Don't Want Corporations to Control Your Life? Oppose the FTAA!

by Aaron G. Lehmer, Earth Island Website Manager

Most of today’s economists should be hanging their heads in shame.

It’s bad enough they envy the natural scientists so much that they actually believe the world operates in blissful balance between supply and demand.

What’s worse is that so many of them now sit in silent approval as their basic theories are being grabbed hold of, warped and then spun by corporations for the self-serving purpose of advancing their bottom lines at the expense of the rest of us.

In recent years, we’ve seen the sensible idea of market-oriented environmental rules used to justify corporate trading of an ever-expanding number of pollution permits. Never mind that such schemes often failed to limit the overall contaminants released -- making them little more than green window dressing.

We’ve also seen that magical wand of modern economic thought -- a.k.a., “privatization” -- used by energy companies, media firms, health and pharmaceutical corporations and so on to justify becoming unregulated by the public.

Let’s take a look at what they’ve accomplished in the process.

Energy corporations like PG&E and Southern California Edison basically wrote the deregulation law that locked in their huge profit margins while jeopardizing the public’s supply of sustainable energy.

Now we’re stuck bailing them out, facing huge utility bills and scrambling to fix our energy crisis.

Media conglomerates like AOL-Time Warner and Disney secured legislation ridding them of most public education requirements, licensing fees and limitations on ownership.

Now with only a handful of corporations deciding what’s newsworthy and what’s not, we have mostly shallow, error-prone and herd-like media that scream bloody murder whenever they’re asked to cover public events, let alone provide substantive coverage of the goings-on in our diverse democracy.

Health maintenance organizations and drug companies used deregulation and privatization to justify cutting one service after the next, hiking the cost of vital prescriptions and even denying care in some cases to Medicaid and Medicare recipients.

All the while, these sectors of the economy -- along with so many others -- have become so concentrated that to speak of free market competition within them is a cruel joke.

Despite this sorry record of public disservice, the economists are once again coming to the corporations’ rescue. This time around, they’re singing the praises of “free trade,” probably their most-loved, yet most deceptive notion.

In today’s world, “free trade” doesn’t mean freely chosen, mutually agreed upon terms of exchange between people. No, thanks to the growing power of corporations, it means you must buy their products, you must get rid of your pesky environmental and worker protection rules and, perhaps most of all, you must quit whining about it.

That pretty much sums up the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement, which is under active consideration by the governments of 34 countries (except Cuba). At the Summit of the Americas in late April 2001 in Quebec City, the countries agreed to an overall framework for further negotiations.

Summit organizers and participants were so nervous about public outcry over their invitation-only scheming that they erected a colossal security barrier around the city. To further prevent people from expressing themselves too much, Canadian officials arbitrarily refused entry to citizens of other countries at the border and assigned around 6,000 additional police officers to block the streets.

Of course, officials had every reason to be concerned.

Hundreds of meeting halls in Quebec City’s sprawling “security zone” remained off limits to citizens -- a move that effectively threw up a middle finger at democracy. A better invitation to mass protest could scarcely have been imagined.

In the end, a small group of determined protesters -- amid tens of thousands of others from all over the world -- broke through the "Wall of Shame" and disrupted the opening day's summit meetings, delaying their commencement for an hour and a half. And while the media predictably denounced the "violent anti-globalization" protesters, many of them could not deny that the growing segment of society they represent is getting increasingly fed-up with back-room trade deals with questionable benefits.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this latest corporate power grab is that community-conceived standards governing business are being redefined by foaming-at-the-mouth free traders as unfair “barriers to trade.”

Corporate backers of the summit desperately want FTAA negotiators to approve a rule requiring businesses to be paid for any lost profits that come from government regulations.

This rule has already become law among signatories to the North American Free Trade Agreement and has resulted in corporations like Vancouver-based Methanex suing for $970 million in damages against the United States.

Why?

Because the California state government dared to phase in a ban of one of Methanex’s products -- the gasoline additive MTBE -- even though the Environmental Protection Agency reported cancer risks and at least 10,000 groundwater sites contaminated with the substance.

So corporations not only want to pulverize our environmental, worker and health and safety laws -- they want you and I to shell out millions of dollars to them if we insist on protecting ourselves from their misdeeds.

It’s way past time for economists to stop defending corporate rule. It is literally leading to people’s deaths and to an increasingly unsustainable economy.

Call your senators and representatives today at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to oppose the FTAA.

For more information and ideas for action, please visit http://www.stopftaa.org.

Aaron G. Lehmer, Earth Island's Website Manager, is a graduate student in Humboldt State University's Globalization and the Environment program. He is also the founder of ProgressiveRockers.com, an online showcase of classic and contemporary rock artists who use their talents to promote social and environmental causes.