The Revenge of the Capitalists
BY BILL LASCHER

Imperialism. Colonialism. Extortion. If there are common evils in the eyes of Oberlin students, these are probably at the top of most Oberlin students’ lists. Last night, at a teach-in sponsored by the Socialist Alternative, La Alianza Latina and the African American studies department, these were dominant themes associated with the nascent Free Trade Area of the Americas.

(photo by Areca Treon)

Organizers of the event are attempting to raise awareness of what they claim is a corporate assault on democracy and drum up support for a protest an upcoming meeting on the FTAA. When they meet in Quebec City, Canada, on April 20-22, trade representatives from every country in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba, as well as executives from a number of multinational corporations, hammer out an agreement on that they claim would eliminate international economic barriers and create the largest trading bloc in the world.
Associate Professor of Politics Chris Howell, who spoke first, stressed FTAA’s mysteriousness. “As the FTAA is being constructed very little is known,” he said. There has been little media attention and no democratic oversight of the negotiations, he explained.
“We need to be clear that what is being constructed is not a free trade agreement,” Howell said, expressing a sentiment that was echoed later by the other speakers, African American Studies Department Chair James Millette and Carlos Alberto Estrada Salgado, Editor in Chief of the Mexican newspaper Oposición Socialista. “This is not about free trade,” Howell said. “It creates legal regimes to allow the free movement of capital and products, not labor.”
Under the agreement, corporations would have the right to sue any nation state for any law or policy if it adversely affects the company’s profitability. Countries which are a party to the agreement would be prevented from any preferential subsidizing of public services. This policy would mean that companies have to be given the same access that the state has for providing public services such as education, correctional facilities and health care. Opponents claim that allowing corporations this access could prove destructive to these sorts of services.
“Free trade has never been free,” Millette said. “There has never been a weak country or constellation of weak countries who supported it,” he added. Instead, he explained that it was a concept designed by the British to break open foreign markets and create a dependency on trade with the empire, such as when it forced China to buy opium.
“Today we are seeing the same thing,” he said, “It is not by chance that the FTAA is developing as a stepchild of NAFTA.”
He argued that the agreement would not bring benefits to third world countries which would face massive deregulation and privatization of their economies. “No developed nation has not had a period of significant protection of industry,” he said. “What we are facing is that developed nations are trying to write an ‘end of history.’ It seems they are saying that we have reached a point that change should not be made.”
Despite painting a dire picture of potential effects of FTAA, all the speakers had praise for the student movement that began with the December, 1999 protest of the WTO in Seattle and the new chapter that they felt that opened in student activism. “Opposition to NAFTA was poorly organized and misdirected,” Salgado said. “Now we’re in a different era. The student movement in 1999 changed our possibilities.”