Effective immediately, no Abbott lab products will be covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Or Abbott lab patents are no longer valid and generics can begin production immediately. This can be stopped if someone had the stones.

India is a WTO member now.

Unfortunately that means that they gain a "most favored nation" status which allows their firms workers to work here as long as its not permanent. Several other trade deals do similar things. Other countries have been repeatedly promised these jobs as the reward for allowing US firms similar privileges to open facilities there. Thats where the growth is expected to be.

So to make that deal happen, the US - pushed by thousands of corporate lobbyists had to give up something.

They plan to privatize large portions of the public sector to lower costs. Soon all government procurement will be forced to go to competitive bidding internationally.

What you are describing (preferring one country's workers over another's) is increasingly going to be seen as forbidden by the 1995 WTO service agreement.

Europeans have been living with this since the 1990s - but their strong unions have managed to limit its impact greatly, at the cost of flexibility which we have here but that means it will likely be devastating to non-unionized American workers. GATS Mode Four was never allowed to become what it was expected to be because of pressure which limited its adoption. However the Obama and presumably the Clinton administrations will have full freedom to liberalise. Contracts have to be awarded by objective and verifyable criteria - such as education and track record, not country. Government spending will create global economic stimulus instead of local or national stimulus.

Its going to be new here.

Negotiations to finish the procedural aspects of it have been on again and off again for 20 years but its expected that they will finish up soon. People should have protested this back in 1995 when they were signing it!