U.S. Right and Left Fall for Global Trade Fantasy
theamericancause.org
John R. MacArthur
Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
May, 2001
Last month's "free trade" fest of politicians and their tenured valets (also known as economists) in Quebec City provoked the usual vitriol from both sides of the global political divide, much of it from liberals denouncing the conclave as antidemocratic, exploitative of the Third World and skewed toward further enriching the rich.
These critics of "globalization" were not wrong -- the two miles of chain-link fence surrounding the Summit of the Americas conference area, the 6,000 cops, the tear gas, all made their point better than they themselves could.
We can safely say that President Bush and his 33 would-be counterparts did not travel to La Belle Province with a plan to enlighten the downtrodden masses or feed them more equitably. Indeed, the purpose of the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- to guarantee an even larger pool of cheap labor enhanced by special protections against expropriation and pollution controls -- is so transparent that it is a wonder so much of the media insists on pretending otherwise.
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We must, says the union hierarchy, make the global system more fair, not raise U.S. tariffs or penalize companies that export factory jobs. Ask the labor federation's president, John Sweeney, what he plans to do about union-destroying NAFTA, and he calls for modification, not repeal. Ask him why he endorses Democrats for president like the great NAFTA promoter Al Gore, and you get a blank stare, that of a man grasping at the straws of declining power.
Every year, Mr. Sweeney flies to the World Economic Forum -- in Davos, Switzerland -- and lectures the attendees on their moral responsibility to the workers of the world -- a challenge welcomed by the sly publicists for free trade. He would do better if he stayed home and organized a sit-down strike in front of Motorola corporate headquarters, in Schaumburg, Ill. Motorola, already nonunion, recently closed its last domestic cellular-phone factory and is building a huge new phone and semiconductor plant in cheap-labor China, a country that will never have U.S.-style labor law.
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By the end of 2000, there were about 3,700 maquiladoras in Mexico, mostly concentrated along the U.S. border, employing 1.35 million people. These assembly platforms for the U.S. market, many of them deceptively modern and clean, are the big lie of the free-trade lobby. Most of their workers still make about $1 an hour for a 48-hour week and huge numbers subsist in sprawling shack cities with no running water or electricity.
Visit a border city -- Matamoros, Juarez, Nogales, Tijuana -- and you will be appalled by the living conditions: the open sewers, the parched landscapes, the gimcrack structures made from pallets and tar paper, the ragged children. Mexico's rural villages are emptying out in one of the great mass industrial migrations in history, tens of thousands of people flooding north to the factories, in headlong flight from their dying farm economy, destroyed by U.S. crop and dairy exports encouraged under NAFTA.
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And yet, the free traders have the gall to promote NAFTA and FTAA as something akin to foreign aid to the disadvantaged, rather than exploitation of the indigent. Even worse, they tout the NAFTA "side agreements," allegedly designed to protect labor rights and the environment in Mexico.
No radical, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt calls them a "hoax." Not a single one of 23 complaints before a NAFTA "tribunal" has resulted in redress for working stiffs in the three member countries. (Recall also that a good part of the U.S. environmental movement was suckered into supporting NAFTA, in the vain hope of cleaning up the Rio Grande, now filthier than ever.)
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Of course, no respectable economist would call NAFTA or FTAA a free-trade agreement because free trade assumes not only duty-free movement of goods and capital, but free movement of labor across borders, which neither the United States nor Canada can tolerate. Pure free trade is a utopian madhouse, even crazier in concept than communism. Just imagine the damage to the social structure -- not to mention wage rates -- if unlimited Mexican immigration were permitted in either country.
The naive left-leaning internationalists can't face these facts of life, but the right-wing nationalists who also oppose the phony free-trade agreements are under none of the same illusions. Forever anti-communist, they feel no responsibility toward the world proletariat, just the workers and businesses here at home.
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