Of course this is nonsense. The overwhelming majority of Americans, along with the overwhelming majority of Haitians and Hondurans, would be absolutely delighted if Haitian and Honduran workers producing clothes for the U.S. market would be paid more. Labor costs are a small fraction of the prices that consumers face. Wages are so low because that yields even more profits for those who already have more money than they can ever spend; the low wage floor is being determined by government policy in Washington, Haiti, Honduras, and elsewhere, not by the desires of consumers. No magic formula of economics determines the minimum wage that can be sustained in Haiti and Honduras. At the margin - whether the minimum wage shall be $3 a day or $5 a day in the export sector in Haiti - it is determined politically. If you say that the leverage of the U.S. consumer market should be used to support higher wages for poor workers in poor countries, rather than the opposite, you're likely to be told that this is not allowed. This leverage has been allocated to something else. The power of the U.S. market can only be used for things like forcing developing countries to enforce the patents, trademarks, and copyrights of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and Hollywood.

a history of economic thought, isaac ilych rubin (part one: mercantilism and its decline)

--- important quotes/excerpts and summary ---

(19-26): a brief history of the transition from feudalism to early capitalism in england (called the age of merchant capital by the author, standing for the period 1500-1700). insofar as this is the staple narrative against which all other history is tested, it makes sense to reconstruct this carefully.

1100s-1400s: the Later Middle Ages, characterized by a "town" or "regional" economy. Key is that "each town...comprised a single economic region, within whose confines all exchange between town and countryside took place." Rural economy involves peasants producing for their own consumption, giving some surplus to their lord as "quickrent", and selling whatever meagre portions were left on the market; also, of course, involved compulsorly labor that the feudals extracted from these peasants on their own manor. Urban economy organized into guild handicrafts--each master owns his own tools and instruments; as a member of the guild he is bound by its "strict code of rules on prices and output," even while he enjoys the monopoly that it affords him.

1500-1700: this social structure begins to break up as a result of three distinct, basic causes:

1. the rapid development of a money economy
2. the expansion of the market
3. the growing stregnth of money capital
   

colonial trade, in particular, was instrumental in bringing money capital and silver bullion to England, at this time. this caused the famous "price revolution" (which had the effect of depressing real wages for the majority of the population, but enriching the commercial bourgeoisie). peasantry begins to be displaced (and their land enclosed), as feudals look toward cash-crops, sheep, and larger/productive farmers. the guilds begin to break up under the pressure of this trade, as opportunities are sought beyond the bounds of the regional and eventually national economy (as a result of this transition, middlemen come to play an important role--these middlemen become primitive industrialists, of course, as the cottage industry takes off). an important point often elided in the apologists' history, of course, is that this nascent commercial bourgeoisie formed a ready alliance with the absolutist state, which shared their interest in undermining the authority of independent feudals.

(26): "The basic feature of mercantilist policy is that the state actively uses its powers to help implant and develop a young capitalist trade and industry and, through the use or protectionist measures, diligently defends it from foreign competition." Rubin further distinguishes between early mercantilism (which prioritizes the fiscal aims of the State--careful regulation of trade, ban on export of currency--and corresponds to period before 1600, when Britain in the main exported raw materials and lacked a native merchant class--for more, see pp 27-28) and developed mercantilism (which attempts to bolster capitalist trade and industry, defending it through protectionism).

(30): However, as "the basis of English exports shifted from raw materials (wool) to the export of finished products" (cloth) in the late 1500s and 1600s, a new merchant class is looking ever more anxiously for profitable markets in which to sell these products. "The country was now forced to purse an active colonial policy... The entire history of England from the 16th (1500s) to the 18th (1700s) centuries is a history of its struggles with these nations for commercial and colonial superiority. Its weapons in this struggle were the founding of its own colonies, commercial treaties, and wars."

(31): "And so, the money balance system, that old, outmoded set of restrictive, essentially fiscal measures, gradually gave way to the state's intervention on a broad front, as it actively fostered the growth of capitalist trade, shipping, and export industry with the aim of consolidating England's position on the world market and doing away with her foreign competitors."

(31-32): "Fully-fledged mercantlism was above all a policy of protectionism, i.e., the use of customs policies to stimulate the growth of native industry. It was protectionism which was to speed up England's transformation from an agricultural to a commercial and industrial nation. Customs duties now started to be used to further economic as well as fiscal ends. Previously, the government had, for fiscal reasons, levied duties indiscriminately on every type of export item; now, however, the state began to differentiate between raw materials and finished products. To provide English industry with cheap raw materials it required the governemtn either raised their duties or forbade their export altoghether. In the years when corn prices went up neither corn nor other agricultural products could be sent out of the country. On the other hand, when it came to finished goods, the state encouraged their export by every possible means, exempting them from duties or even offering an export subsidy... The import of wool, cotton, linen, dyestuffs, leather, and other raw materials was not only freed of customs levies, but even subsidized, and otherwise encouraged. Conversely, the import of foreign finished products was either banned or subjected to high tarriffs. Such a customs policy meant that native industry was to be shielded to the detriment of agriculture, which produced raw materials."

(32): Rubin distinguishes between mercantilist policy in England, which could only fleece agriculture so far because of the relatively speedy penetration of agriculture by the bourgeoisie, and France, where the State actively depressed trade in raw materials as part of its efforts to win the alleigance of merchants and industrialists in its fight with the feudals.

(32): Navigation Acts, issued by Cromwell in 1651.

(33): Summary of differences between early and developed mercantilism: in the former, (1) exports limited to 'staples,' (2) state exercises control over individual commercial transactions, (3) state regulates the flow of precious metals directly; in the latter, (1) policy is expansionist and colonial (aiming at maximum extension of foriegn trade and hegemony on the world market), (2) regulation is not individual but national in scale, and (3) it is understood that monetary health is acheived indirectly, by protecting the balance of trade.

(39): In the early 1800s, Rubin is saying, the bourgeoisie came into conflict with the landlords over the price of corn (the former favored a low price, because that would cheapen the price of labor-power). But in the 1600s, many English mercantilists were in complete agreement about the need for high prices of corn, since the operative problem was bringing people to work (this is the time of the maximum limit on wages, in other words).

(48-50): Thomas Mun is introduced as the first of the developed mercantilists (Hales was the represenative of the early mercantilists)--he, among other things,(1) strongly defends the carrying trade on the basis of which the East India company was making massive profits (and, in the process, losing hard currency, to the chagrin of the early mercantilists), (2) understands the link between monetary well-being and the balance of trade (so he argues that England will fix its metallic problems by crafting a strategy to export finished products, in effect).

(54-55): "The disproportionate value accorded to foreign trade by the mercantilists is to be explained not simply by its great potential for transforming products into money and attracting precious metals: the enormous profits derived from foreign trrade helped foster primitive capital accumulation by the merchant class... The process of transforming products into money was to be accompanied by the accumulation of the latter and its own conversion into profit-bearing money, that is, into capital. But for the most part, really large profits were only to be had in this period through foreign commerce, in particular through trade with the colonies... In this period the basic source of commercial profit was non-equivalent exchange. It was, then, natural that the mercantilists saw profit only in the net profit of trade, or 'profit upon alienation,' which had its source in the mark up that the merchant added to the price of the commodity."

(58): "The first person to develop a critique of the principles behind mercantilist policy was Dudley North... North is the first of the early prophets of the idea of free trade. He dedicates his tract to a discussion around two central themes: first, the restrictions which the state, in its desire to attract money into the country, has imposed upon foreign trade, and second, the legal limitation placed upon the level of interest. On both of these issues North consistently demands that the state cease its interference into economic life."

(65): Rubin takes note of a primitive labor theory of value during the age of craft production--Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught that the "value of a product depends upon the quantity of labor and the outlays expended upon its production. This, however, developed 'normatively,' and not scientifically, as the governing concern of that time was how to establish a just price for craftsmen. Beginning in the 17th century, as capitalist competition at the market congealed, these considerations ceded to a scientific appraisal of the price that was being established by supply and demand (John Locke being its pioneer)--the "process of price formation" as it occured on the market. "The normative formulation of the problem of value had given way to that of scientific theory."

(67): Similarly, as industrial capitalism became more ascendant in the 18th century, there arose a theory of price as corresponding to production costs--this was the work of James Steuart, who was one of the last mercantilists.

(69-74): William Petty, another of the last mercantilists, was developing the original insights of the labor theory of value at this time--"the magnitude of a product's value depends upon the quantity of labor expended on its production." But Petty, Rubin continues, confuses himself because of an inability to systematically distinguish between use-value and exchange-value (in the case of the former, he integrates labor and land into his argument for the source of value).

(74-75): Locke suffers from a similar confusion, though slightly inverted--for Locke, use-values are given by labor (valueless nature made valuable by labor), whereas exchange-values are determined by supply-and-demand. (Cantillon and James Steuart are insufficient in similar ways, Rubina adds)

(81): David Hume, in the 18th century, develops the "quantity theory of money" ("according to which, the value (or purchasing power) of money is determined by the latter's overall quantity"). He traces the mechanisms by which this will happen--a cascading series of consecutive increases in individual demand for various products (this introduces the temporal element into the theory, which is key).

(83-84): "Hume's theory of money is in turn a reaction against the mercantilist concept of money and a theoretical generalization fromt he price revolution of the 16th-17th centuries (when there had been a massive influx of silver and gold from America)." Yet, what is crucial, Hume doesn't understand the analytical importance of the other source of this price revolution--namely, the technological improvements in the extraction of silver/gold and the consequent fall in their value... His "nominalist conception of money as a simple token, with no value of its own but rather with a 'fictitious' value that derives from, and alters with fluctuations in the amount of money, proved to be profoundly mistaken when applied to metallic money."

(84-86): The preceding is the first revision to Hume's theory of money. The second is a complication of his understanding of causality. Hume understood that hoarded money would have no effect on prices. Rubin notes, therefore, that one obviously needs to consider what causes money to "enter circulation." One of the factors, clearly, is the price of commodities themselves. In that sense, it is not as simple as saying as "the quantity of money in circulation determines prices", is it? This was James Steuart's argument, in part: "Steuart denies that commodity prices are dependent upon the quantity of money in circulation; to the contrary, it is the quantity of money in circulation which is determined by the demands of commodity circulation, including the level of commodity prices."

(86): "The ideas that Steuart had put forward in contraposition to the quantity theory were extended in the 19th Century by Tooke, and then later on by Marx. These two theories--Hume's quantity theory, on the one hand, and Steuart's doctrine, on the other--represent in brilliant fashion the two basic tendencies in the theory of monetary circulation that even this day are vying for supremacy in economic science.

The interim government, built from a coalition of the Left-Green Party and the Social Democrats, is at least as different from the old one as the Obama administration is from the Bush administration. The latest prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, broke new ground in the midst of the crisis: she is now the world's first out lesbian head of state. In power only until elections on April 25th, this caretaker government takes on the formidable task of stabilizing and steering a country that has the dubious honor of being the first to drop in the current global meltdown. Last week, Sigurdardóttir said that the new government would try to change the constitution to "enshrine national ownership of the country's natural resources" and to "open a new chapter in public participation in shaping the structure of government," a 180-degree turn from the neoliberal policies of Iceland's fallen masters.

"I agree with the farmers, they need more support. The government needs to at least limit these kind of imports ... in order to make them (farmers) competitive in the international market," said Aqa. "It's not a good time to introduce a free market in Afghanistan at the moment."

derail doha:
It's estimated that about 60% of the world's use of oil goes to transportation activities which are more than 95% dependent on fossil fuels. An OECD study estimated that the global transport sector accounts for 20-25% of carbon emissions, with some 66% of this figure accounted for by emissions in the industrialized countries.
(...) From the point of view of environmental sustainability, global trade has become deeply dysfunctional. Take agricultural trade. As the International Forum on Globalization has pointed out, the average plate of food eaten in Western industrial food-importing nations is likely to have traveled 1,500 miles from its source. Long-distance travel contributes to the absurd situation wherein "three times more food is used to produce food in the industrial agricultural model than is derived in consuming it."
(...) A study by the OECD done in the mid-nineties estimated that by 2004, the year marking the full implementation of free-trade commitments under the WTO's Uruguay Round, there would have been an increase in the transport of internationally traded goods by 70% over 1992 levels. This figure, notes the New Economics Foundation, "would make a mockery" of the Kyoto Protocol's mandatory emissions reduction targets for the industrialized countries.
(...) "Each ton of freight moved by plane uses forty nine times as much energy per kilometer as when it's moved by ship....A two-minute takeoff by a 747 is equal to 2.4 million lawn mowers running for twenty minutes." In support of trade expansion and global economic growth, authorities have by and large not taxed aviation fuel as well as marine bunker fuel, which now account for 20% of all emissions in the transport sector.
(...) A derailment of Doha won't be a sufficient condition to formulate a strategy to contain climate change. But given the likely negative ecological consequences of a successful deal, it's a necessary condition.

Those other “Singapore” issues (named after the site of a 1996 WTO summit) include investment protection (so future policies don’t hamper corporate profits), competition policy (to break local large firms up) and government procurement (to end programmes like South Africa’s affirmative action). These were removed from the WTO by African negotiators during the Cancun summit in 2003, but have re-emerged through EPA bilaterals.
According to Gyekye Tanoh of Third World Network in Accra, “The key thing for Mandelson is to gain exclusive preferential market access. Europe is gaining 80% of our markets in exchange for what is effectively just 2% of theirs.”
(...) Already, says Tanoh, “The effect of trade liberalisation on African agriculture is a disaster, with only one sector anticipated to grow: agro-processing. That’s the one that most easily invites European capital to scale up investments in joint ventures. Agricultural output would only increase by 1%, our studies show. But the big contradiction is in the export of cash crops, at a time of severe pressure on food products.”
(...) African farmers’ ability to sell on the local market will be undercut by rapid trade liberalisation that opens the way to surges of cheap, often subsidised imports. Women are most adversely affected.
(...) [delinking] As Walter Rodney observed, “It is typical of underdeveloped economies that they do not -- or are not allowed to -- concentrate on those sectors of the economy which in turn will generate growth and raise production to a new level altogether, and there are very few ties between one sector and another so that, say, agriculture and industry could react beneficially on each other.”
(...) Added Senegalese scholar Cherif Salif Sy, “Most of Africa has an electricity crisis, and yet to get economies of scale for European agro-processing companies if they locate in Dakar, they require vast amounts of electricity. And they come with the power to demand a lower price, which puts much more stress on our grid and causes the price to go up for local buyers, and the supply to be redirected.”
(...) African firms cannot compete in this sector, as they lack the brand names, skills and marketing structures that European companies enjoy. The same firms have also no access to EU support in the forms of straight subsidies, tax incentives, research and development funding or concessional credit.
(...) Rodney might agree, as he criticised “the minority in Africa which serves as the transmission line between the metropolitan capitalists and the dependencies in Africa ... The presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment. Any diagnosis of underdevelopment in Africa will reveal not just low per capita income and protein deficiencies, but also the gentlemen who dance in Abidjan, Accra and Kinshasa when music is played in Paris, London and New York.” (And now, with EPAs and the WTO, add Brussels and Geneva.)

zero hour: nafta and mexico's agrarian collapse
Nor does the President and his cronies identify who it is that is actually benefiting from the NAFTA-TLCOM boom. According to the National Farmers Confederation or CNC, a creature of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party and once gung-ho for the trade treaty, only 2% of all Mexican producers are sharing the largesse. The other 98%, including 3.5 million corn farmers, 85% of whom grow on five hectares or less (average U.S. corn spreads are 270 acres), have no access to the NAFTA-TLCAN market whatsoever. The big winners? About 20,000 corporate tomato growers, avocado and tropical fruit moguls, and specialty crop niche market sharpies (organic coffee -but organic anything) - plus, of course, the beer barons.

why the 'free trade' agenda is losing steam:
Real wages - adjusted for inflation -- for the more than 100 million people that make up most of our labor force were just ten percent higher in 2006 than they were in 1973. This is a revolutionary upward redistribution of income, vastly different from the prior 25 years, when real wages increased by 74 percent. How much of this redistribution is due to trade, or more broadly, the "globalization" that includes the movement of production to countries with low wages, repressed labor, and weak environmental regulation?

The conventional wisdom is that there are huge gains from trade, but since benefits are not so visible and are dispersed among many consumers, "protectionists" who might lose jobs prevail against the public interest. The reality is the opposite: the losses are dispersed among the majority of workers through lower wages. The gains are concentrated among the big corporations who own our Congress and lobby for "free trade."

expanding NAFTA:
The expansion of NAFTA into the Security and Prosperity Partnership reveals the road ahead for other nations entering into free trade agreements. It is not a road most nations -- or the U.S. public -- would take if they knew where it led.
(...) The first problem is that very few people know about this next step of "deep integration." In March 2005, Presidents George Bush, Vicente Fox and Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas launched the Security and Prosperity Partnership with a splash. ... These rules and trinational programs have profound effect on the environment, the daily lives of citizens, and the future of all three countries.
(...) Its security component represents a new and ominous form of integration, all in the name of counter-terrorism.
(...) The official U.S. web page describes the SPP as "a White House-led initiative among the United States and the two nations it borders - Canada and Mexico - to increase security and to enhance prosperity among the three countries through greater cooperation."
(...) "White House-led" is a key element.
(...) Many of the priorities of the SPP benefit only a small handful of powerful actors, such as greater patent protection (Mexico holds very few patents) and joint anti-piracy campaigns (piracy is a major employer in Mexico and benefits low-income consumers).
(...) SPP on the other hand, was born in the "global war on terror" era and reflects an inordinate emphasis on U.S. security as interpreted by the Department of Homeland Security. The head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mexico's Secretary of Finance Carlos Gutierrez, represent the three ministries charged with attending SPP ministerial conferences.
(...) The SPP measures to coordinate security have pressured Mexico to militarize its southern border and adopt repressive measures toward Central and South Americans presumably in transit to the United States. The false conflation of undocumented immigration with security in the United States has also led to measures that have little to do with Mexico's own national security and cause friction with friendly nations, such as the decision to require visas for citizens of Brazil and Ecuador to enter the country.
(...) Moreover, in all three countries, significant civil society movements have questioned whether the high-tech solutions advanced by Homeland Security (and that profit major military suppliers) are really the best and most resource-efficient answer to security challenges. Again, for the most part, the decisions are being made without public knowledge or consultation.
(...) Economic integration under NAFTA has led to job loss and the erosion of job security and quality in the United States, while also increasing unemployment in Mexico. Over thirteen years, the model has confirmed, rather than reversed, Mexico's status as the less-developed partner. The rise in immigration to the United States attests to the failure of NAFTA as a development mechanism. Moreover, it has not increased the U.S. competitive edge although it has delivered record profits to a few major global traders. Unfortunately for the majority, those "few" are now driving the efforts to deepen integration under the NAFTA-plus-Homeland-Security model.
(...) But to deepen integration would mean deepening the contradictions and the problems that have led most Americans to express their rejection of the free-trade model in recent polls, and that has spurred widespread public protest in Mexico and Canada.

parenti on globalization, free trade:
The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particu­lar nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmol­ive Company, could have been speaking for all transnationals when he remarked, “The United States doesn’t have an automatic call on our [corporation’s] resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.”[i]
(...) Not one of GATT’s five hundred pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against govern­ments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidi­es, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honor all corporate patent claims, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO. Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.[ii]
(...) It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby fo
od. It has eliminated the ban in various countries on asbestos, and on fuel-economy and emission stan­dards for motor vehicles. And it has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban on endangered-species products. The European Union’s prohibition on the importation of hormone-ridden U.S. beef had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the U.S. Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries. And the WTO overturned that portion of the U.S. Endangered Species Act forbidding the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.[iii] [the cha-ching of democracy!]
(...) Free trade is not fair trade; it benefits strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us. Globalization means turning the clock back on many twentieth-century reforms: no freedom to boycott products, no prohibitions against child labor, no guaranteed living wage or benefits, no public services that might conceivably compete with private services, no health and safety protections that might cut into corporate profits.[iv]
(...) In this way agribusiness can better penetrate locally self-sufficient communities and monopolize their resources. Ralph Nader gives the example of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesti­cidal and medicinal proper­ties. Cultivat­ed for centuries in India, the tree attracted the attention of vari­ous pharmaceutical companies, who filed monopoly patents, causing mass protests by Indian farmers. As dictated by the WTO, the pharmaceuticals now have exclusive control over the marketing of neem tree products, a ruling that is being reluctantly enforced in India. Tens of thousands of erstwhile independent farmers must now work for the powerful pharmaceuticals on profit-gorging terms set by the companies.
(...) If the current behavior of the rich countries is anything to go by, globalization simply means the breaking down of the borders of countries so that those with the capital and the goods will be free to dominate the markets.[vi]
(...) Under free-trade agreements like General Agreements on Trade and Services (GATS) and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), all public services are put at risk. A public service can be charged with causing “lost market opportunities” for business, or creating an unfair subsidy. To offer one in­stance: the single-payer automobile insurance program proposed by the province of Ontario, Canada, was declared “unfair competi­tion.” Ontario could have its public auto insurance only if it paid U.S. insurance companies what they estimated would be their present and future losses in Ontario auto insurance sales, a prohibitive cost for the province. Thus the citizens of Ontario were not allowed to exercise their democratic sovereign right to institute an alterna­tive not-for-profit auto insurance system. In another case, United Postal Service charged the Canadian Post Office for “lost market opportunities,” which means that under free trade accords, the Canadian Post Office would have to compensate UPS for all the business that UPS thinks it would have had if there were no public postal service. The Canadian postal workers union has challenged the case in court, arguing that the agreement violates the Canadian Constitution.
(...) International free trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA have hastened the corporate acquisition of local markets, squeezing out smaller businesses and worker collectives. Under NAFTA better-paying U.S. jobs were lost as firms closed shop and contracted out to the cheaper Mexican labor market. At the same time thousands of Mexican small companies were forced out of business. Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass produced corn and dairy products from giant U.S. agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidized by the U.S. government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy, displacing large numbers of poor peasants. The lately arrived U.S. companies in Mexico have offered extremely low-paying jobs, and unsafe work conditions. Generally free trade has brought a dramatic increase in poverty south of the border.[viii]
(...) We North Americans are told that to remain competitive in the new era of globalization, we will have to increase our output while reducing our labor and production costs, in other words, work harder for less. This in fact is happening as the work-week has lengthened by as much as twenty percent (from forty hours to forty-six and even forty-eight hours) and real wages have flattened or declined during the reign of George W. Bush. Less is being spent on social services, and we are enduring more wage conces­sions, more restructuring, deregula­tion, and privat­ization.
(...) What is seldom remarked upon is that NAFTA and GATT are in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the preamble of which makes clear that sovereign power rests with the people: “We the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution reads, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Article I, Section 7 gives the president (not some trade council) the power to veto a law, subject to being overridden by a two-thirds vote in Congress. And Article III gives adjudication and review powers to a Supreme Court and other federal courts as ordained by Congress. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There is nothing in the entire Constitution that allows an international trade panel to preside as final arbiter exercising supreme review powers undermining the constitutionally mandated decisions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
(...) What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labor standards, and consumer protection, but also the very right to legislate such laws. Our democratic sovereignty itself is being surrendered to a secretive plutocratic trade organization that presumes to exercise a power greater than that of the people and their courts and legislatures. What we have is an international coup d’état by big capital over the nations of the world.
(...) It is not only national sovereignty that is at stake, it is democratic sovereignty. Millions, of people all over the world have taken to the streets to protest free trade agreements. Among them are farmers, workers, students and intellectuals (including many Marxists who see things more clearly than the aforementioned ones), all of whom are keenly aware that something new is afoot and they want no part of it. As used today, the term globalization refers to a new stage of international expropriation, designed not to put an end to the nation-state but to undermine whatever democratic right exists to protect the social wage and restrain the power of transnational corporations.
(...) So the fight against free trade is a fight for the right to politico-economic democracy, public services, and a social wage, the right not to be completely at the mercy of big capital. It is a new and drastic phase of the class struggle that some Marxists–so immersed in classical theory and so ill-informed about present-day public policy–seem to have missed. As embodied in the free trade accords, globalization has little to do with trade and is anything but free. It benefits the rich nations over poor ones, and the rich classes within all nations at the expense of ordinary citizens. It is the new specter that haunts the same old world.

capital gone wild:
Previous Bolivian governments had signed a flurry of bilateral investment treaties that gave foreign investors the right to bypass domestic courts and file such lawsuits through international tribunals. Morales complained that these rules made him feel like a "prisoner" in the presidential palace.
(...) The Bolivian president's predicament is a common one for political leaders around the world. They are caught in an interlocking web of rules and institutions that promote and protect foreign investment -- with little regard for the costs to democracy, the environment, or the public welfare. These increasingly controversial investor protections have become the "get out of jail free" card for corporations in the global economy. They are promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, codified by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, and enforced through the World Bank's arbitration court and other international tribunals.
(...) Argentina has been socked by more than 30 such claims, many of them in retaliation for measures to alleviate the pain of the country's 2002 financial meltdown. A U.S.-based gas company, for example, sued over an emergency law that froze utility rates to protect consumers from runaway inflation. The company, CMS Gas, won $133 million in compensation, money that could have compensated Argentine consumers.
(...) Ecuador is facing a $1 billion suit by Occidental Petroleum, a company widely reviled in that country for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, including using child labor to clean toxic materials, failing to repair pipeline leakages, and operating in protected indigenous lands without authorization.
(...)
In another case with disturbing human rights implications, Italian investors are targeting post-apartheid affirmative action policies in South Africa. They are suing over a law designed to redress historic racism by requiring mining companies to have 26% black ownership and 40% black management by the year 2014. These policies, the investors claim, violate protections against expropriation and discrimination in the Italy-South Africa bilateral investment treaty.
(...) Currently, there are more than 100 cases pending before the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which decides most investor-state disputes. More than 90% have been against developing countries. Meanwhile, these rules are not delivering increased foreign investment. Tufts University researchers recently found that signing bilateral investment treaties with the United States had no effect on Latin American and Caribbean investment flows. In fact, Brazil, which has refused to sign any such deal with the United States, is by far the region's biggest recipient of U.S. investment.
(...) Canada currently faces a case in retaliation for terminating a project to transport garbage from Toronto to an abandoned open pit mine 600 kilometers (370 miles) away. To protest the mega-dump, the nearby Algonquin indigenous community joined with farmers and other local citizens in a railroad blockade that was the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of Ontario province. When the government responding by dropping the plan, it offered some compensation to the mine owners. But one U.S. investor is still using NAFTA to sue for lost potential profits.
(...) Their demand to include sweeping investor protections in the Free Trade Area of the Americas was one factor in the collapse of those negotiations, after 11 years of talks involving 34 countries.
(...) However, over the past 14 years U.S. trade officials have managed to insert excessive investor protections in trade agreements with 14 countries and in pending deals with four additional nations (as of May 1, 2007). The only exception is a 2004 U.S.-Australian deal. That country's negotiators refused to accept investor-state dispute settlement. Worldwide, these rules have proliferated through more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties.
(...) On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua announced plans to withdraw from the World Bank's arbitration court. Their joint declaration stated that "(We) emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that … resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration." This surprise announcement will not be enough, legally, to release the three Latin American countries from the interlocking web of rules and institutions designed to shield foreign investors. Bilateral investment treaties signed by Bolivia and Venezuela would still be in force, and getting out of them could take years. Nicaragua would still be bound by the investment rules of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. And ICSID is the dominant but not the only enforcement option. Foreign investors could instead demand that their cases be heard under similar United Nations arbitration rules.

walden bello on small farmers and free trade:
In advanced capitalist countries like the United States, a deadly combination of economies of scale, capital-intensive technology, and the market led to large corporations cornering agricultural production and processing. Small and medium farms were relegated to a marginal role in production and a minuscule portion of the work force.
(...) The Soviet Union, meanwhile, took to heart Karl Marx's snide remarks about the “idiocy of rural life” and, through state repression, transformed farmers into workers on collective farms. Expropriation of the peasants' surplus production was meant not only to feed the cities but also to serve as the source of the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital for industrialization.
(...) Asian governments placed the burden of industrialization on the peasantry during the phase of so-called developmentalist, industry-first policies. In Taiwan and South Korea, land reform first triggered prosperity in the countryside in the 1950s, stimulating industrialization. But with the shift to export-led industrialization in 1965, there was demand for low-wage industrial labor, so government policies deliberately depressed prices of agricultural goods. In this way, peasants subsidized the emergence of Newly Industrializing Economies. Peasant incomes declined relative to urban incomes, and the resulting stagnation of a once-vibrant countryside led to massive migration to the cities and a steady supply of cheap labor for factories.
(...) In China, millions of peasants died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward as the government requisitioned grain surplus to finance Mao Zedong's super-industrialization drive. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution allowed peasants to regain a degree of control over production because the government was in crisis. Following the death of Mao in 1976, Deng Xiaoping dealt with the crisis by introducing the “household contract responsibility system.” Each family was given a piece of land to farm, along with the right to sell what was left over after a fixed proportion of the produce was sold to the government at a state-determined price. This led to peasant prosperity that, as in Taiwan, stimulated industrial production to fulfill rural demand.
(...) Currently, the various tiers of the Chinese government foist a total of 269 different taxes on farmers, along with often-arbitrary administrative charges. Not surprisingly, in many places, taxes now eat up 15% of farmers' income, three times the official national limit of 5%. Not surprisingly, too, while the economy has been growing at 8-10% a year, peasant income has stagnated, so that urban dwellers now have, on average, six times the income of peasants. True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.”
(...) The forcing of peasants to subsidize industrialization was indeed harsh. But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.
(...) As a result, the level of subsidization of agriculture actually increased in developed countries in the first decade of the WTO. The total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by the OECD's member governments rose from $182 billion in 1995 to $280 billion in 1997, $315 billion in 2001, $318 billion in 2002, and almost $300 billion in 2005. The United States and the European Union (EU) were spending $9-10 billion more on subsidies in the early 2000s than they were a decade earlier. For every $100 of agro-exports from the United States, government subsidies accounted for $20-30. In the case of the EU, the figure was $40-50. While unsubsidized smallholders in the developing world had to survive on less than $400 a year, American and European farmers were receiving, respectively, an average of $21,000 and $16,000 a year in subsidies.
(...) As the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) notes, instantaneous import surges following the adoption of the AOA in a number of developing countries led to “consequential difficulties” for “import-competing industries.” The report continued, “Without adequate market protection, accompanied by development programs, many more domestic products would be displaced, or undermined sharply, leading to a transformation of domestic diets and to increased dependence on imported foods.” This historic shift to dependence on food imports was, needless to say, accompanied by the displacement of millions of peasants.
(...) In China, tens of thousands of farmers, including those growing soybeans and cotton, have been marginalized with China's entry into the WTO. Indeed, to maintain and increase access for its manufacturers to developed countries, the government has chosen to sacrifice its farmers.
(...) In India, tariff liberalization, even in advance of WTO commitments, has translated into a profound crisis in the countryside. Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports.
(...) India's rural electoral revolt was part of a global phenomenon that put governments on notice that the countryside would no longer accept policies that sacrifice farmer interests. In Asia, protests in the form of land occupations, hunger strikes, violent demonstrations, and symbolic suicides made rural distress a pressing issue. In China, what the Ministry of Public Security calls “mass group incidents” -- in other words, protest actions -- increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a powder keg that needs to be defused.
(...) Committed under a banner that read “WTO Kills Farmers,” Lee's suicide was designed to draw international attention to the number of suicides by farmers in countries subjected to liberalization. He succeeded only too well. The event shocked the WTO delegates, who observed a minute of silence in Lee's memory. By adding to what was already a charged atmosphere, Lee’s act was certainly a key factor in the unraveling of the talks.
(...) Both Lee and the Korean farmers protesting in Hong Kong were members of Via Campesina, an international federation of farmers established in the mid-1990s. Since its founding, Via Campesina -- literally translated as the Peasants' Path -- has become known as one of the most militant opponents of the WTO and bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements.
(...) The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”
(...) his is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”
(...) Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.
(...)

on free trade:
We specified that our disagreement with the FTA is not merely with particular parts but with the text as a whole, that is, with the very concept of so-called “free trade”, because its aim is a world that benefits only a handful of monopolies. To demonstrate the degree to which the “free trade” concept is regressive, even for the people of the United States, we noted that in the United States the minimum wage is just now being increased for the first time in ten years! This shocking fact confirms that neoliberal globalization implies degradation of living standards for all nations in the world. We explained that the atrocious violence that has afflicted and continues to afflict Colombia, which is understandably appalling to outside observers, makes it even more difficult for our country to compete on an equal footing with an economic competitor whose gross domestic product is 129 times larger than ours.
(...) Colombia would suffer enormous losses due to the extremely one-sided character of what has been agreed in terms of tariffs, agriculture, industry, sanitary and phyto-sanitary controls, subsidies allowed to the United States, intellectual property, medicines, investment rules, procurement contracts, telecommunications, financial services, dispute resolution, the balance of payments clause, indirect expropriation, labor mobility, transborder commerce, and culture, among other things. In terms of labor conditions, Article 17.2 of the FTA would intensify the already shocking situation for Colombian workers by authorizing further weakening of labor standards for the benefit of employers. Article 18.2 does the same for environmental norms. To try to turn the FTA into a positive agreement by making a few cosmetic changes would be like trying to alter Frankenstein’s nature with a bit of lipstick and earrings.

from envio, jan 1994:
Life in Nicaragua today is marked by a push towards the private, the individual and thus an attack on most things collective including in organizational terms. When the Chamorro government took office in 1990, its officials began to talk about the "new era" and the "new economy," preaching the advantages of a free market and the future awaiting Nicaragua as it opened itself up to international trade. It is common to hear the government and politicians of all stripes talking about the need to adapt their strategies economic or political to this new era. Many of the "new" models have as their key foundation something as old as a nearly total faith in the efficiency and moral correctness of the free market. What is new today is how the world has changed, and with it, nearly all the rules of the game.
(...) [history] In the mid 1960s, most of the poor countries of the South still did not have assembly (maquila) plants or free zones producing for the world market. A decade later, the technological innovations taking place in the North led to a new international division of labor and an industrialization of the poorer countries oriented toward new kinds of exports for example, radios, tape recorders, computer chips, blue jeans and sportswear instead of coffee, bananas or sugar. With this new division, the free trade zones emerged. The free trade zones came to the region during the 1970s, within the context of the new Central American Common Market. They were conceived of by the governments as mechanisms to promote development, and the state was seen as playing a key role.
(...) Nicaragua was one of the Central American countries where the installation of a free trade zone was first planned (in 1973), but the zone did not open its doors until 1996, with eight factories and 3,000 workers. There was even a complementary plan to construct a deep water port on the southern Atlantic Coast near Monkey Point, to facilitate exportation of the zone's products to the eastern seaboard of the US by bringing transportation costs down. But the port was never built.
(...) The free trade zones throughout Central America were taking on more importance by 1980 and were integrated first as part of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and later in the Initiative for the Americas, the economic strategies for Latin America promoted by the Reagan Bush administrations. They fit well with the neoliberal model and the structural adjustment programs the international financial institutions were introducing at the regional level. The emphasis was on assembly process of nontraditional exports. According to the study, "Maquilas and Union Organization in Central America," by Roland Membreño and Elsa Guerrero, "our countries are being converted into huge industrial parks, abandoning any pretension of serving to satisfy internal demand."
(...) Although the zona franca was essentially irrelevant to the economy of revolutionary Nicaragua, a small zone did continue to function, producing primarily shoes and clothing. A worker from the ENAVES textile factory confiscated by the revolution and part of the zona franca during the 1980s remembers those years: "There were problems, but there was protection. They gave us meals, including breakfast and dinner, when we had to work extra hours. They also gave us the basic market basket of goods and transportation." The factories in the zone during the 1980s were unionized and state run. Thus their workers benefited both directly, in terms of their actual salaries, and indirectly, through the many subsidies the state guaranteed to the entire population. That is the key difference with the zona franca as currently constituted.
(...) Looking to reinsert the country into the international market, the "1970s style" maquila reappeared in Nicaragua at the end of 1991. New legislation facilitated investment in this kind of enterprise and the zona franca began to function, as it does in all countries, as a productive enclave, isolated and disconnected from the national economy. Nicaragua's free trade zone is still small and relatively unimportant for the country economically, but the prospects are for significant growth. And that's what the government is aiming for. Government statements about the zone circulating among the foreign business community declare that "the government of Nicaragua offers an attractive package of incentives, to all enterprises that qualify, to establish operations in the free zones of the country."
(...) "Although the Ministry of Labor is supposed to look out for the interests of the workers, the truth is that it represents the interests of these foreign companies. It has rubber stamped firings and mistreatment of the workers," charges Meneses.
(...) "A lot depends on the country's productivity image, and, in spite of everything that's happened here, we have a good reputation," Carlos Zúniga claims. Regarding public services (water, light, etc.), which so often fail to function in Managua, he adds, "We are always working for the institutions to offer better services in the zone. We want special treatment, because if we received the same treatment the rest of the world does, we wouldn't be able to produce."
(...) As part of its package to privatize state enterprises, the Chamorro government closed a number of state textile, clothing, shoe and other factories which set unemployment soaring among women workers, who had been the backbone of the work force in these industries. When the zona franca opened it doors again in 1991, almost all of the women from the closed textile factories sought and found jobs in the zone, working now for foreign employers.
(...) In its US publicity campaign, the Nicaraguan government emphasized how cheaply investors could acquire these factories. Although it spoke and continues to speak of "private" enterprises, the government plays a key role in consolidating the zone. The free trade zones, showcases for the free market, would not exist if not for other mechanisms that promote them, at the expense of other types of economic activity. In a commentary on the nightly "Sin Fronteras" radio program, CRIES economist Adolfo Acevedo destroyed the myth of the so called free market; his words are pertinent to an understanding of the zona franca. "The concept of the free market is ideological. A free market exists nowhere in the world; there is state intervention and regulation everywhere.... In the case of Nicaragua, the market simply does not function for 70 80% of all Nicaraguans. What the market does is deepen social and economic polarization, instead of attenuating it."
(...) "It's not that unions aren't allowed," says Carlos Zúniga, "it's that no place in the world is there a free trade zone that has unions. A union would mean shutting down the zona franca because, quite simply, investment doesn't come in where there are unions. We're working with the Ministry of Labor to resolve all this, so that unions aren't needed here."
(...) According to a study by Ana Silvia Monzón, the characteristics traditionally assigned to women in the social and labor division of society point to "women as a labor reserve that is poorly skilled and therefore cheap, docile and disciplined." This makes women the "perfect" work force for maquila production.
(...) Advertisements in the Nicaraguan newspapers appearing recently read as follows: "Private firm located in the zona franca needs female personnel from 16 to 22 years old." In Central America, women are 90% of the work force of the maquila, which now employs 8% of the economically active female population at the regional level. This is explained in part because the region's most important maquilas are textile plants, an industry that has long been a bastion of female labor. Another reason is of greater concern: businessmen tend to see women, and particularly young women, as ideal workers, more easily manipulated and thus less problematic.
(...) In spite of all these problems, there are always workers who manage to earn fairly well. And what happens to them? They tend to be transferred to other areas inside the factory. "That happened in ENAVES," says Auxiliadora Abarca, "And what happens when they're moving you around every other day is that you never get really good at any one job."
(...) The growing complexity and constant intensification of work in the maquilas takes a serious toll on the women workers. According to Membreño and Guerrero, this method of work hides "a conception of the woman worker, and of human beings in general, which reduces her to a kind of cog on the machine. Thus it becomes so important to control the time, and even the bodies, of the workers."

on fascisim in colombia, as gamonalismo:
[free trade in history] Not only did they consolidate their local power and the property of their haciendas, they also imposed an era of “free trade”, which really meant freedom of import, setting the growth of national industry back fifty years. That era saw the rule of the doctrines of English liberal economists as well as Colombia’s submission to the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, signed in 1846 with the US by the government of the gamonal of gamonales, landowner Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera, who not only opened the doors to free trade but also forfeited the sovereignty of the country to the megaproject of the Panama Canal which led eventually to Colombia losing Panama in 1903.
(...) [on needing connections] The gamonal is in the first instance a major landowner. His title originally depended on the Spanish Crown, which granted lands and gold mines, first to the conquistadors and afterwards, under the Bourbon dynasty, to slave traders and other businessmen who received the mines and haciendas of the Jesuits, who were expelled by the empire at that time. His wealth depended on the government in power, the articulation of economic power and international politics, and the links between local powers and big landowners. These elements have shaped the configuration of gamonalismo, from its beginnings to this day.
(...) Gamonalismo survived in spite of industrialization and severely limited the modernization of Colombia. Although peasant and indigenous movements expanded and won some victories between 1914 and 1946, the gamonales managed to retain their latifundia and ultimately to consolidate them by way of violence, namely “La Violencia”, between 1946 and 1958´.
(...)[capitalism needs democracy?]Another portion of the capital came from foreign investment in petroleum, mining, and banana enclaves that, rather than challenging the power of the gamonales, stimulated it and guaranteed its concessions and profits. Gamonalismo was the most efficient political agent and police force for foreign capital.
(...) [history of the paramilitaries; need for control] “La Violencia” of 1946 closed many hopes for democracy. The assassination of Colombia’s most popular leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, on April 9 1948, summarized the decision of traditional gamonalismo to maintain the status quo with blood and fire. Two hundred thousand people were killed in the process of displacing 2 million people from 350 000 small plots of land. Those who are today called “paramilitaries” were then called “pajaros”, illegal troops who worked with police and the regime and its own army to assault lands and peoples. For the politicians, access to armed bands was a source of power, and new fortunes were made by way of La Violencia, fortunes that made it possible to control local business and the international contraband trade in coffee and liquor.
(...) [this war on drugs] Colonization was offered as the solution for landless peasants and in the distant regions, without roads, communication, or services, the peasantry had resorted to illicit cultivation, first of marijuana and then of coca. Colonization, the solution for preventing agrarian reform, had become a problem: the peasants had money and gained power, organized, marched, and held strikes. The war extended into the regions of colonization, and under the pretext of the “War on Drugs”, the gamonales crushed the peasant resistance, allied with the mafia dons and seized control of narcotrafficking. This was the model in Puerto Boyaca, Puerto Berrio, Puerto Triunfo and a large part of southern Magdalena Medio, and extended throughout the country.
(...)[mafia and transnationals] These increasingly wealthy mafias became central characters in many self-defense teams and came to finance the training of the paramilitaries as an army, paying well-known mercenaries from the UK (like Peter McAlleese), South Africa, and Israel (like Yair Klein). These mercenaries had been (in Malaysia or Angola) continued to be (in Sierra Leone or the Congo) stars for the transnationals in the wars of other countries. The warlords trained by these men can be found in various parts of the world where profits can be had from gold, petroleum, diamonds, narcotrafficking, the theft of gasoline from government pipelines, or the theft of health care, housing, and any other public funds to which the imprisoned electoral system can provide “democratic access”.
(...) [justice and peace?] The parties affiliated with President Uribe are full of para-politicians, who in the congress voted in the “Law of Justice and Peace” that regulated the agreement between the paramilitaries and the government. Today in Colombia by virtue of the laws that were approved, the jail term a paramilitary faces for cutting hundreds of people to pieces is the same that a peasant would receive for growing a Monsanto-patented seed.
(...) [resistance] Against these objectives, there is a popular resistance that has expressed itself in mobilizations like that of May 15 2006, the popular consulta against FTA organized by the indigenous, the unity of peasant, indigenous, and afro-colombian organizations against FTA and the Rural Statutes, the marches of the teachers, the struggles of the oil workers and the strengthening of the Polo Democratico Alternativo as the opposition party. In 2003, civil resistance managed to stop in a referendum the constitutional reform of Uribe. Civil resistance has slowed the project of imposing a fascist constitution legalizing mass detention without judicial order. But civil resistance has not managed to stop the co-optation of local governments by the armed gamonales nor has it managed to stop the FTA or Uribe’s lamentable foreign policy. It is nevertheless the only hope for Colombia to break the hegemony of the gamonales and their transnational sponsors and join the movement of the majority of Latin America. Only civil resistance can prevent the war from being a profitable business for the warlords.
(...) [the future?] For the moment Uribe can count on a favorable point in the economic cycle, brought on by the laundering of the narcodollars of the paramilitaries. But when the economic cycle moves back down and the speculative force becomes a crisis again, uribismo could fall to popular mobilization. Agrarian reform will be an essential element of change because it will take the power base of the gamonales away and create the economic conditions to strengthen the internal market that the FTA seeks to destroy. The great failure of the 1991 constitution, which sought to combine democracy with neoliberalism and latifundium, should be repaired.