continued."
Granted, Microsoft's commanding portion of the browser market -- Johnston puts Internet Explorer's current market share at 92.4 percent -- is in no immediate danger of collapsing. What is in danger, however, is the trusted wisdom that open-source developers, whether through cultural prejudice or isolation from market forces, don't know how to deliver simple, consumer-friendly software tools. Cut loose from the corporate world, Mozilla's developers have hit their target: a thriving, user-friendly open-source browser. The question everyone should be asking now is: Where Mozilla has trodden, will other open-source projects follow?
The Mozilla Foundation's Hofmann says the first move in launching the Firefox redesign was soliciting feedback from dedicated users in the hopes of gleaning something that Microsoft developers might have missed.
"We wanted to gather all the different things we learned about building browsers over the last 10 years and combine that with a strong look at the way people used browsers," Hofmann says.
One thing Mozilla developers quickly learned was that most traditional browser elements are extraneous to the everyday Web-surfing experience. Using minimalism as a design cue, developers whittled down the Firefox tool bar. They also stole a trick from Internet Explorer 5.0 and Opera, a browser created by a Norwegian company, by integrating a Google search form into the browser frame. Most important, they scrapped support for anything outside the W3C rule book, which attempts to set standards for Web development.
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This latter decision, which meant that Firefox does not support Microsoft's ActiveX extensions or any party's VBSscript add-ons, proved fortuitious. In June, just after the 0.9 version of Firefox became available for download, a Trojan horse known as Download.Ject began to harass Microsoft Windows users en masse. A JavaScript-based Trojan horse of Russian origin, Download.Ject exploits tight coupling of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows. Users who visit a propagating page automatically download the invisible JavaScript applet. The applet then installs backdoor access and a keystroke logger on the unwitting recipient's machine, thus giving third-party hackers a chance to break in at a later date.
One recent convert is Frank Scheelen, manager of the porn-specific search engine Ask Jolene. Based in the Netherlands, Scheelen's site has a blacklist policy for thumbnail galleries and other porn sites that try to slip JavaScript applets into the downloaded bitstream. To minimize user headaches, the site has also taken to endorsing Firefox, offering a direct link to the Mozilla Foundation download page.
"Firefox is inherently safer, because it allows you to turn off the things that make Internet Explorer dangerous -- popups, JavaScript, ActiveX," says Scheelen.
The reason, says Hofmann, boils down to marketing savvy, or lack thereof. Internet Explorer currrently enjoys its dominant market share not because of Microsoft's celebrated marketing muscle, but because of Microsoft developers' undercelebrated flexibility. In essence, they've made it accessible to both sides of the browsing experience -- the ordinary user who wants to take advantage of the Web's abundant content and the commercial marketers who use dangle-free content as a lure for sideline promotions. Firefox developers, in contrast, don't have to worry about the content-provider side and can thus focus on a few elemental details: security, downloading speed, and ease of use.
"We've been able to focus, saying, 'Let's just do the right thing for the user. If there's a good search engine out there, let's integrate it into the product,'" Hofmann says. "We don't have to worry about business arrangements. We don't have to worry about how to make money off it. Let's just go out and make quality software."
Hofmann isn't the only one enjoying that freedom. Much of the Mozilla project's success stems from the fact that individual components have been outsourced to teams obeying their own "let's just make quality software" imperative. For example, Gecko, the layout engine that determines how Firefox displays HTML, is its own independent project under the Mozilla aegis. The same goes for Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR), a library to ensure that applications interact with Firefox across a variety of platforms, and Thunderbird, an e-mail client still in development.
This sort of feudal distribution of authority seems like an ideal recipe for chaos. In fact, it's exactly the sort of thing that has kept both Mozilla in general and Firefox in particular moving forward, even without a major corporate benefactor.
"Our original manifesto for Phoenix set out a few key principles: make a product that just browses, and browses well (and) keep the team small and focused," writes Blake Ross, a Firefox team co-founder and current Stanford University sophomore, celebrating the 1.0 release on his personal Web site. "I'm proud to say we have delivered on that today."
Such focus in the midst of complexity is a large reason many open-source projects, despite the waning of late-1990s media hype, have not lost momentum. Apart from Firefox and the ongoing SCO-IBM lawsuit, the most noted open-source story of the last two years has been the Salt Lake City software company Novell's 2003 decision to purchase Ximian, a Linux desktop company founded by developers of the free software GNOME graphic user interface.
Noting the countercyclical timing of the purchase -- IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems had each invested in GNOME's success as early as 1999 -- Jeff Hawkins, vice president of Novell's Linux Business Office, says it was the GNOME team's sustained progress in the subsequent downturn that proved more compelling.
"Remember the phrase 'Internet time?'" Hawkins asks, pointedly. "I think during the late 1990s there was this fallacy that somehow software could be developed faster. The truth is that software takes people writing it. It takes time."
Hawkins credits open-source developers for adopting a "steady march of progress" mind-set in the face of shifting market and media conditions. In the case of Mozilla, that mind-set has proved especially useful given the quick die-off in excitement when the 1998 Netscape source code failed to save that company from losing the remainder of its market to Microsoft.
"They kept plugging away," Hawkins says, of Mozilla. "People ignored them, until they got their break from the security problems in I.E."
The Mozilla second act, in other words, is a misnomer. While the rebirth imagery works well for those of us with short attention spans, the truth is, Mozilla never really went away. If anything, its delivery comes right on time. Most successful software projects, notably Linux and Windows, take between a half-decade and a full decade to reach full maturity, and most software project managers worth their salt will tell you that a good team, like a good winery, delivers no code before its time.
Instead of the fiery phoenix or the speedy firefox, technology watchers would be well served to think of the microscopic yeast cell -- a humble organism that delivers its best work when the lights are off and the oxygen supply is low -- the next time they read about reignited browser wars.
"That's one of the best strengths of open-source [development]," says Hawkins, noting the anaerobic analogy. "There's no way to kill it in the classic sense. Even the failed companies of open source contribute to its success." |
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News: Human Rights |
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US Soldier Shoots Innocent Iraqi |
Submitted by: Eric GInsburg / 16 Nov 2004
Publisher: Associated Press
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BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military said Tuesday it is investigating the videotaped fatal shooting of a wounded man by a U.S. Marine in a mosque in Fallujah. Iraqis condemned the act as "cowardice" and "something forbidden in Islam."
The dramatic footage was taken Saturday by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, whose report said the man who was killed didn't appear to be armed or threatening in any way, with no weapons visible in the mosque. |
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News: Politics : Technology |
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Nader Challenges Optical Vote Scans in NH |
Submitted by: rambo / 15 Nov 2004
Publisher: boston.com
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CONCORD, N.H. -- New Hampshire, home of the first state presidential primary, is about to become a test case for the accuracy of optical scan vote-counting machines -- thanks to third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
Nader has asked for a recount in 11 precincts that use Diebold Inc.'s Accuvote optical scanning machines. Based on the results, his campaign could ask for recounts in other states, spokesman Kevin Zeese said Monday.
Nader doesn't expect to change the outcome: In New Hampshire, Democrat John Kerry defeated President Bush, 50 percent to 49 percent, while Nader got less than 1 percent.
But the former consumer advocate wants to address concerns that the machines are inaccurate or can be tampered with, and New Hampshire is the perfect place to do that because state law requires paper ballots, Zeese said.
"New Hampshire is a smart enough state to have a paper trail," is experienced at recounts and the process is inexpensive, he said. |
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News: International : Media : Organizing |
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New anarchist book store in Montreal |
Submitted by: Sneeky / 15 Nov 2004
Publisher: CMAQ
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The bookstore committee of the A.E.E.L.I *, a non-profit association of anarchists, announces with great satisfaction that on Saturday November 13, 2004, we will be opening a new anarchist bookstore. The bookstore, called L'Insoumise (the unsubdued or rebellious), is centrally located at 2033 St-Laurent boulevard, just below Sherbrooke street.
The bookstore will have books, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers in French and English from anarchist authors and distributors, as well as on subjects such as ecology, anarchism, labour, anti-racism, economics, history, feminism, etc.
We will provide readers interested in anarchist literature with a space to browse, to sit, read, discuss and meet. To the best of our ability, we will be welcoming and knowledgably helpful.
Our doors open at 1 p.m. Saturday, November 13 and we are located at 2033 St-Laurent boulevard. At 4 p.m., a member(s) of the bookstore committee will make a presentation about the new project.
We are open :
Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday, Noon to 6Â p.m.
Thursday & Friday, Noon to 9Â p.m.
Saturday & Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
For more information :
insoumise ( at )northernhacking.org
aeeli( at )altern.org |
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News: Globalization |
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Uruguay signs bilateral ivestment protection treaty with U.S. |
Submitted by: Sneeky / 15 Nov 2004
Publisher: USINFO
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Pact aims to protect U.S. investors and promote two-way trade
Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier and Uruguayan Minister of Economy and Finance Isaac Alfie signed the U.S.-Uruguay Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 25, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has announced.
In a press release issued that same day, the USTR office explained that U.S. BITS protect U.S. investors doing business abroad by obligating a host country "to treat investors from the other BIT party as favorably as the host treats its own investors or those from any other country." Similarly, "BIT parties must also permit the free and timely transfer of funds relating to an investment into or out of their territory," the USTR office said.
Allgeier pointed out that the treaty will confer important benefits on both signatory countries. The U.S.-Uruguay pact "levels the playing field and ensures that Americans are treated equitably by increasing protection for U.S. investments in this South American nation," he said. "This agreement will also deepen our economic relationship with Uruguay, thus encouraging two-way trade."
Following is the text of the USTR press release, with further details: |
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