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PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS ON HOW THE 'FREE TRADE' CASE FOR OFFSHORING AMERICA'S JOBS HAS COME UNGLUED Roberts on the sensational exposure of the faked "gains" and phantom stats of the free traders. Who was America's most anti-imperialist president? Try Grover Cleveland! JoAnn Wypijewski on the unlikely hero of Hawai'i's restoration movement. Alexander Cockburn reports on evangelical Christians in crisis amid fresh onslaughts by forces of darkness. The Warbler's Parable: Rosa Miriam Elizalde on the black-masked visitors to Cuba defying the US economic blockade.
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Today's Stories June 30 / July 1, 2007 Alan
Farago Robert
Fisk Judith
Siers-Poisson June 29, 2007 St.
Clair / Frank Brian
Cloughley Patrick
Cockburn Gilad
Atzmon Dave
Lindorff Jennifer
Matsui / Kevin
Zeese Daniel
Klimek David
Michael Green John
Chuckman Website
of the Day
June 28, 2007 Bill
Quigley Vijay
Prashad Margaret
Kimberley Winslow
T. Wheeler Philip
Rizk D.
K. Wilson Bill
Williams Mahmoud
El-Yousseph Richard
Rhames Paul
Krassner Website
of the Day
Marjorie
Cohn Dr.
Susan Rosenthal, MD Alan
Farago Carla
Blank Matthew
Abraham Sunsara
Taylor Russell
D. Hoffman Robert
Weissman Sen.
Russ Feingold Paul
Buchheit Website
of the Day
June 26, 2007 Jonathan
Cook Ralph
Nader Corporate
Crime Reporter Ron
Jacobs Martha
Rosenberg John
Chuckman Denny
Haldeman Anthony
DiMaggio Stephen
Fleischman William
S. Lind Website
of the Day
Paul
Craig Roberts Jennifer
Loewenstein Bob
Anderson Robert
Pollin Patrick
Cockburn Eva
Liddell Dan
Bacher Larry
Atkins Mark
Brenner James
Rothenberg Website
of the Day June 23 / 24, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Jeff
Taylor Oren
Ben-Dor Gary
Leupp Robert
Fisk David
Rosen Russell
Mokhiber Alison
Weir Robert
Fantina D.
K. Wilson Nicole
Colson Stephen
Soldz, Steven Reisner and Brad Olson Dave
Lindorff Benjamin
Dangl Michael
Dickinson Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
June 22, 2007 Andy
Worthington Sherwood
Ross Eliana
Monteforte Robert
Weissman Richard
Rhames Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy
Baroud Ehud
Krinis, David Shulman and Neve Gordon David
Michael Green Kathryn
Webber Website
of the Day
June 21, 2007 Peter
Linebaugh Natsu
Saito Ron
Jacobs Saree
Makdisi John
Stauber Scott
Liebertz Tom
Clifford Robert
Jensen Michael
J. Smith Jeb
Sprague Website
of the Day
Omar
Barghouti Andy
Worthington Margaret
Kimberley Robert
Weissman Russell
D. Hoffman Rannie
Amiri Stephen
Lendman Dave
Lindorff David
Swanson Anne
Dachel Website
of the Day
June 19, 2007 Ralph
Nader Dr.
Shepherd Bliss Bill
and Kathleen Christison Jeff
Leys Dave
Zirin Chris
Floyd Ben
Terrall Anthony
Papa VIPS Linda Flores Website
of the Day
John
Ross Paul
Craig Roberts Martha
Rosenberg Norman
Solomon Don
Santina Isabella
Kenfield James
Brooks Eva
Liddell Sam
Husseini Akiva
Eldar Website
of the Day
Alexander
Cockburn John
Halle Robert
Fisk Andy
Worthington Uri
Avnery Fred
Gardner Saul
Landau P.
Sainath Missy
Comley Beattie Alan
Gregory Walter
Brasch Website
of the Weekend
June 15, 2007 Alan
Farago Andy
Worthington Michael
Simmons Franklin
Lamb Gary
Leupp John
Ross Website
of the Day
June 14, 2007 Michael
Donnelly
Faisal
Kutty Harry
Browne Charles
Jonkel Steven
Higgs Bruce
Dixon Bruce
K. Gagnon
Website
of the Day June 13, 2007 Glen Ford Marjorie Cohn Bill Christison Charles Jonkel Silvia Cattori Richard Gott Firmin DeBrabander William S. Lind Keith Rosenthal Website of the Day June 12, 2007 Jeffrey St.
Clair Paul Craig
Roberts P. Sainath Ralph Nader Omar Waraich Dave Lindorff Harvey Wasserman Malini Johar
Schueller Ramzy Baroud Website of
the Day
June 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Norman Solomon Eva Liddell Rannie Amiri Rachel Voss Christopher
Brauchli D. K. Wilson Website of
the Day
Alexander Cockburn George Ciccariello-Maher Saul Landau Robert Fisk Brian Cloughley Ron Jacobs Ward Boston Conn Hallinan Leonard Peltier Lawrence Davidson John Ross Kate Allan Fred Gardner Stephen Fleischman Monica Benderman Geoff Bailey Missy Beattie Patrick Dyer Tim Lengerich James Irani
Gary Leupp Michael Tillery Michael Simmons Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
June 8, 2007 Serge Halimi Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair
Paul Craig Roberts William Blum Joshua Frank Lance Selfa Dave Lindorff Lawrence Ferlinghetti Website of the Day
Marjorie Cohn Soldz, Reisner
and Olson: Soldz, Reisner
Paul Craig Roberts Bill Quigley Silvia Cattori Carl G. Estabrook Ellen Taylor Corporate Crime
Reporter Brenda Norrell D. K. Wilson Kevin Zeese Website of
the Day
Alain Gresh Gary Leupp Steven Sherman Bruce Dixon Corporate Crime Reporter Brian M. Downing Ron Jacobs George Bisharat Nicole Colson Bruce K. Gagnon Website of the Day
June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Jonathan Cook David Vest Robert Fantina Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury John V. Walsh Richard Cretan Adam Engel William S. Lind Myles Hoenig Jim Minick Website of
the Day
Nizar Latif Diana Johnstone Gregory Wilpert Paul Watson Susan Rosenthal,
MD Richard Ward Eva Liddell Zahi Khouri Evelyn Pringle China Hand Karyn Strickler Website of the Day
June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Marc Levy Martin Smith Diana Johnstone John Ross Uri Avnery Sunsara Taylor Richard Neville P. Sainath Missy Comley
Beattie Nisrine Abiad Rannie Amiri Margot Pepper Eric Stewart Ralph Nader Dan Bacher Shaun Harkin Richard Rhames Frederick Hudson Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Dave Marsh Saul Landau David Phinney Robert Jensen Stanley Heller Yifat Susskind Robert Weissman Paul Buchheit William S.
Lind Sherwood Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
Robert Bryce Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Kathy Kelly Marjorie Cohn Chris Kutalik
Corporate Crime Reporter Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
May 30, 2007 James Ridgeway Franklin Lamb Terrence E. Paupp Uri Avnery Alan Maass Rock and Rap
Confidential Ralph Nader Nirmal Ghosh Jean Daniels Tom Barry Website of the Day
Stephen Soldz Eliza Ernshire Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Mike Whitney David Swanson John Holt Cynthia McKinney Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day
Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Dr. Susan Block Jeeni Criscenzo Douglas Valentine Website of the Day 
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Weekend
Edition The Political, Economic and Environmental Consequences of Executive Trade NegotiationsFast Track to Trade FailureBy JACOB HILL In recent days, the Bush administration has begun an initiative to push several free trade agreements through their final stages before the president's Trade Promotional Authority (also known as Fast Track) expires on June 30, 2007. As the deadline looms, trade agreements with Peru and South Korea are scheduled to be signed. Yesterday, June 28, workers at South Korea's top automaker, Hyundai, initiated a partial strike in protest of the Fast Track formed trade agreement, crippling production for several hours. In Washington D.C., several days ago, Susan Schwab, the U.S. Trade Representative, asked members of Congress to approve an extension of Fast Track in order to salvage the dying Doha round at the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. The goal of the WTO talks is to eliminate various trade barriers between developed and developing nations throughout the world in a macro-expansion of free trade. Many experts believe, based on the history of free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that both bilateral pacts between individual countries (such as the one between the U.S. and South Korea) and collective WTO-sponsored agreements could actually have devastating negative effects on the economies of the nations involved. What is Fast Track Trade Authority? Fast Track is a process in which the president of the United States and the staff in the executive Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) are exclusively mandated to recommend with which countries the U.S. will enter into special trade relations and what will be the exact terms of such arrangements. The USTR is an office within the executive branch headed by the United States Trade Representative, who has been given "cabinet level" status. The USTR attends Cabinet meetings and advises the president on trade-related policies, but the position does not require confirmation by the Senate. In the end, the only two people permitted to negotiate trade deals under Fast Track legislation are the president and an official from the executive branch appointed without any congressional assent. After the president and the USTR have formulated their trade proposals and proceed to initial them, Congress is only allowed to declare either for or against their terms in an up and down vote-rather than the usual process of amendment prior to the final vote. Moreover, the legislature is restricted in its debate of the pact's provisos. After the deal is signed, Congress has only 90 days to vote on the proposition under discussion and the House and Senate are limited to 20 hours of discussion and debate of the topic, but Congress is never given the opportunity to revise the proposal. Fast Track was first established in 1974 during President Richard Nixon's time in office. The authority was reinstated in 1979 and continued until 1994. Fast Track ended shortly after the passage of the NAFTA, one of the most controversial examples of the Trade Promotional Authority's use. During most of the Clinton presidency, Fast Track was not in place, but by 2002, under the Bush administration, the authority was reestablished amidst considerable debate and bipartisan deal-making, as evidenced by the House of Representatives' authorization of Fast Track by only three votes at 3:30am on July 27, 2002. Fast Track Deforms Democracy Under the U.S. Constitution, the legislative branch is given the authority to negotiate all trade deals. According to Article Two, Section Eight, "the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises" and "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states." It was obviously the intention of the Founders that the legislative branch control all trade-related negotiations. Since practically every trade treaty negotiated by the president and the USTR concerns matters of taxation, Fast Track trade authority would seem to nullify Congress' constitutional power to regulate revenue and tariffs and to create and monitor trade pacts between the U.S. and other nations. In effect, Fast Track critics say that pro-free trade senators and representatives have abandoned their constituents, who trusted them to monitor and act upon these issues. Many believe that it is negligent of Congress to pawn their jobs off to the president and his trade representatives, over whose appointments Congress is not involved. Fast Track prevents the legislature from action on issues of trade, essentially leaving the citizens of the United States without an unfettered voice in all trade matters in which Trade Promotional Authority is utilized. Under the existing system, those who craft the pacts are in no way accountable to citizens who may be most impacted by the trade agreements-this country's blue collar workers. While average U.S. citizens do not have a voice in the outcome of trade agreements, large corporations exercise their influence almost unchecked and unwitnessed. The Bush administration has appointed a number of CEOs (whose companies made large campaign contributions to the Republican Party) to a government advisory committee for trade negotiations. Additionally, agreements formed through Fast Track are binding, long-term pacts. If a newly-elected president believes that the agreements are not in the best interest of the American people, he or she will lack the authority to revoke the pacts without serious and damaging economic repercussions. Even if the American people use their presidential votes to voice their disapproval of existing trade agreements created by the Fast Track system, their dissent will never be clearly registered, because future administrations' hands are tied by long-term deals negotiated without direct public consent. Fast Track and Free Trade Failures As previously mentioned, perhaps the most contested free trade initiative that has resulted from Fast Track has been NAFTA, which was initiated in 1994. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), over a million job opportunities were lost in the U.S. due to NAFTA. Moreover, the U.S. trade deficit has increased at a dramatic rate as the nation continues to import a much greater volume of products than it exports. Trade deficits are a sign of external economic dependence and may show a lack of internal fiscal discipline and growth. After NAFTA was enacted, U.S. exports did increase significantly, but the rate of import increases eventually outpaced exports. In fact, since 1994, the year that NAFTA came into effect, the U.S.'s trade deficit has actually increased by $107.3 billion. Outside of the U.S., NAFTA's impact has been every bit as significant. After the ratification of the pact, the Mexican market gradually filled with subsidized corn from the United States, pushing small local producers out of the market because the prices of such subsidized U.S. produce fell below the production costs of Mexican farmers. As a result, upwards of one million small-scale corn producers in Mexico have lost their jobs. An EPI report on the impact of NAFTA found that the percentage of the Mexican population involved in agricultural activities has fallen from 26.8 percent in 1991 to 16.4 percent in 2004. In Canada, 47 percent of the manufacturing plants that existed in 1988 were closed by 1997. Experts critical of NAFTA are wont to say that President Bush and the USTR did not learn from the failures of NAFTA, as they desire to continue to use Fast Track to push through trade legislation that many analysts insist eventually harms American workers and their counterparts abroad. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) became law with President Bush's signature in August 2005. Since then, it has been ratified by the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. Although the full impact of CAFTA will not be known for several years, leery evaluators predict that the results will be virtually identical to those of NAFTA, as CAFTA's wording is nearly indistinguishable from that of its sister document. Just as with Mexican farmers and NAFTA, Central American corn producers cannot compete with the low prices of the mass-produced and heavily subsidized corn coming from American agro-corporations, such as Cargill. Already, impoverished farmers in countries like Nicaragua are being forced to abandon their traditional crops, such as corn, for new, less reliable and non-nutritional produce with very high price volatility, like sesame. When international prices drop, these small-scale farmers will once again find themselves unable to compete. To make matters worse, sesame, unlike corn, has no intrinsic sustaining nutritional value, leaving producers with neither adequate funds nor sustentative produce with which to provide for their families. Fast Track Weakens Environmental Standards In what many see as an affront to both the workings of democratic institutions and the environment, NAFTA and CAFTA both include chapters that allow corporations to sue governments for existing, as well as projected damages, when businesses are unable to turn a profit because of local legislation. There have been two instances of this application under NAFTA. In December 1995, the local government in San Luis Potosí, Mexico denied Metalclad, a large U.S. corporation, the necessary permits to operate a hazardous waste transfer station within an ecological sanctuary neighboring the community's fresh water supply. Under a previous owner, the transfer station contaminated the site with 20,000 tons of toxic waste. In January 1997, over one year after originally being denied the permit, Metalclad sued the Mexican government for damages as a result of being denied the permits to process poisonous waste which, arguably, would have devastated both the health of the community and the environment. In August 2000, a NAFTA tribunal awarded Metalcald over $16.6 million in damages, to be paid by the government of Mexico. The NAFTA tribunal consists of arbiters whose identities are kept hidden from the public. Not only is there no democratic nomination or confirmation process to ensure that the judges will have the best interests of the citizenry in mind, but after their covert appointment, they are able to rule in total anonymity. Re-approval of Fast Track? As President Bush campaigns for the renewal of Fast Track, supporters and detractors of the authority come from both sides of the aisle. Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Barack Obama (D-IL), and John Edwards (D-NC) all support Fast Track legislation. In May 2007, a deal was struck between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Bush administration to place labor and environmental provisions into the primary wording of free trade agreements with the same fervor as was the case with commercial provisions that provide protection to private-sector firms. Nevertheless, its opponents maintain that this is not an acceptable solution to the problems associated with Fast Track. Even with these new arrangements, Americans will not be able to adequately have their voices heard in the negotiation process, the well-being of the environment will obviously take a back seat to corporate earnings and jobs will continue to be sacrificed throughout the Western Hemisphere to buttress annual corporate stockholder reports. Jacob Hill is a Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
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CounterPunch Books of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy  Click Here to Buy! How the Press Failed The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!  Buy End Times Now! CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order!  Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn   Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed        Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
