Corporate Consolidation, from Argentina to Alaska

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The FTAA takes things from bad to worse. In a report for the International Forum on Globalization, Canadian activist Maude Barlow argues that the FTAA 'goes far beyond NAFTA in its scope and power . . . to create a trade powerhouse with sweeping new authority over every aspect of life in Canada, the Americas, and the Caribbean.'

According to the public interest group Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch (http://www.tradewatch.org), the FTAA rolls the worst aspects of NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, and several other international trade bureaucracies into one neat package that will '[handcuff] governments’ public interest policymaking capacity and [enhance] corporate control at the expense of citizens.' This would be accomplished by the following means:

• by installing new ‘investor protections’ that create closed-door trade tribunals where corporations can sue governments over domestic policies that may undermine future profits;

• by limiting governments’ abilities to stabilize their economies through regulation of foreign investment and speculative capital;

• by allowing foreign governments and corporations to bypass a nation’s legal system thanks to secret international trade tribunals;

• by providing corporations with new legal rights and political tools to attack government standards for food security, public health and safety, worker safeguards, and the environment; and

• by expanding the scope of trade to include the service sector, which will increase economic pressure on governments to privatize and/or deregulate already vulnerable public services.

Under current plans, the FTAA negotiations are scheduled to conclude in 2005, though several member countries, including the United States and Chile, are pressing for a 2003 deadline.

George W. Bush remarked at the close of the Quebec summit that 'trade helps spread freedom.' Delegates even voted to include a 'democracy clause' stipulating that any country admitted to the FTAA must have a democratically elected government. Critics dismissed the clause as a cynical attempt to deflect criticism that the treaty is anti-democratic while in reality further cementing the exclusion of Cuba from the hemispheric economy.

The irony of Bush’s statement was palpable in the streets of Quebec, where police went to unprecedented lengths to shut the public out of the proceedings, constructing a 12-foot-high, 2.5-mile-long cement and chain-link wall around the already-walled old town. But protesters outside the 'wall of shame,' as it was dubbed by the Canadian media, soared to new heights of creativity to get their message across. After a group from the anarchist Black Bloc tore down a section of the wall, 'a medieval-themed faction rolled up its catapult and flung pink stuffed animals at the police,' reported David Moberg on Salon.com (April 23, 2001).

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