Free trade at workers’ expense

Daily Lobo column

If you have been watching the network news lately, you might not have heard much about issues of free trade and globalization.

Broadcast in the United States have said little about the massive uprisings in Ecuador against the privatization of water, the Zapatista march to Mexico City or anyone who dares to fight capitalism. Remember how the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle brought issues of economic globalization to the forefront for about a week?

You may have asked yourself at the time, “Why didn’t I get the opportunity to vote for the U.S. delegates to the WTO? What does the WTO do? Why are people dressing up in sea turtle costumes? What does tear gas smell like? And who were those masked anarchists?”

But, before your questions were answered, the presidential campaign began and the only candidates rethinking America’s role in globalization were banned from the debates. If globalization was a real issue, legitimate candidates would be debating it, so its absence must make it an unimportant topic — just like capital punishment, global warming, the drug war and our involvement in the Colombian civil war.

Like it or not, these are real issues the media and most politicians ignore. That doesn’t make the issues go away, it just allows the decisions to be made without your input. If the newspapers of colonial America had failed to report the policies of Britain, perhaps we would still be living under the crown and paying outrageous taxes on tea imports.

Globalization issues stretch far beyond the price of tea in Boston. Since NAFTA was passed in 1993, Americans have lost manufacturing jobs and the trade deficit has increased.

This change has benefited the extremely wealthy in our country, while hurting America’s working class, who have traded their jobs in manufacturing for dead-end service industry jobs with low pay and few benefits.

These people lost their jobs because their rich bosses moved factories to Mexico where they can pay lower wages and face fewer safety and environmental regulations. The only way for Canada and the United States to compete with Mexico for manufacturing jobs is to lower their own regulations and wages, thus initiating a race towards the bottom, where governments compete with each other to sell out their citizens.

In April, 33 other nations will join NAFTA and the race to the bottom. On April 18-22 in Quebec City, Quebec, negotiators will be meeting behind closed doors to finalize plans that have already been taking place in secret. If ratified as expected, NAFTA will expand to become the Free Trade Area of the Americas and encompass all of the Western Hemisphere except Cuba.

FTAA would essentially undermine the sovereignty of nations if their policies were in contradiction to those of the FTAA. This could mean forced privatization of education, water and deregulation of postage similar to the deregulation of California electricity. Although this spells out big profits for transnational corporations, it means big trouble for common people in all of the Americas and the Caribbean.

In anticipation of mass protests against the founding of the FTAA, the Canadian government is preparing the largest police deployment in its history. Its budget is more than $22 million and more than 5,000 police officers are scheduled to work. In addition to personnel, there are plans for a 2.4-mile perimeter fence similar to those around prison camps. The perimeter will cover about four square miles of the city’s downtown core.

The FTAA delegates will be relatively accessible in comparison to WTO delegates, who are planning to have their meeting in a cruise ship off the coast of Qatar. Apparently not all of the delegates enjoyed their welcome in Seattle.

For those who might have missed Qatar in your high school social studies courses, it is a small, peninsular country east of Saudi Arabia. It is not known as a bastion of freedom and democracy; women only recently gained suffrage there.

If you want to find out more about the FTAA, WTO, or globalization in general, check out www.infoshop.org, it is a great source of news from the anarchic perspective. To take action, visit www.stopftaa.org, which has information about protests taking place in Quebec, which is along the Canadian border, and around the world. Locally, organizations are mobilizing for a protest April 21and 22 at the Columbus/Palomas border crossing.

Local action is essential if we are to make people a higher priority than profits, so put on your walking shoes, pick up your picket signs, and prepare for the sensation of freedom.

It’s time to fight capitalism, even if it won’t make the evening news!