Book Recommendation: Evil Hour in Colombia

Ever since we've started working on Colombia, I've been looking for a good single volume history of modern Colombian history. I read Marco Palacios' "Between Legitimacy and Violence," which reads a lot like many Latin American history texts assigned in college, with a lot of emphasis put on an CEPAL-like analysis of import and export trends shaping the political economy.

But for a great single volume at just over 100 pages that is up-to-date that will help you understand what you read in the newspaper, it doesn't get much better than Forrest Hylton's 2006 book, "Evil Hour in Colombia." It briskly surveys the 19th and early 20th century, but the bulk of the book is dedicated to the post-Violencia (1946) history, or the period that Colombia has been at civil war.

Importantly, Hylton also shows how the paramilitary "demobilization" and the decline in killings and displacements in recent years are not the result of things getting better in Colombia, but rather of a more consolidated criminal control of the state apparatus. In other words, put Tony Soprano in charge of a government, and you'll have a criminally-enforced "peace." (As James Vega shows in a piece for The Democratic Strategist, such tactics can often just postpone more civil war.)

There are some shortcomings of the book, mostly having to do with the length. Some characters and their importance aren't explored in great detail. For insance, while Hylton sets out to correct the shortcoming of other histories that "give short shrift to radical popular movements," key moments in popular history like the struggle to create a unified Afro-Colombian movement in the 1980s through today, are scarcely mentioned. But these defects are more than made up for by the brilliant synthesis of material related to civil-military-narcotrafficker relations.

America's backyard gets a carraige house

Military dude plus trade lady plus Julie Sweig (and others) have put out a new Council on Foreign Relations task force report saying that it's time for the U.S. to move past a trade obsessed focus in our dealings with Latin America, and that the Monroe Doctrine is dead. Here's a key clip:

The Task Force finds that trade... and development aid have not and cannot alone lead to sufficient reductions in poverty and economic inequality in Latin America. The growth of the informal sector, while often successful in increasing incomes for the poor, undermines the economic base of Latin American countries and the effectiveness of state institutions, which are critical in addressing the region’s fundamental challenges.

At the same time, you don't get former USTR Charlene Barshefksy to sign off on your task force without the obligatory hail marys at the FTA altar:

The United States should also approve pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama. Free trade remains an important policy tool for expanding economic opportunities in the region and the United States. Rejection of these agreements would severely damage close allies, send a negative signal to other countries in the region, give rise to the view that the United States is an unreliable partner, and strengthen countries in the region that espouse anti-Americanism.

Oh yeah, and trade is responsible for the stellar growth in Latin America, which, wait, wasn't so stellar. Can we say that if something good happened it was because of trade, but if something bad happened, trade had nothing to do with it? As a leading presidential aspirant might say, "yes, we can."

Corporate takeover of everything department

And the food crisis roils on, thanks to NAFTA and WTO's neoliberalization of the food supply. Mexican farmers continue to be displaced in the wake of NAFTA:

“We migrate because we don’t think there are options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is to give options for a better life.”

Viewed against the backdrop of rising food prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León’s fight to keep farmers from abandoning their land is much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.

As Mexico imports more corn from the United States, the country’s reliance on outside supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, farmers’ groups and leftist critics of Mexico’s free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, farmers’ groups marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.

And the few that made it across the border are now getting slammed by ICE stings. And has anybody noticed that the destruction of Mexico's traditional economy and import substitution schemes have not led the way to more efficiency, but greater instances of narcotrafficking and narcoterrorism? I mean, seriously, we seem close to having a failed state on our borders.

In other news, apparently the Supreme Court is so taken over with corporate concerns that they can't even hear international human rights cases any more, most recently in the case of apartheid in South Africa. And though it's not directly trade related, I thought this piece on the Senate compromising on banning menthol cigarettes showed an outrageous form of health and environmental racism:

Menthol is particularly controversial because public health authorities have worried about its health effects on African-Americans. Nearly 75 percent of black smokers use menthol brands, compared with only about one in four white smokers.

That is why one former public health official says the legislation’s menthol exemption is a “cave-in to the industry,” an opinion shared by some other public health advocates.

“I think we can say definitively that menthol induces smoking in the African-American community and subsequently serves as a direct link to African-American death and disease,” said the former official, Robert G. Robinson, who retired two years ago as an associate director in the office of smoking and health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trade on the Trail: Obama v. Uribe

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) made a speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO yesterday that called for an overhaul of our trade policy. Here's the key quote:

But what I refuse to accept is that we have to sign trade deals like the South Korea Agreement that are bad for American workers. What I oppose - and what I have always opposed - are trade deals that put the interests of multinational corporations ahead of the interests of Americans workers - like NAFTA, and CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with China.

And I'll also oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements. So you can trust me when I say that whatever trade deals we negotiate when I'm President will be good for American workers, and that they'll have strong labor and environmental protections that we'll enforce.

Obama touched on two themes that are obvious but rarely spoken in polite political circles: one, there is a severe imbalance in our trade policy against the public interest in favor of corporations; two, that it's a mockery of human dignity to even consider signing a trade deal with a country that is the union murder capital of the world.

The bold statement didn't win him any friends in Colombia's right-wing government, which has attached its hellish political sails to the outgoing Bush administration. According to the AP:

Colombia's president sharply criticized U.S. presidential contender Barack Obama on Wednesday for opposing a trade deal with his country, calling the Democrat out of touch with the realities of the South American nation.

The White House is urging Congress to approve the agreement, which would remove most tariffs on American exports and cement Colombia's preferential trade status with the United States.

But Illinois Sen. Obama said Wednesday he would oppose the deal.

"I deplore the fact that Senator Obama, aspiring to be president of the United States, should be unaware of Colombia's efforts," President Alvaro Uribe said in a statement. "I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement that does not correspond to Colombia's reality."

Okay, I realize that the news that was trying to be reported here was the Uribe and Obama spat. But to describe the monstrous (what is it about Barack that makes people use that word?!) 600-plus page FTA does far more (and far more harm) that the innocuous-sounding summary "would remove most tariffs on American exports and cement Colombia's preferential trade status with the United States."

For folks covering the campaign, this short blurbs are a great opportunity to move past the horse race and dig a touch deeper on the issue. Here's just a few thoughts for things to insert:

1. If FTAs are just about tariff reduction, why are they hundreds of pages, while only a few pages deal with tariff reduction? What accounts for the opposition of such a wide swath of Americans and environmental and consumer groups who don't work on tariffs? Could it be the corporate privileges which allow foreign investors to claim taxpayer-funded compensation for having to comply with the same public interest laws which domestic firms must comply?
2. What's up with this narrative - paid for by the super-expensive Uribe lobbying outfits - that the Colombia FTA would help our foreign policy initiatives? If voters across Latin America are electing candidates that reject our failed trade model, how is our Latin America policy helped by shoving NAFTA-style trade policy on the one outlier government in the region, and one that doesn't seem to mind playing favorites in our domestic electoral processes? Doesn't sound like much of a foreign policy to me.

Another issue to probe is what role the candidates envision for U.S. multinationals in the global economy. I had the great misfortune to read the cases brought by the estates of murdered Coca-Cola workers against the company. Among the highlights: In 2001, the International Labor Rights Fund and United Steelworkers of America brought a civil case for equitable relief and damages against Coca-Cola and its Colombian bottlers on behalf of the estate of a murdered Coca-Cola plant worker (Isidro Segundo Gil) and of five other plant workers who were tortured, kidnapped and/or otherwise injured. According to the plaintiff’s complaint:

“The claims in this case arise from Defendants’ wrongful actions in connection with their production, bottling and distribution of Coke products in Colombia. With respect to their business operations in Colombia, the Defendants hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders of the Union representing workers at Defendants’ facilities. The individual Plaintiffs have been subjected to serious human rights abuses, including murder, extrajudicial killing, kidnapping, unlawful detention, and torture in violation of the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), 28 U.S.C. §1350, the Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA), international human rights law, and the common tort law of the state of Florida. Further, Defendants, their alter egos and/or their agents engaged in a conspiracy to cause physical and mental harm to Plaintiffs in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 18 U.S.C. § 1961 et seq.”

In 2003, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed this case on jurisdictional grounds. In 2006, a similar case that is still pending was brought against Coca-Cola and its Colombian bottlers on behalf of the wife and estate of another murdered Coca-Cola worker.  The number of unionized workers at Coca-Cola's Colombia plants dropped precipitously after these fear campaigns. As a result, we've seen heightened congressional scrutiny, corporate shareholder protests and university Coke boycotts.

This is the same Coke, ahem, pushing the Colombia FTA. How is doling out legislative victories to corporations that have provoked such animosity abroad helping the long-term interests of Americans? What do the candidates have to say about these crucial issues?

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

Getting into the mud and blood bath and rising sea levels

• It seems like Hillary may have also been talking to the Canadians on NAFTA.
• Reading the NAFTA-memo on Goolsbee more closely, we were struck by this passage: Goolsbee "again cautioned that much of the current conversation in the US about the negative impact of free trade is not aimed at Canada. He said the 'blood bath' is over expanding free trade to countries like Peru and Korea." Hmmm... is that a reference to the Peru NAFTA expansion that Obama and Clinton supported? As I recall, a perfectly avoidable blood bath.
• The Bush administration is using the Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela tiff as an excuse to further push the Colombia FTA. As BoRev.Net and Just Foreign Policy show, moreover, it looks like Bush and the candidates may need to take a step back from the unflinching support of Colombia in this spat. 
• The Bush administration and climate change deniers in Congress are saying that not only should we be scared of the WTO preempting our domestic climate change proposals, but also of retaliation from unnamed foreign countries. Schwab confirms some of our findings from our report, but seems to be using the WTO as an excuse to tamp down rather than ramp up climate action. Bad politics, bad policy...
• Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.

Afro-Colombians reiterate opposition to Colombia FTA

Marino Córdoba, founder of the Association of Internally Displaced Afro-Colombians (AFRODES), has a nice guest blog post at The Hill entitled "Why Afro-Colombians Oppose the Colombia FTA."  The whole post is worth a read, but the juicy tidbits include:

...At the end of 2007, angered by the strong opposition of the majority of Afro-Colombian communities to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA,) Uribe created a new Commission in Colombia that directly challenges our legal governance structure.

Cynically dubbed the Commission for the Advancement of Afro-Colombian People, it would undermine our communities’ ability to advance development strategies chosen by our people that comport with our needs and that help even the economic playing field... President George Bush and other U.S. Uribe allies, such as Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and the vast array of lobbying firms hired by the Uribe government are now trying to tout this outrageous Commission as evidence that Afro- Colombian concerns are being addressed as they push to pass the FTA.

Córdoba says that thanks to a vibrant civil society movement in the 1980s, Afro-Colombians enjoy full legal recognition of their cultural rights and collective ownership of their lands (he specifically mentions Law 70 of 1993 (PDF), a rather remarkable piece of progressive legislation that I'd encourage anyone to read).  Yet this recognition has been undermined by paramilitary organizations forcing Afro-Colombians off of their land: "Tens of thousands of us have been forced to flee... clear[ing] the way for the entry of oil palm plantations, logging operations, and mining projects advanced by allies of the Uribe Administration."

The Colombia FTA's Chapter 10 contains the same poisonous investor rights provisions as NAFTA, CAFTA and the Peru FTA.  If the FTA is implemented, these provisions will only exacerbate the situation, empowering foreign companies to engage in resource extraction made possible by the illegal and often violent forcing of Afro-Colombians off of their land — land supposedly guaranteed to them by Law 70.

The Colombian Corporate Agenda... from the inside

Today, at an event at the Council of the Americas, a corporate organization, I was introduced to a delegation of corporate CEOs from Colombia: David Bojanini of South American Insurance, Manuel Carvajal of the Carvajal Corp., Antonio Celia of Promigas and Francisco Diaz of the Corona Organization.

The event was introduced as a discussion of whether the "free trade agreement" would help improve Colombia, but amongst the diverse panel made up entirely of CEOs of Colombia's corporations (but from different geographic regions, perhaps? Though not even sure about that...), no one said that the FTA would be a bad idea, omitting the perspective of most civil society groups in Colombia and not leading to much of a discussion.

Each businessman outlined their commitment to improving life in Colombia. Antonio Celia said, "we provide jobs...hoping that they [workers] will be compensated with commitment and personal reward." (I'm sure most Colombians would prefer a living wage)

They also said that as opposed to Mexico pre-NAFTA, Colombia's corporations have a real sense of social responsibility and the problems were different in Mexico. (a  reminder that drugs were one of the major issues during the NAFTA debate and last I heard most of our cocaine still comes from Colombia...?)

Bojanini said that he is "very concerned about the well-being of our employees. We have deep respect for our labor unions - many of our companies have unions. We support free association." (and still the most dangerous country for unionists in the world)

After going on about all the contributions of what they admitted was not a representative sample of Colombian CEOs, Francisco Diaz strained to say, "we're trying to tie this into the FTA..."

There was also the obligatory exchange about Venezuela and Chavez (that "purveyor of false populism" Bush mentioned last night in the State of the Union). The CEOs cited that the #1 market for Colombia corporations is the U.S. and #2 is Venezuela. The businessmen also said that the private sector has no control over this and will continue to send the "wrong signal" by exporting to Venezuela, but the government can't send the "wrong signal" by rejecting the trade agreement, because the top two exporters might switch places and then the world will end!!! ahhh!! This was an especially interesting statement given the frame of this forum as about Corporate Social Responsibility, but I guess by this point they had forgotten the corporate responsibility part...

The CEOs were also excited to announce that they were adopting a few conventions of a Human Rights Code of Conduct that they had written. I would think that since they wrote it they would sign up for all of it, but apparently some of the private-sector written Human Rights Conduct just went too far in supporting human rights.

And then they assured the people around the table including a few reporters that this forum and this trip was in fact "not a PR effort." (Well, at least with only the two reporters who showed up and the arguments full of holes, it wasn't a very successful PR effort.) 

Fun sleepover game: who would you rather have as president?

Bush didn't mention unionists' murders once on SOTU! He did draw that funny conclusion: "If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere." Well, it's nice to know that he believes there can be such a thing as true populism. I wonder what he could be thinking about?

As we've shown time and time again, if avoiding populism is the goal, it's best to not pass trade deals that limit development policy space. Zapatista uprising - born with NAFTA. Chavez's rise to power - born with IMF structural adjustment policies. The same is true country-by-country, across the hemisphere. If take everything away from people but their chains, they're going to have less to lose in rising up against you.

Sadly, it's not only Republicans that buy this Bush line. Democrat Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.), one of the CAFTA 15, also buys much of the same line, and is trying to get more Democratic support. Judge for yourself in this speech in Colombia whether he is up for it. In Meeks' endorsement of Uribe for the U.S. presidency, he presents us all with a major moral quandary: do we want Bush, or Uribe? It makes my head hurt something awful, like I'm reading some sort of poisonous zen koan.

Lotta nice fluff. Also no mention of union murders! If you want to get the other side of the story to the Colombia FTA - the side that does talk about the rampant murders there -  please take a moment and watch this video on the Afro-Colombian struggle there, and also this video "letter" by Chicago activists to Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama.

UPDATE 2:15pm EST: RuthG leaves us a better YouTube link for the Chicago letter, and Public Citizen publishes its detailed response to Bush's state of the union!

When will people get embarrassed about Colombia?

Nobody could accuse the Washington community of lawyers that is responsible for our trade policy of being overly concerned with social justice.

But, c'mon, give me a break. Usually when we have trade debates in this town, they center around making one-way streets into two-way streets, keeping the bicycle of trade moving forward, bashing protectionists and isolationists, engaging not retreating, etc.

Enter the debate around the Colombia FTA. Back in the 1990s, even some Clinton administration officials were cited in the Christian Science Monitor as thinking NAFTA expansion to Colombia was a bad idea - precisely because of the country's ongoing civil war and drug problem. Today, it's no secret that a majority of members of Congress and the entirety of the Democrats' base is utterly opposed to a Colombia FTA, both on the grounds that it's a NAFTA expansion and that it's the biggest unionist-murdering country in the world. In most popular discussions of the pact, this latter fact is THE talking points - people murdered. Thousands of them. With total impunity.

So when the advocates of the Colombia FTA take to the stage, they're rarely talking about bicycles or exports. Their main talking point is that UNION MURDERS HAVE GONE DOWN. Is there no shame?? Who cares if they're up or down... if you had to lead with that fact, you have a problem. In Europe, they have a whole host of social and developmental criteria before you can join the European Union. Not here. The bigger the freak social problems you have, the better.

A Republican at an event I was recently at put it bluntly: how many fewer murders do you want to see before you pass the FTA? What's the specific target? Some Dems in attendance had to respond that they would be glad to expand NAFTA to Colombia, but "more progress [on murder] needs to be made." It's like the saying about porn, I guess the Dems'll know sufficient murder reduction when they see it. Problem is, none of us'll know beforehand. Might it be time to get beyond the country-specific critique and blast the failed model instead?

All these change agents, and I still can't break a 20

The growing usage of the phrase "change agent" has to be the oddest and most incongruous adaptation of radical thought into recent American political discourse. For many folks on the left, some variation of the phrase "change agent" has denoted the working class, the multitude, oppressed nationalities, etc. Overnight, everyone from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton assumes the mantle previously given to very large, very strategically placed groups of people.

Whatev. Here at Global Trade Watch, as we are apt to disclose, we have no preference among the self-designated change agents. What we are concerned about is how the struggle for a break from the neo-liberal policies of the past is informing or being informed by the horse race now moving on to South Carolina, Nevada, Michigan and beyond.

The good news is that many of the candidates, including last night's victor Hillary Clinton, are coming up with specific ways that they would change trade policy, as the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign documented in the letters it received from the candidates.

One of the major issues that a new president will likely have to deal with is an economic recession, and they will have to come up with ways to deal with the problem. Corporations have worked hard to ensure that constraints are put on the ability of people to democratically determine how they get themselves out of a recession. Thus, while many of the candidates banter on about international labor and environmental rights that are largely unenforceable in current trade policies, relatively short shrift has been given to the ability to break from NAFTA-WTO style policies during times of national crisis.

In last year's debate over the Peru FTA (and the 2006 debate over the Oman FTA), some attention was given to trying to come up with policies that would safeguard the ability of the U.S. government to block without FTA challenge any takeover of U.S. ports by foreign entities. The "great leap forward" given by our fearless leaders in Congress (they're like 535 little change agents!) was to insert a clause into the "revised" Peru FTA that read:

"Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed: ... to preclude a Party from applying measures that it considers necessary for the fulfillment of its obligations with respect to the maintenance or restoration of international peace or security, or the protection of its own essential security interests."

Some are claiming that this allows "full non-challengeable authority" for the U.S. to do whatever it wants if it invokes this so-called "national security" exception.

Unfortunately, the history of these clauses are a little murkier, as this law review article shows. Take the case of Argentina. In 2001-02, the country of my childhood went through an economic recession on par with the Great Depression. The government took a series of measures that it deemed necessary to insulate it's citizens from the worst aspects of the recession - a regulatory move that has made it the target of countless challenges from multinational corporations. These corporations, including Enron, have used NAFTA-like provisions in so-called bilateral investment treaties (BITs) to go after the country in foreign courts and demand billions in Argentine taxpayer dollars. Their gripe? Argentina making use of these so called "non-precluded measures" during a time of national emergency.

As the aforementioned article by William Burke-White and Andreas von Staden argues, even though the U.S. and other countries have tried to move closer to a clearly "self-judging" standard on these "non-precluded measures", the case history shows a lack of agreement among the corporate trade elite about this discretion.

When Enron sued Argentina, for instance, the corporate trade tribunalists ruled that Argentina could not decide for itself what measures it could take during an economic recession (and avoid challenge and compensation claims). But in a very similar case brought by LG and E, the tribunal ruled the exact opposite way. (See pages 106 and 4 respectively). Both these cases were brought under the U.S.-Argentina BIT, which is like the investor-state regime inserted into NAFTA-style trade agreements.

Anyone still think we're immune from what our corporations have gotten written into pacts that we're party to? Anyone who still thinks it's a good idea to offer up sovereignty to such a fickle, unelected grouplet of trade specialists? Anyone who still buys the idea that you can offer up whole swaths of the U.S. economy and regulatory structure to FTA dictates, and then hope and pray that clever exceptions will stand up when the corporate class wants to teach democratically elected leaders a lesson? (As Sirota points out, they're already in the ginger phase one of that lesson here in the U.S.)

Rain on the scarecrow as the border blockaded

January 3rd, you know what that means? Only 40 more days until the Dee-Cee presidential primary vote! I can't wait! D.C. has always had a unique role in the nation for our role in the presidential primary process. Sure, there's SOMETHING happening in Iowa today, but it's not until a candidate wins the D.C. primary that they're truly considered anointed.

In all seriousness, voting in America's last inland colony is not today's top news. No, just wanted to remind everyone about the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign's excellent web resource on the candidates' positions on trade, available here.

There's been a lot of paeans to corn ethanol during this season, and with good reason: Iowa's farmers are taking it on the nose. As we've written before,

While the volume of U.S. corn and soybean exported increased as predicted by NAFTA’s proponents, the prices received by American farmers declined to the lowest levels in recent memory. While American farmers received $12.64 per bushel of soybeans (in inflation-adjusted terms) when the NAFTA predecessor Canada FTA went into place in 1988, that price halved to $6.30 by 2006. In inflation-adjusted dollars, farmers received $4.29 a bushel for corn in 1995, the year the WTO went into effect and a year after NAFTA went into effect. But a decade later in 2005, the bushel price was at a low of $2.06, and only started increasing with the recent ethanol boom  – a development that is threatened with derailment as Brazil and other agricultural exporters plot WTO challenges against U.S. corn ethanol subsidies. 

But don't take my word for it... after all, there's a reason that John Cougar Mellencamp is a political figure on par with Oprah in Iowa.

The corn issue in Iowa is connected to the corn issue in Mexico, which has been a lot in the news recently. (See our fact sheet for more.) In particular, the final phasing in of NAFTA tariff cuts in Mexico happened, and folks in Mexico were none too happy about it. (video in spanish)

As we've written about before, Latino civil rights groups are calling attention to NAFTA-style policies, which are destroying the Mexican countryside, which has led to massive displacement of people towards the United States.

As the AP reported,

Mexico's Roman Catholic Church has warned that the changes could spark an exodus to the U.S.

"It is clear that many farmers will have a difficult time competing in the domestic market, and that could cause a large number of farmers to leave their farms," the archdiocese said in a statement issued on New Year's Day.

Dozens of farm activists in Ciudad Juarez blocked one lane of the border bridge leading into El Paso, Texas, to protest the unrestricted imports of U.S. corn, as part of a 36-hour demonstration that started in the first minutes of the New Year.

They had pledged not to allow any U.S. grain into the country...

"The open battle against NAFTA begins," read a banner headline in the daily La Jornada.

In Mexico City, activists announced plans to march through the capital and hold a nationwide conference on Jan. 14 to plan further protests.

"This is going to be a complicated year, and there will certainly be a lot of demonstrations," said Enrique Perez, a spokesman for the National Association of Farm Distributors, one of the groups organizing the marches.

Mexico, the birthplace of corn, obtained a 15-year protection for sensitive farm crops when NAFTA was negotiated in 1993. That protection period ran out on Jan. 1. Mexico still grows almost all of the corn consumed here by humans, but imports corn to feed animals.

Mexican politicians from all major parties agree that a NAFTA renegotiation needs to happen. An area where there might be some common ground with the candidates for president, many who are talking about doing something that sounds an awful lot like renegotiation of NAFTA.

Christmastime for corporations (in Germany, err, here)

Just in case you were worried that the corporate masters weren't getting enough of a Christmas this year, what with record CEO pay and booming inequality, never fear. It looks like they may get to gobble up U.S. Postal System, liquiefied natural gas terminals, Mexican peasants, the right to avoid obeying the law overseas, and right to not give back to the community. Let's quickly review:

The Bush administration is on the cusp of formally revealing what they're going to give the European Union to "compensate" for their Internet gambling providers not being able to sell in the U.S. market. As we detail in our release here,

To compensate Europe for the removal of the U.S. gambling sector from WTO jurisdiction, the Bush administration reportedly proposes to bind U.S. storage and warehousing, and postal and delivery to WTO jurisdiction, among other service sectors. Compensation talks have been conducted behind closed doors without input from congressional committees whose jurisdiction would be compromised by the proposal.

What this could mean in practice is that there would be additional pressures to privatize and deregulate not only our postal service, but also our safety policy around dangerous LNG terminals. Oh, yeah, and this is just for the right to maintain a gambling policy that corporations don't like - a policy that treats foreign and domestic gambling firms THE SAME.

Exhibit Two takes us to Mexico, where corporations have reportedly used NAFTA's investor-state system to beat back the Mexican government's right to have a sugar policy for its small peasant producers, rather than allow U.S. high fructose corn syrup exporters and users (the soft drink companies) to run roughshod over a rare policy that keeps Mexicans employed in Mexico. Now, Mexican taxpayers will be ordered by a secretive World Bank court to pay what will probably be tens of millions of dollars to companies like Archer Daniels Midland.

As we wrote about the case back in 2005, Mexico's regulations of HFCS, which it will now be forced to compensate ADM for, were one of the few ways that governments could take active steps to keep farmers on both sides of the border from being squeezed by huge agribusiness corporations. It turns out that's it's inconsistent with NAFTA to help society's most vulnerable.

The final stop is north of the border, in Canada, where U.S. oil companies are using NAFTA to get around having to give back to the community where they are drilling by spending some research and development dollars there. This parallels Big Oil's efforts to  avoid having to pay taxes in Ecuador, where it is using a NAFTA-style tribunal under the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment treaty to not only not pay, but try to get out of being arrested for not paying. Luke Eric Peterson has the skinny on the Mexico, Canada, and Ecuador cases right here.

And in our ongoing Trade Musical Hits, here's Rage Against the Machine's "Testify," directed by Michael Moore.

National Latino Congreso to Congress: Oppose Bush's NAFTA Expansions!

NEWS RELEASE, October 7, 2007

National Latino Congress Unanimously Passes Resolution Calling on U.S. Congress to Stop Signing New Trade Agreements

Latino Leaders Say U.S. Cannot Address Immigration without Changing Course on Failed Trade Policy

Los Angeles, CA – Reflecting on the root causes of poverty and migration in Latin America, the National Latino Congreso has unanimously approved a resolution rejecting new trade agreements based on the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and calling on the U.S. to change its international economic policies, which so far are largely to be blamed for producing wealth and income inequalities abroad, as well as at home. In the case of Latin America, policies promoted by the U.S. have also resulted in the impoverishment and displacement of millions of rural inhabitants.

The resolution adopted on Saturday Oct. 6 by delegates of the Second National Latino Congreso , comes at a moment in which the U.S. Congress considers a new trade agreement with Peru, which largely mirrors NAFTA. The adopted resolution reads, in part:

“Therefore, be it resolved that the organizations present at the 2007 Latino Congreso, are strongly opposed to expanding the failed NAFTA and CAFTA through the “free trade” agreements between the United States and Peru, Colombia, and Panama, and will mobilize our constituencies to work in vehement opposition to their passage, and call on the U.S. Congress directly to reject these agreements.”

The resolution specifically condemns national lawmakers who are attempting to push anti-immigrant legislation while continuing to push for expansion of trade and economic policies that force families to emigrate in the first place. More than 1,000 Latino leaders present applauded the passage of the resolution, calling it an important step towards addressing the obvious link between current U.S. trade and economic policies, and migration.

Close CAFTA Vote Shows Failure of NAFTA Model

Here's our statement on the results, followed by the more recent numbers by region:

For Immediate Release:                   
Oct 8, 2007

Close Tally on CAFTA by Costa Rica in First-Ever Public Vote on a NAFTA Expansion Shows That Bush Administration's Continual Push for These Deals Hurts U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America

Even After U.S. Threats Aimed at Stimulating Public Fear of Reprisal and Big-Dollar Campaign Pushing ‘Sí' Vote, Result Is Marked by Razor-Thin Margin

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The depth of public opposition to North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-style pacts was demonstrated Sunday by Costa Rica's massive "no" vote to CAFTA despite a intensive campaign led by the country's president, months of deceptive radio and television advertising in favor of the pact, and a threatening statement issued Saturday by the White House, Public Citizen said today.

The strong vote against CAFTA likely will fuel growing opposition to another Bush proposal now before Congress to expand NAFTA to Peru. The Peru Free Trade Agreement (FTA) contains the same foreign investor privileges, service sector privatization, agriculture and other provisions that fueled Costa Rican public opposition.

"That nearly half the public in Latin America's richest free-market democracy opposed CAFTA despite the intensive campaign in favor of it should end the repeated claims that pushing more NAFTA-style free trade deals is critical to U.S. foreign policy interests in the region or helps the U.S. image," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division. "This vote also debunks the claim that these pacts are motivated out of U.S. altruism to help poor people in trade partner countries, given that many of the people in question just announced that they themselves don't want this kind of trade policy. This policy, supported by the elite, will help foreign investors seize control of their natural resources, undermine access to essential services, displace peasant farmers and jack up medicines prices."

Fair traders for trade and intact machines

Folks trapped in a flat world mindset may think all this hub hub about fair trade is some sort of disguised attempt to smash the machines and shut down the borders.

That’s so 1990s. Consider just two examples from this week.

Case study 1: Costa Rican voters will vote on Sunday in the world’s first popular referendum on a trade deal (CAFTA). Polls show the “no” vote with a 12 point lead, despite the Bush administration’s considerable bullying and threats. And the hundreds of thousands of people that have filled San Jose’s streets for the “no” campaign aren’t asking for a shut down of trade, but a renegotiation so that human, labor and environmental rights can be put in, and a lot of the bad NAFTA-style provisions taken out.

Case study 2: Just this afternoon, leading fair traders in the U.S. Congress showed yet again that they’re not anti-trade, they just want a different model of trade. Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) announced plans to introduce a bill to make permanent the tiny fraction of Costa Rica’s duty-free market access that isn’t already. These benefits would be extended to nearly two dozen countries, including desperately poor Haiti. This move puts the kibosh on the Bush threats that preferences would expire, which, as I argue here, were based on lies anyway.

In fact, there’s a growing sense that, in order to save our foreign policy, we’re going to have to move away from the NAFTA-CAFTA model, which has been a largely destabilizing factor in Mexico and had painful economic costs. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) articulated this well in his Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, as did Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in a moving floor speech:

Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Sander Levin (D-Mich.) echoed some of these themes in a statement today (you can read it after the jump), as did Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid earlier in the week. So did Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine) in a letter sent just last night to Costa Rica:

There is a growing sense in Congress and among the American public that threatening our neighbors to our South with reprisals for seeking their own economic path after a generation of lost income growth is a strategy that has largely backfired and undermined the U.S. reputation in the region.

Indeed, whoever our next commander in chief ends up being, if they want to re-establish U.S. credibility in the region, they’re going to have to start paring back the harmful interventionist habits and the trade and aid conditionalities and rules that limit local economic development. 

Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua to World Bank: "Go away"

Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua have announced that they are pulling out of the World Bank's International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Under the investor-state procedures set up under NAFTA and similar agreements, foreign companies are allowed to sue sovereign nations at ICSID if they feel their "expected future profits" are endangered by domestic policy.

Perhaps the most infamous ICSID case is the Bolivia water case, in which privatization of the water system in the city of Cochabamba led to massive rate hikes, violent protests, the repeal of watter privatization legislation, and then the company in question suing Bolivia in the ICSID for $25 million in lost future profits.

Obviously not wanting to expose themselves to further such cases in this undemocratic body, these three countries are considering a proposal from Bolivia's President Evo Morales that would "emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that ... resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration."

Given that Nicaragua is party to the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) signed in 2005, which includes investor-state provisions that allow foreign companies to utilize ICSID, it'll be interesting to see how the United States responds to this move.

For more on the investor-state issue, check out "Challenging Corporate Investor Rule" (PDF), a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Food and Water Watch. This report

"documents how private investors have used [investor-state] right[s] to demand compensation for government actions that diminish their potential profits, including public interest regulations. The report summarizes ten of the most controversial suits, including one pending against the U.S. government over California state measures to reduce environmental damages from a Canadian-owned gold mine. "