Open wide . . . here comes another great big glob of globaloney that the Powers That Be want to shove down your throat. They forced us to swallow NAFTA, the WTO, and NAFRICA (NAFTA for Africa), and now they have a brand-new acronym for global greed: FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
The same cabal of Wall Street arrogance and Washington ignorance that came up with NAFTA as a way to haul good jobs out of our country and undermine our environmental and worker-saftey standards is now trying to press down upon our brow the FTAA crown of thorns. It promises to extend NAFTA to 31 other nations, granting corporate power such diverse new venues as Guatemala and Guyana, Belize and Brazil for pitting people and their economic aspirations against each other, and for subverting national sovereignty throughout the hemisphere.
But the FTAA takes NAFTA from loopy to sheer lunacy by insisting that even the public sector of all local economies must be opened to "market competition." This means that corporations could use NAFTA-style closed tribunals to force national, state, and local governments to let them privatize schools, water systems, Social Security programs, utilities, mail delivery, prisons, and other public services.
Until the FTAA reared its ugly head, it was workers in manufacturing and transportation that had to worry about being displaced by these trade scams, but public employees would suddenly find themselves sucked into this vortex if the FTAA is approved.
Citizens who count on getting everything from medical care to mail, roads to retirement benefits from these public programs might also be alarmed that control over such services could be usurped by globe-hopping profiteers.
What's so bad about NAFTA?
Let's take a moment to review our seven-year experience with the North American Free Trade Agreement. We were promised that this three-nation trade scheme—foisted on us in 1993 by Bill Clinton, a Democratic-controlled Congress, and a gaggle of corporate lobbyists—would create 200,000 new U.S. jobs in its first year alone. Instead, even the Labor Department now concedes that we've lost at least 400,000 jobs to Mexico as a direct result of NAFTA.
Also, corporate chieftains routinely use the back-door exit to Mexico as a threat to abandon workers and communities here unless the workers accept major pay cuts, give up health and pension benefits, speed up the work line, and put in more hours. This is one big reason that real wages in our country average less today than when Richard Nixon was president—and that working families are stressed to the max.
But at least it helped Mexico, right? We wish. NAFTA contains no provisions that corporations moving there must pay a living wage or avoid polluting the air and water. So they don't.
Most corporations don't even pay the sub-poverty Mexican minimum wage. Since NAFTA, a million more Mexicans are now paid less that the minimum wage, and eight million Mexican families have slipped from the middle class into poverty. ... [ read more ]
THE 8,000-MEMBER GREATER GRACE TEMPLE in Detroit is the home church of many autoworkers, and its Sunday service on December 7 spoke directly to their troubles. The tone was set by the choir's opening selection, "I'm looking for a Miracle." The Pentecostal pastor kept the spirit moving with a sermon he titled "A Hybrid Hope," after which the congregation joined in a full-throated, hallelujah version of the gospel classic, "We're Gonna Make It." For the men and women who actually do the work in automobile manufacturing (America's quintessential industry), the only hope left for dealing with a catastrophic economic meltdown seems to be prayer. 
