Political Circus

Story by Colleen Tuite

Later this month, on November 20 and 21, government and business officials from 34 countries in North, Central, and South America will gather behind closed doors in Miami, Florida, to discuss a proposed trade agreement called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). If it is enacted, it will create the largest trading bloc in the world, with a combined GDP (gross domestic product) of $11.4 billion and with a population of about 800 million people.

It is telling that of those 800 million, only a select few hold the power to make these massive decisions. The FTAA will override local, state, and national laws. Content aside, the way the agreement is being formed has been widely criticized by many, including the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, as being profoundly anti-democratic.

The FTAA is a vast expansion of the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Like the FTAA, NAFTA was crafted mostly in secret, the only non-governmental input coming from corporations. The Labor Advisory Committee (LAC), which, according to the 1974 Trade Act, must have input on any trade-related subjects, was given a copy of the lengthy agreement only 24 hours before the deadline for their report. Even then, the LAC, consisting mostly of moderate
Links to Related Info:

www.stopftaa.org

tools for organizing and mobilizing protests in Miami Nov 20-21

www.ftaa-alca.org/alca_e.asp

Official website for the Free Trade Area of the Americas

www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/ftaa/

Background and fact sheets about the FTAA

www.ftaaresistance.org/

Info and calls to action about the FTAA and its effects

conservative union leaders, predicted in their report that NAFTA, while a boon for investors, would be extremely detrimental for the working classes of the US and Mexico and for the environment as well. They also noted that the agreement firmly protected property rights, but offered little protection for workers’ rights.
The reservations of the LAC, shared by many economists and financial watchdog groups, have clearly become reality in the decade that NAFTA has been in place. By making it exponentially easier for American companies in search of cheaper labor to move their production to Mexico, thousands of U.S. workers have lost jobs, while the influx of corporations in Mexico have driven down the working wages by 52 percent.

According to the Canadian Labor Congress, Mexican workers have been faced with a “huge decrease in living standards and massive job losses,” which serves as a “clear warning” of the “lethal dangers of deregulatory international financial markets” and to “integrating economies at different levels of development.”

Unfortunately, no one ever listens to Canada. The FTAA is a mammoth version of NAFTA and does precisely

what the Canadian Labor Congress warns against — massive market deregulation and integration of both extremely powerful and fledgling economies.

Both US and foreign workers will suffer from its passage — Americans will lose jobs as corporations look to other countries as a source of cheap labor, and foreign economies will become even less stable and more dependant on the U.S. as they are flooded with American products. So why would anyone want to enact this agreement if it will cause most people to lose?

Because one small group of people will win — corporations and private investors. The FTAA will open the doors to many markets that were previously inaccessible and it will also allow companies to find cheap labor abroad. Furthermore, the FTAA (like its predecessor, NAFTA) awards a huge amount of rights to corporations, such as the right to actually sue the governments of countries it believes to be interfering with “free trade.” It alsostrengthens intellectual property rights — which is actually antithetical to the idea of free trade. Which tips us off that this is ultimately less about the goal of strengthening economies through a free trade arrangement, and more about strengthening corporations through market dominance. Remember that the only other individuals besides government officials allowed to contribute to the agreement are a fraction of the population that will actually profit from the FTAA.

But it has not happened yet. Although NAFTA has been in place for a decade, the FTAA has yet to be agreed upon. And negotiations have not gone as smoothly as the U.S. and others pushing for it have expected. Brazil, which has the largest economy in Central and South America, has strong reservations about the agreement, the same issue which caused the collapse of the recent WTO meeting in Cancun — U.S. farm subsidies and its restrictions on certain imports, two actions which are directly against the concept of a free market. Since FDR’s New Deal, the U.S. has provided very generous subsidies (totaling in the millions annually) to U.S. farmers (the money is supposedly for “family farmers,” but the bulk of it generally ends up going to large corporations), which makes it extremely difficult for developing nations which cannot afford such payments to its farmers to compete with the U.S. in a global market. Additionally, the U.S. has a number of restrictions on certain imports, such as beef and sugar — two of Brazil’s main exports. Thus, Brazil would have to allow the U.S. to flood its market without being able to compete in the US. The “free market” that the U.S. government heralds at every opportunity is not very free at all.

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