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A Fair Trade?

MPAC Newsletter, November 2003

By Jeff Lowell

"Free Trade". It sounds so harmless doesn't it? Say it out loud. "Free Trade." It felt good, didn't it? I mean what could be wrong with "free trade"? It's free for crying out loud. Free! Free things are good. And trade, well, for me that just conjures up images of trading baseball cards with my friends when I was a kid. The trades were usually fair. Sure once in while you would run into a kid who didn't know who Carl Yastremski was and you'd get a deal, but for the most part everyone knew what they were doing. Isn't that like "free trade"? Doesn't everyone get a fair deal? Isn't "free trade" good for America?

Let's stick with the baseball card analogy for a moment. Suppose you were forced to trade your Mickey Mantle card for a Bob Uecker card. For those of you unfamiliar with these players, let me just say you would not be happy. Someone who was one of the greatest players of all time and someone who, well, wasn't. That is kind of what the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is like. The United States gets the Mickey Mantle and everyone else gets the Bob Uecker.

I know what your thinking, Isn't the FTAA like NAFTA, and didn't we lose all sorts of manufacturing jobs under NAFTA, and isn't losing jobs bad for the United States? The answers are "yes," "yes" and "yes." So why you may ask would the United States want to expand NAFTA with the FTAA? The answer lies in the definition of the United States. When I say United States, I think of the people of the United States, when NAFTA and the FTAA say United States, they mean the corporations of the United States and not the people. The corporations love these "free trade" agreements. They get to fire all their workers here and move shop to a country where labor is cheaper and there are fewer pesky environmental laws to follow (not that Bush is exactly enforcing the environmental laws we have anyway).

The corporations who are at the negotiating table during these meetings care about one thing, money. Not only do they get cheap labor and fewer labor unions, they get all the raw materials these countries have. They get to privatize everything, including water. Let me say that again. They are privatizing water! When over 2,000,000,000 people in the world do not have access to clean, healthy water, the heartless American corporations want to charge these people for it. To make matters worse, the corporations are the ones who polluted the water in the first place. Talk about a Bob Uecker. First we'll pollute your water and then we'll charge you for clean water, which you can't afford because we pay you next to nothing and kill off all your labor leaders.

It is not just water though, it is everything. These "free trade agreements" (they should really be called coerced theft approval), want to privatize health care and education. They want to patent indigenous medicines for the pharmaceutical companies and not allow the people who discover them and have been using them for centuries to use them without paying the pharmaceutical companies.

How are these countries being forced into this trade? Well there are many methods, the first of which I like to call, "we'll sue the hell out of you" method. We've already seen this with NAFTA and the FTAA will bring more of the same. Corporations will be able to sue a country if that country enacts, say, an environmental law that adversely affects their bottom line. For example, if a country passed a law that said it is illegal to dump hazardous waste into its rivers, a company that was doing that could sue the country for damages. This "free trade agreement" is nothing but a license to steal and exploit. The only "free" thing about these agreements is that the corporations are "free" from any interference that might get in the way of their plans to commodify life.

Another method would be to shut them out of trade all together. Kind of like we did to Cuba. Or the U.S. could just use force to open up markets like it is in Iraq. The possibilities are endless. After all, the U.S. has the strongest military, the strongest economy, and therefore the most influence. A word of warning to the countries thinking about signing this ridiculous "agreement": The United States wants your Mickey Mantle, and they don't care how they get it.