By Frank Noakes
"A trade deal simply limits the extent to which the US or other signatory governments may respond to pressure from their citizens", says Michael Walker, executive director of the right-wing Canadian Fraser Institute, affirming what he sees as a positive attribute of trade agreements.
The French Socialist Party claimed that Napoleon would have supported the Maastricht Treaty. US President Bill Clinton was reduced to claiming that his hero, John F. Kennedy, would have supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Polls showed opinion in the US running two to one against the agreement. But Clinton convinced enough Democratic Party members of Congress to side with the majority of Republicans in passing the pact to create a trade bloc between the US, Canada and Mexico.
A glance at the list of prominent individual campaigners for NAFTA reads like the credits from a horror movie: Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman and a supporting cast of the notorious. The anti-democratic Mexican government of Carlos Salinas and US corporations chipped in US$100 million to persuade members of the US Congress that NAFTA is a good thing for US workers. Five regional presidents sent videotaped messages to Congress urging ratification of the agreement.
The opposition is based on unions, greens and consumer groups. "NAFTA's market-based rules embody a faith in the free market to determine what is in the best interests of society. Under this free trade regime, the marketplace, not government, will decide what is best for society ... The removal of nationalist protections and regulatory safeguards offers a new kind of protectionism — for global corporate interests from government regulation", says a Greenpeace document.
Larger plan
NAFTA is only the second step in a broader plan to create a trade bloc embracing all the Americas. First came the Canadian-US Free Trade Agreement.
Action Canada Network chairperson Tony Clarke warns, "Expanding the corporate free trade zone to include the rest of Latin America simply extends the playing field in which transnationals are free to make profitable investments without interference or regulation by nation states".
The Canadian experience of the FTA offers a foretaste of the NAFTA menu.
In September 1990, a social democratic government was elected in Ontario campaigning to replace private car insurance with a publicly owned and administered system. But article 2010 of the FTA stipulates that if government action reduces the financial benefits that a company might otherwise expect, the company is entitled to compensation. The US insurance industry drew up a billion dollar claim and enlisted US government support; this caused the provincial government to dump its election promise. NAFTA embodies the same principles.
A research paper commissioned by the Canadian Telecommunications Workers Union claims: "In addition to severely constraining governmental action, the FTA has had a devastating impact on the Canadian economy ... between June 1989 and October 1991, Canada lost 461,000 jobs — roughly 23% of its manufacturing jobs."
Supporters claim that these jobs were doomed by the recession, but 150,000 of them were destroyed before the onset of the recession.
The FTA has already compelled Canada to weaken its pesticide, recycling and other environmental protection laws to harmonise them with weaker US standards; the fear is that NAFTA will reduce these standards to the Mexican level.
A fear that the current trickle of jobs south of the border will become a torrent under NAFTA has forced US trade unions to reassess their disastrous, and racist, "Buy American" campaign, in which unionists driving Japanese cars were vilified at union meetings and their cars were barred from union property.
There is the beginning of a different orientation to Third World workers, union activist Carl Finamore told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. Union leaders are encouraging tours of Mexican workers and offering solidarity and aid to them in their fight for improved pay and conditions, recognising that ultimately this is the only way to stem the flow of US jobs.
More than a million Mexican small farmers will be forced off the land by cheaper US corn flowing south. New industrial jobs won't grow apace, forcing many more Mexicans to flee northward simply to survive.
Full-page advertisements have recently appeared in leading US newspapers offering business $1 a day workers just south of the border.
University of California professor Ed Leamer, a proponent of free trade policies, found in his research that the average US worker will be US$1000 a year worse off under NAFTA.
An Economic Policy Institute briefing paper claims that wage competition will undercut US wages amongst skilled and unskilled workers, as skilled workers in Mexico are also paid considerably less than their US counterparts.
NAFTA will "encourage US manufacturers to compete in the world by attempting to reduce wages — either by going to Mexico or threatening to go to Mexico — rather than by upgrading workers' skills and investing in more productive machinery and equipment. The result will not be to bring Mexican wages to US levels, but to do just the reverse", reports the briefing paper's author, Jeff Faux.
'Greenwash'
Greenpeace and other environmental groups describe the "side agreements" which Clinton promised would "fix" the environmental and labour problems as a "greenwash". "Key provisions are either missing or non-enforceable", says Craig Merrilees from the Fair Trade Campaign, a network of union, environmental, family farm, religious and consumer organisations.
While NAFTA provides that parties to the agreement "should not" lower environmental standards to attract investment, there is no provision to enforce it. The pro-NAFTA corporations include 10 of the worst US polluters.
Greenpeace's media person in San Francisco, Bill Walker, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that NAFTA is the first major campaign that his organisation and the union movement had been able to fully cooperate on.
The FTC strongly supported a June 30 district court ruling that NAFTA will have significant environmental impacts and must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. Clinton successfully appealed against that decision.
Equally worrying are the provisions within the 2000-page NAFTA document that allow private companies to lay claim to living matter, including "genetic material, biological material such as is found in nature and inventions relating to living matter that comprise the human body", which are currently non-patentable under Mexican law.
"The effects of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement offer dramatic proof that as capital grows stronger, it uses its increased power to lower workers' standard of living, to undermine government programs that provide social and economic security, to subvert attempts to promote workplace health and safety, to degrade the environment", asserts the Canadian telecommunications union.
Judgment was passed severely by the Canadian people at the recent national election on those responsible for implementing the Free Trade Agreement and negotiating NAFTA: the ruling Progressive Conservatives were deposed from office in dramatic fashion, losing 153 of their 155 seats.
There's a popular chant at anti-NAFTA demonstrations in the US that, in the wake of the Canadian experience, must have Clinton more than a little jumpy. It runs: "Hey Bill! You know it's true! If we lose our jobs, you could too!"