FTAA MUST BE STOPPED!
By Jack A. Smith
QUESTION: What do the following elements have in common--The price of corn in Mexico, the reign of Queen Victoria, the downfall of the USSR, the South Korean economy, the arrest of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosovic, the far-right nature of the Bush presidency, the worsening plight of the peoples of the third world and an upsurge in the U.S. radical movement?
ANSWER: If you attended the CLASP meeting at Boughton Place in Highland, N.Y., April 1 you’d know these were just some of the points made by speaker Brian Becker in his analysis of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
The FTAA is Washington’s plan for extending the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico to all the Americas by 2005. Only Cuba out of 35 nations has been excluded. All the participating nations are meeting at a “Summit of the Americas” in Quebec City, Canada, April 20-22 to put the finishing touches to the agreement amidst an anticipated crescendo of protest by activists from Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere opposed to capitalist globalization.
The FTAA negotiations have been taking place in secret for the last six years and the public has not been informed about the details of the draft text that is being worked upon--but some information has penetrated this barrier. For example, government social services in many countries would be put in grave jeopardy through enforced deregulation and privatization.
In essence, the practical effect of this expanded NAFTA would be to lower production costs by driving down living and environmental standards and the quality of social services; to weaken the ability of national governments to regulate big business, and to create powerful global institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, which are accountable only to giant corporations.
Brian Becker, a co-director of the International Action Center, took his audience on an extemporaneous anti-imperialist global tour that began with an examination of word meanings and concluded with a prediction that the U.S. left will rise again, soon.
Queen Victoria was evoked during a deconstruction of propagandistic word meanings, such as “free trade” (capitalism’s domination of foreign markets), “flexible labor markets” (the super-exploitation of labor) or “war on drugs” (in the U.S., targeting a greatly disproportionate number of black youth for punishment; in Colombia, the excuse for Pentagon military intervention against the country’s liberation forces).
Becker noted that the British queen is most remembered for a “moral” code so famously unforgiving that an entire era was named for her, but Victoria’s real secret was that she presided over an immoral regime of vicious colonial oppression around the world, including the hideous Opium War forced upon China. Like Victoria’s feigned morality, the FTAA’s lofty expressed goals degenerate in reality into a vicious grab for corporate profits at the expense of working people throughout the Americas.
The thought of creating a “continental NAFTA” may be a pleasant dream for U.S. corporations but it’s nightmare for the working class, Becker suggested, noting that nearly 400,000 U.S. jobs have been lost since NAFTA took effect because Yankee companies relocated to Mexico to take advantage of much lower paid workers and weaker labor standards.
Meanwhile Mexican workers have been super-exploited at higher and higher rates. Since NAFTA began, over a million additional Mexicans work for less than the prevailing minimum wage of $3.40 a day (not hour, day) and some million Mexican workers have tumbled from the lower middle class into poverty. He noted that in vast areas of Mexico, where corn is a staple food, many farmers have been impoverished by duty-free cheaper corn imports from more mechanized and subsidized U.S. agricultural imports. Under the FTAA, these exploited Mexican workers would be pushed into competition against even more desperate workers in Haiti, Guatemala or Brazil by national companies seeking tariff-free access into U.S. markets. Meanwhile, U.S. companies would be protected from competition by the industrialized nations of Europe or Japan.
Corporate capitalist globalization is bad enough without NAFTA-FTAA type trade agreements, Becker declared, drawing upon his February visit to South Korea at the invitation of that country’s union movement. He described the struggle unions are trying to mount in defense of workers suffering from pro-corporate “structural adjustment programs” imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Since the collapse of the USSR a decade ago, Becker explained, the IMF and other institutions of global capital have vastly expanded their activities around the world. In 1990, for example, only 10% of third-world countries were subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs, which invariably favor international capital. This year, that number has risen to 80%.
“At one time, the third world could turn to the Soviet camp for economic aid,” he said, “and this provided some comfort for the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for poor third world countries who were left with no alternative but to seek aid from the IMF. This explains the great upsurge in neocolonialism in the last decade.” The FTAA, he continued, will accelerate the process of neocolonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, where half the population is already living in poverty.
The recent arrest of Slobodan Milosovic by the new U.S.-backed government of Yugoslavia (Washington financed and directed the unified election campaign of some 18 opposition parties last fall that defeated Milosovic) is also part of globalization’s hegemonistic designs, Becker mentioned. The Clinton administration and Congress threatened a cut-off of all international and IMF assistance--desperately needed since the U.S./NATO destruction of the country’s civil infrastructure--unless the Belgrade government incarcerated the former president by midnight March 31, which it did just in time.
The IAC co-chair also pointed out that one of the reasons for the U.S./NATO assault to begin with was that Yugoslavia, alone among the former socialist societies of Europe, held out in part against repeated IMF demands for privatization and massive cutbacks in social programs. Now, Yugoslavia has a government willing to comply totally.
“Now that there is no alternative to globalization such as a Soviet camp any longer,” Becker declared, “it has become the responsibility of the peoples of the world to create an alternative by their actions.”
This is the context in which he placed the current beginnings of an international movement against globalization. He also predicted the “rebirth of a radical movement in the U.S.” based on the “present unusual political situation” (i.e., the fact that the majority of Americans--Greens plus Democrats--voted for a left-of-center government but got a far-right-of-center regime instead) combined with the gathering economic crisis and the existing early stages of an oppositional movement. “As the most conservative president in a century,” Becker explained, “Bush may provide an incentive to resistance.”
The April 20-22 mass demonstrations in Quebec City and at U.S.-Canadian border areas are a hopeful sign of this increased resistance,” he continued, pointing out that the IAC was among the organizations seeking to send vans and buses into Canada for the confrontation. “We are bringing a clear message to the 34 heads of state assembled in Quebec City: the poor people of the world won’t take it any more--a new day is coming!”
The only way to confront corporate globalization, the FTAA, IMF and the new right-wing regime in the U.S.--which all operate in tandem--is to create a mass mobilization of the American people around a number of interrelated issues, Becker argued. Such an effort will take place in Washington Sept. 29 in protest activities aimed against the Bush administration and globalization, among other issues. “We must demonstrate that it is not the oppositional movement but George W. Bush who is isolated in America,” he insisted.
In conclusion, an approved FTAA trade pact will insure that the 100-year domination of Latin America and the Caribbean by the White House, Wall St., and Pentagon will be greatly strengthened in this new century. President Monroe’s wildest fantasies of excluding foreign competition to U.S. economic hegemony in Latin American and the Caribbean, as embodied in his famous Doctrine, could not approximate the FTAA agreement as a deterrent to trade competition by Washington’s industrialized capitalist competitors. It amounts to arming Uncle Sam with the Monroe Doctrine on one hand and Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick in the other. Becker left no doubt, however, that sticks and doctrines are no match for a people united and mobilized in opposition.
posted: 9 April 2001
Message from IAC re: Anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City: ANTI-FTAA PROTESTS TO ROCK QUEBEC CITY APRIL 20-22
IAC TRANSPORTATION TO QUEBEC CITY For April 20-21 2001 Demonstrations
ANALYSIS FOR APRIL 20-22 PROTESTS OF FTAA
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