Today's Stories

April 15, 2009

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

April 15, 2009

Obama and the Summit of the Americas

Is There a Latin American Policy?

By ROBERT SANDELS

President Barack Obama may or may not announce something new in US Cuba policy at the Fifth Summit of the Americas (April 14-19 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago). He may or may not even take part in any discussion of Cuba, which is bound to take place whether he likes it or not. The well-deserved attention given to the insane and delinquent policy is obscuring another question that deserves some attention: Does the United States even have a Latin American policy?

Leaving aside the always-switched on machinery of intervention to block center-left presidents from holding power, the chief policy initiative of the last 15 years has been hemispheric free trade. Begun in the Clinton years, free trade was eagerly embraced by President George W. Bush. By the time he left office last year, Bush had much less to say about it than in 2001, when he hoped to get 34 nations to sign up for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2003 instead of the original Clinton target date of 2005.[1]

When 2003 arrived, it turned out to be the year FTAA come apart and eventually broke into a patchwork of multilateral treaties with Central America and the Dominican Republic (DR-CAFTA) and bilateral pacts with Chile with others pending. With big economies like Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela in opposition, there is little likelihood that the United States will ever be able to achieve a US-dominated hemispheric economic system. This is part of the tattered policy the Obama administration has to work with.

Competing with Europe & Asia

Globalization was the preferred method of projecting US power through economic dominance in the post-bipolar world of the 1990s. FTAA was to be the hemispheric component by creating a closed system to counter the emerging trading blocs of the European Union (EU) and Asia.

"We have a choice to make," Bush said in 2001. "We can combine in a common market so we can compete in the long term with the Far East and Europe, or we can go on our own. I submit, and I suspect the other leaders will echo with me. I hope they do, at least, that going on our own is not the right way." [2] As Cuban scholar Jorge Hernandez described it, the FTAA strategy was to build a "closed reserve" for the United States through "an offensive of regional expansion of the transnationals of that country."[3] Fear of being crowded by competing trade blocs is consistent with a number of policy statements issued by neoconservative think tanks since the 1980s. Perhaps the most influential was the Santa Fe Document ("A New Inter-American Policy"), which became the template for President Ronald Reagan's Latin America policy. Written in 1980, it called for the United States to "assume the role of the unquestionably cohesive force in building a Western Hemispheric community."[4]

This kind of thinking was residual Cold War hysteria over the spread of communism and fear of losing control anywhere in the Hemisphere whenever a government seemed about to fall into the hands of its own people. The Santa Fe Document urged Reagan to use unilateral military action to prevent the loss of power by Central American political elites.

Some self-serving conservative thinkers confused socialism with loss of sovereignty and concluded that free traders like financier George Soros were subversives and that former secretary of state Henry Kissinger was conspiring to turn the United States into a subdivision of "a global socialist state."[5]

The Santa Fe Document failed to consider the possibility that free traders were not giving up US sovereignty but rather the sovereignty of others and that US international strategies would be boosted into orbit beyond constitutional reach where a military controlled by a US commander-in-chief could preserve economic dominance continent-wide.

Still, the Santa Fe Document was more honest about the military component of free trade than were US trade representatives with their clichés about common aims, values and destinies of Canada, Mexico and the United States under the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA was less about eliminating tariffs than about the free flow of transnational capital and intellectual property rights. It had little to do with a common market that Bush mentioned and more to do with gaining US access to Mexican markets and resources.

The FTAA was not intended to be a supersized NAFTA. If adopted in its early form, FTAA would have allowed infinitely greater penetration of national sovereignties by transnationals asserting such rights as the "liberalization" of services, an idea supposedly killed off in its previous incarnation as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

MAIs would have given transnational corporations extraordinary access to public services in FTAA member countries. They could exercise "investor-state" rights against attempts by a host government to regulate private commercialization of a service like potable water. In other words, a foreign corporation could bypass the US government and, acting as though it were a state, seek redress in special tribunals. Defeated in the late 1990s, MAI proposals reappeared in early FTAA drafts.

A Canadian public advocacy group warned that the resurrected MAI "will give unequalled new rights to the transnational corporations of the hemisphere to compete for and even challenge every publicly funded service of its governments, including health care, education, social security, culture and environmental protection."[6]

2003: A bad year for FTAA

The FTAA was doomed in September 2003 at a FTAA Technical Negotiating Committee (TNC) meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, when Brazil refused to agree on the services, investment and intellectual property rights sections of the draft.

Almost simultaneously, at the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva led an insurgent group of South nations against the US agenda. The resulting stalemate carried over into FTAA negotiations. A surprised US delegation, led by Trade Representative Robert Zoellick announced that the United States would shift its strategy to negotiating bilateral treaties.

Analysts William Greider and Kenneth Rapoza described the angry aftermath as a display of US bluster and threats. "The impoverished island nations of the Caribbean were told they could forget about their newly negotiated US trade agreement. They folded. Central American countries were threatened with loss of the modest trade preferences already granted to their products. Costa Rica, one of Lula's original allies, was hammered --  privatize your energy and telecommunications sectors or be left in the cold -- and gave in."[7]

What was left of FTAA came to be called "FTAA lite," and the word "flexibility" crept into the drafts. "Ministers also recognize the need for flexibility," said a TNC declaration in November 2003, "to take into account the needs and sensitivities of all FTAA partners,"[8]

2005: A worse year

Who remembers that the official theme of the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 2005 was "increased job creation to fight poverty and strengthen democratic governance"? What the summit actually did was to make even a flexible FTAA untenable. The Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, joined by Venezuela, forced the inclusion of a dissenting view in the final declaration.

"Other member states," said the minority opinion, "maintain that the necessary conditions are not yet in place for achieving a balanced and equitable free trade agreement with effective access to markets free from subsidies and trade-distorting practices, and that takes into account the needs and sensitivities of all partners, as well as the differences in the levels of development and size of the economies."[9] Once you take all those considerations into account, there is no FTAA.

A symbolic end to FTAA was a December 2008 conference in Brazil to which the United States was not invited, though Cuban President Raul Castro was. Media coverage of the event described the tone as decidedly critical of the United States, FTAA and the blockade of Cuba. The New York Times said the United States had become "a punching bag at the three-day conference." One commentator told the Times, "The United States is no longer, and will not be ever again, the major interlocutor for the countries in the region."[10]

This is the situation Obama faces at the Fifth Summit of the Americas; a string of defeats and humiliations for the centerpiece of US Latin American policy stretching back to 2003. The shriveling of the free trade concept coincides roughly with the general decline of US power and influence in the region. FTAA came about too late, for by 2003, neoliberalism, its central economic principle, was seen nearly everywhere as the capstone of US economic imperialism. At the January 2004 Special Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, Lula said neoliberalism had turned the 1990s into "a decade of despair" in Latin America.[11]

FTAA and its satellite programs were brazenly -- even stupidly --  counter to Latin America's sovereign interests. Yet, Bush pressed on, apparently unmindful that a hegemonic plan largely negotiated in secret with limitless input from transnational corporations was likely to provoke a backlash that might help bring about an anti-FTAA.

Rather than locking Latin America and the Caribbean into a free-trade agreement favoring US interests, the push for FTAA contributed to the regional integration movement. The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) was founded by Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2004 as a direct response to FTAA. It has gone the furthest in creating trade, investment, communication, banking, energy and other regional ties.[12] Thus, Bush left office facing the possibility that Latin America could become a third independent trade and investment bloc for the United States to worry about.

The undead FTAA

Some observers believe, however, that multilateral negotiations may not be so bad for Latin American interests as long as they proceed along the lines that now appear to be acceptable to the United States under FTAA lite. These include a willingness by the United States to drop services and other features. Bilateral free-trade agreements pit weaker economies against the United States, which is still in a position to offer inducements to sign up for dubious one-sided deals.

Jurgen Kurtz, director of the International Investment Law Program at the Melbourne Law School, said, "In bilateral negotiations, individual developing countries have significantly less leeway to negotiate concessions in areas of interest to them." Besides, the United States has a way of introducing some of the more objectionable proposals such as services and foreign investment into bilateral draft treaties, says Kurtz.[13]

The United States has lately been following multiple paths to achieve what FTAA failed to achieve. The official line at the State Department under late Bush was that a string of bilateral treaties adds up to a stealth FTAA. Under Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon claimed that once Congress approved the pending Panama and Colombia treaties, the United States "will effectively have an unbroken line of Free Trade Agreements stretching from Canada to the tip of Chile."[14]

This had being done by combining the less ambitious trade pacts with some of the weaker states with military and security programs ostensibly to promote peace and democracy. The militarizing of the free-trade has not gone unnoticed. The final declaration of Cuba's most recent FTAA counter summit (encuentro) equates the trade content of the neoliberal agenda with regime change. As examples, it cites denunciations by Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales of alleged US attempts to destabilize their governments through security programs attached to free trade.[15]

A scholarly argument for militarized free trade is a study by the US Army War College recommending "soft-power architecture" for the Americas. "An incipient economic community (Free Trade Area of the Americas) within an existing democratic community," says the study "requires a new security structure that can support and defend it, now and in the future."

This security imperative requires "standing multinational forces (SMFs) that can handle humanitarian assistance missions, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and other small-scale contingencies (SCCs)."[16]

It is doubtful that many of us knew that, as the study suggests, "It is time to bring back the First Special Service Force (FSSF)," a commando outfit from World War I. There would an FSSF (N) for the northern countries of the hemisphere and an FSSF(S) for the southern. Thus, the SMFs that would take care of the SCCs would be the FSSF (N) and FSSF(S). Now you know.

A Not-Plan Colombia for Mexico

An example of how military and security issues merge with free trade is the US-Mexico Merida Initiative (also called Plan Merida). Officially, we are not supposed to compare it to the infamous Plan Colombia, which, since 1996, has tied the United States to the permanent train wreck that is Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Already connected to the United States and Canada through NAFTA, Mexico is now enlisted in the wars on terror, drugs, gangs and the other US fears regularly investigated in congressional hearings.

Bush signed the multiyear $1.4 billion program into law in June 2008. It combines economic assistance with a lot of weapons, technology and training for Mexican military and police forces. It is essentially the security arm of NAFTA.

The plan also includes provisions that sound like FTAA "disciplines" to bring other countries into line with US "practices and interests." It requires Mexico to reform its legal and judicial systems to harmonize them with those of the United States.

The military and security aid portion of Plan Colombia has varied between 80% and 100% of the total, which is currently over $600 million per year. Likewise, little of the Plan Merida money goes to purely economic and social uses in Mexico. For fiscal 2009, 83% is for the Mexican military and police.

The United States has somewhat similar arrangements in Central America through the United States-Central American (SICA) Dialogue on Security. All of this is loosely tied together militarily by the US Southern Command, part of the geo-military subdivision of the world that turn[17]s anything south of the Rio Grande into the military equivalent of a US county. The Southern Command holds regular joints exercises in security, counterterrorism and disaster relief.

The Greater North American Co-Prosperity Sphere (17)

If Plan Merida is the security arm of NAFTA, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is the supra-national trade and security umbrella for all of North America. Though held mostly in secret, its meetings look like an attempt to enlarge NAFTA into a northern "soft-power architecture." Secretary Shannon has called SSP the "armoring of NAFTA."[18]

These meetings have been misrepresented as non-substantive talks. While Congress has complained of not being informed of these summits, major transnational corporations are not only consulted but are direct participants in setting agendas. The SPP's secretariat is the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), a private-enterprise association representing Wal-Mart and 29 other corporations.

The SPP's website lists extensive progress on agreements on border, traveler and cargo security, bioprotection, cross-border information and intelligence sharing and energy production to supply the US market.[19] The SPP gave rise to conspiracy theories that Canada, Mexico and the United States were going to build a NAFTA super highway from the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas to Toronto to truck cheap goods from China into the United States and to haul away its sovereignty on the way out.[20] The State Department's description of SPP does not mention a highway but refers to protecting the economic spaces of the NAFTA states, not at their national borders but at continental boundaries.

To understand the purpose of SPP requires that out-of-date conservatives must put aside their Cold War texts and understand that US policymakers are trying to address the dangers to the United States from democratic populism and regional cooperation developing in Latin American and the Caribbean. This is the American phobia. Secretary Shannon said, " how countries in the region address poverty, how they address inequality, and how they address social exclusion affects the well being of the United States and the well being of U.S. citizens.[21] This view gives context to US hostility to the way Morales and Chavez have addressed their countries' social and economic problems.

Pathways to "Prosperity"

Bush launched Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas (PPA) in September 2008, meeting with ten current or pending free-trade partners from Latin America plus Canada. This was Bush's final effort to make some sort of soup out of the FTAA leftovers. The delegates pledged allegiance "to the long-term goals of free trade in the hemisphere," and vowed, "to pursue other efforts to promote economic integration in the hemisphere."[22] In December 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attended a PPA ministerial session in Panama. Rice apparently thought free trade was still on the table as she declared her delight at being with ministers "who share a fundamental .. belief that open markets and free trade [lead] to  growth."[23]

There are allusions to some core FTAA ideas in the final communiqué from the December meeting, such as the always-treacherous phrase "best practices" in connection with protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights and labor and environmental standards. Best practices can mean anything one wants it to mean. For example, it can mean encouraging optional compliance with the law. Thus, the communiqué recommends improving corporate environmental practices by "community and voluntary incentive-based activities for environmental protection."[24]

As if the regional rejection of neoliberal doctrine never happened, Rice and the other ministers thought, "Reducing or eliminating barriers, including administrative ones that hinder investment and the trade of goods and services in the Hemisphere," would be desirable as would, "Increasing the links of our countries with multilateral financial institutions, including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank."

The communiqué stresses the progressive-sounding idea of helping small businesses and farmers integrate into the international market. However, in doing so, the ministers point to the benefits of "the liberalization of trade and investment flows," which, of course, is part of the sulfuric vocabulary of hegemonic neoliberalism rejected since 2001.

Apparently unaware that to sell wine gone bad you are supposed to put it in new bottles, the ministers go on using the defiled word "liberal" as in "neoliberalism."

Mind you, this meeting took place in December 2008, when the unfolding financial and economic crisis took liberalization off the table in US domestic conversations about the economy and forced Bush to make the secretary of the treasury the practical czar of the automotive, finance, investment and real estate sectors.

Under the terms of the long forgotten Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, much of the US government's actions in the current crisis would probably qualify as a "contract or combination in restraint of trade." Accordingly, it is doubtful that the United States could qualify for membership in its own FTAA or meet the PPA spirit of the "liberalization of trade and investment flows."

Robert Sandels is an analyst and writer for Cuba-L Direct. This essay was written for Cuba-L Direct and CounterPunch.

Notes

[1] Clinton first proposed FTAA at the First Summit of the Americas in Miami, 1994. Negotiations began in 1998.

[2] Quoted in Carl Teichrib, "The Merging of the Americas in a New Global Order," Forcing Change, />.

[3] Jorge Hernandez, "Hegemonía y política latinoamericana de Estados Unidos en la era de ALCA," Cuba Socialista, septiembre 2003. .

[4] The Santa Fe Document was privately printed. See excerpts in .

[5] William F. Jaspers, "A NAFTA/FTAA Rogue's Gallery, The New American, 04/05/04, .

[6] Maude Barlow, "Stop the FTAA and the Threat to Social Programs, Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice in Canada and the Americas," The Council of Canadians, 01/18/01, .

[7] William Greider and Kenneth Rapoza, "Lula Raises the Stakes, The Nation, 02/01/03, http://www.thenation.com/sections/ftaa.

[8] Ministerial Declaration, Free Trade Area of the Americas, Eighth Ministerial Meeting, Miami, 11/30/03, .

[9] Declaration, Fourth Summit of the Americas, 11/05/05, < http://www.summit-americas.org/>.

[10] New York Times, 12/17/08.

[11] The Guardian, 01/14/04, .

[12] See "The Other Revolution," Cuba-L Analysis, 04/21/07, < http//cuba-l@listserv.unm.edu>.

[13] Jurgen Kurtz, "Developing Countries and Their Engagement in the World Trade Organization: An Assessment of the Cancun Ministerial, Melbourne Journal of International Law, December 2004,

 [14] U.S. Department of State, "Remarks by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon to the Americas Society Council of the Americas, New York, NY," 04/03/08, < http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2008 [15] Declaración del VII Encuentro Hemisférico de Lucha Contra los TLCs y por la Integracion de los Pueblos. La Habana, 11 de abril de 2008, .

[16] Joseph R. Nunez, "A 21st Century Security Architecture for the Americas: Multilateral Cooperation, Liberal Peace, and Soft Power," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, August 2002, .

[17] People who make up these names really ought to avoid the word "prosperity" attached to expansionist doctrines. See the 1940 announcement of Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, "Laying the foundation of national defense economy, of which the keynote is to lie in the autonomous development of the economy of Japan, Manchoukuo and China with Japan as the center."

[18] Shannon, Remarks.

[19] http://www.spp.gov/

[20] For a debunking discussion of the superhighway, see Christopher Hayes, "The NAFTA Superhighway," The Nation, 08/27/07, . A believer is Pat Buchanan, "The NAFTA Superhighway," Townhall Finance, 08/29/08, < http://townhall.com/columnists/PatrickJBuchanan/2006/08/29>/.

[21] Ibid.

[22] White House, "In Focus: Global Diplomacy," Fact Sheet, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080924.html.

[23] U.S. Department of State, "Remarks at Pathways to Prosperity Plenary Session," 12/10/08, .

[24] Communiqué, Peace and Prosperity for the Americas Plenary, December 2008, .

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