Free Trade or Living Economies?

Could it be that doubts about the benefits of free trade are behind the "no" vote in France against the EU Constitution?

Could these doubts also be putting the brakes on CAFTA here in the U.S.?

A recent article by Seattle writer, Geov Parrish, suggests that the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) may be in trouble in the U.S. Congress. The New Democrats in Congress -- a group that has historically been pro-free trade -- and conservative southern representatives, worried about the sugar and textile industries, are joining the original opponents of NAFTA and opposing CAFTA, Parrish says.

Parrish's article, coming one year after the treaty was signed, suggests the ratification of CAFTA might be in trouble in spite of recent support from Central American political leaders. While corporate leaders like the freedoms embedded in these trade agreements, and have plenty of resources to share with political leaders who agree with them, the ordinary people in the United States and Central America stand to lose.

Like NAFTA, CAFTA promotes a race to the bottom of the wage scale, and worker and environmental protection. Local economies that sustain people over time are sacrificed for global corporations that leave town when forests or energy resources are depleted or when wages are lower elsewhere.

Economists say this sort of policy promotes growth, but growth figures distort the reality for people trying to raise families -- people who need long-term jobs, good schools, food security, clean water, a stable climate. When a farm that supplies a family and a community with reliable food is transformed into an agribusiness enterprise that supplies exotic crops for export, economists cheer it as growth, although the displaced families may go hungry.

Religious leaders from Central America have been visiting the US urging that CAFTA not be adopted, according to Parrish.

Here in the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world is finding it has no money to fund schools for the young and retirement for the aged. The structural adjustment programs that are part of the corporate-globalization agenda are affecting not only the people of the Third World, but those of the wealthy nations.

In 2003, I interviewed German Parliamentarian Ernst von Weizsaecker, and he noted the same thing happening in Germany. With the end of the Cold War, he said, the large corporations no longer believed they needed to support the social programs that have enabled the quality of life of Western Europeans. After all, with the fall of global communism, people believed they had no alternative but to rely on global corporations.

In 2004, I attended and spoke briefly to a rally called in Stuttgart, Germany, to protest the cut back of social services. Don't go the route of the U.S. in shredding the social safety net, I warned the crowd. Global competitiveness is not the way to prosperity for all -- only for the corporations that aim to play us against each other so they can walk away with the best deals.

It is good news indeed that Congress may be having doubts about CAFTA. And it is evidence, according to Parrish, of the strength of the movement that had its coming out in Seattle in 1999.

Is there a link between popular opposition to corporate-led globalizaiton and the vote in France against the European Constitution? News reports as of this morning are still sketchy, but The New York Times quotes a poll showing 46 percent of those who voted "no" did so out of fear of unemployment. Outsourcing and the arrival of low-paid workers was a large part of the debate leading up to the vote.

It will be important that this discontent not be read as blaming the poorer workers or immigrants for the problems faced by workers in the EU and US. All over the world, we need locally based economies that meet local needs first, and then trade only based on mutual benefit -- not at the behest of giant corporations with no loyalty to any people or place.

Building local living economies, as we discussed in the Fall 2002 issue of YES!, is the way to build the foundation for peace, abundance, cultural integrity, and environmental sanity. And if predictions about peak oil turn out to be correct, as increasing numbers of experts are warning, local living economies may prove to be the only kinds of economies that can meet our needs.

In defense of life

Have you noticed that you can identify what a Bush administration program does in practice simply by considering the opposite of the program title. The Clear Skies Initiative allows power plants to pollute more, the Healthy Forests Initiative is about clear cutting forests, No Child Left Behind, Operation Iraqi Freedom ... you get the drift.

So I was a bit alarmed to hear the new phrase from the Bush administration, the one about a culture of life. It hit hard, because so much of what comes out of the Bush White House and the right-wing ideologues seems to further death, or be reckless about its prevention.

Is this the death wish Freud wrote about?

Then I read a piece by New York Times columnist Frank Rich that focused on the obsession with death that is dominating right-wing culture. From the film, The Passion of the Christ to the Left Behind series--the best-selling novels set at the end of the world--death and fundamentalism (of the Christian, Muslim, and other varieties) seem to walk hand-in-hand.

Maybe it comes with being a mom, but I am fiercely passionate about life. When my kids were little, I remember knowing beyond doubt that if needed, I would throw myself in front of a truck to protect their lives. I find myself growing increasingly impatient with those who would trade other people's lives for power and wealth.

Robert S. McNamara former U.S. Secretary of Defense warns us about what is at stake in an article in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, entitled Apocalypse Soon. McNamara notes that we have 2000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, and that the average US nuclear bomb is 20 times as powerful as the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. McNamara quotes former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, who told a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences last summer: "I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now . ... There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade."

The danger is amplified by the Bush doctrine of unilateral warfare, which many believe is driving some countries to see a nuclear weapons as their only defense against the US superpower.

Far from making us safer, the reckless policies of this administration are endangering us and our children, and generations to come.

This is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There will be events around the world to commemorate the event, many of which will call on the world to back away from the nuclear abyss. Among others, the Abolition Now campaign is bringing together U.S. mayors along with the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a call for the banning of nuclear weapons.

One group of women whose fierceness for life is matched by their playful use of color is Code Pink for Peace. A Code Pink delegation recently traveled to Iran in anticipation of war. They sent several delegations to Iraq, raised money to help the civilian refugees from Fallujah, and are working on counter-recruitment at home.

And, they are helping to save libraries in California from being closed down for lack of funding.

Librarians -- now there is a group you don't want to mess with. Between moms and librarians, I think we could save the world.