Posted on 11/23/2004 8:02:38 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
Dogfights in Capitol Hill over free-trade pacts usually pop up not long after presidential elections. Back in 1993, Bill Clinton doled out promises to everybody and their mother to get the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, while President Bush in 2001 had his Congressional allies actually hold a vote open for an extra 23 minutes so they could force a weeping North Carolina congressman to abandon his textile constituency and give the president the single-vote margin he needed for trade negotiating authority.
Next spring promises to be no exception. Mr. Bush has indicated he will try to push through a Central American Free Trade Agreement through Congress, or Cafta. Like Nafta, Cafta would open up trade - valued at $32 billion - between the United States and El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
The usual suspects are already lining up - business leaders for, labor unions against - and many Democrats are protesting that the pact does not go far enough to protect labor and environment in Central America. It would be easier to believe Congressional opponents really did care about protecting labor and environmental standards in other countries if many of them had not also voted in favor of an American-Jordan free trade accord, which included nearly identical language on labor and environment. Cafta actually goes further than the pact with Jordan, since penalty fines collected for not enforcing labor laws would be sent back to the offending country to fix the offense. If, for instance, the United States won a case charging that El Salvador didn't have enough inspectors in its factories, the fine that the El Salvadoran government paid would go toward hiring more inspectors, instead of just ending up in the United States Treasury.
It is easy to see why leading House Democrats like Representative Charles Rangel of New York, the ranking minority member on the House Ways and Means Committee and a normally sound voice on trade, are distancing themselves from Cafta. Mr. Rangel has been pushed around for so long by highhanded Republican behavior that he is not feeling particularly bipartisan these days. The few Democrats who do sometimes support free-trade pacts are waiting to see what they might be offered as the legislative equivalent of the ever-popular swing voters.
We hope President Bush and the Republican leadership can come up with compromises in other areas that might woo Mr. Rangel and the Democrats. The Central American accord is a good idea that will help job growth in a needy region. And if Mr. Rangel and his associates can convince the other side to pare back some of their other plans - those tax cuts for the wealthy come to mind - so much the better.
One of the bigwigs at this affair was Bill Clinton, having received his unction from David Rockefellar and his cohorts of the Council on Foreign Relations, targeting 2005 for congressional passage of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
At the 2003 summit, details were fine-tuned for CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, planned to help expand the North American Free Trade Agreement, the three-nation pact that has outsourced our industrial base. Few have heard of CAFTA, the steppingstone for FTAA, which will congeal every independent nation in our Western Hemisphere into a bureaucratic monstrosity patterned after the European Union.
These so-called trade pacts are a fraud. Free trade by simple word study means removing government controls. But these international agreements have voluminous regulations and international agencies and courts with jurisdiction over education, health care, law enforcement, infrastructure, energy and environment.
What does our 45-page Constitution restrict? Government! Any change and increase in powers of the government can only be done by constitutional amendment. Yet the FTAA is an open-ended process with already thousands of pages of regulations. International agreements would regulate every area of life: world government composed of regional trade blocs.
NAFTA started with the U.S., Canada and Mexico. CAFTA would add all six Central American countries. FTAA would totally entangle all 34 nations in the Western Hemisphere, excepting Cuba, for now.
People should contact Congress without delay by calling 1-877-762-8762.
I don't have time to look this up right now but if you are familiar with DR-CAFTA it illustrates your concerns. We cleaned up dictatorships in the Dominican Republic... and put together a trade agreement which members of Congress today are turning their back on. This not only creates a market for them, but us as well. A big factor is that it would create huge competition for China.
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