Cut the blah blah blah

Cut the blah blah blah

The labour and environmental side-agreements tacked on to the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico have a spectacularly poor track record. Today, 75% of Mexico's population lives in poverty, up from 49% in 1981.
Trade may be creating jobs in Canada but not enough to keep up with the number that have been eliminated - by 1997, there had been a net loss of 276,000 jobs.
Total pollution has doubled in Mexico since Nafta was introduced, according to the Sierra Club. And the US has become a climate change renegade, chucking out its Kyoto commitments wholesale. It turns out that defiant unilateralism is the ultimate luxury item in the free trade era, reserved for the ultra rich.
There is always a ready excuse for why the wealth liberated by so-called free trade is stuck at the top: a recession, the deficit, the peso crisis, political corruption, and now another looming recession. There is always a reason why it should be spent on another tax break instead of social or environmental programmes.
Only economists worship wealth creation as an abstraction, only the very rich fetishise it as an end in itself. The rest of us are interested in those rising numbers on the trade ledger for what they can buy: does increased trade and investment mean we can afford to rebuild our healthcare system? Can we keep our promises to end child poverty? Can we fund better schools? Build affordable housing? Can we afford to invest in cleaner energy sources? Do we work less, have more leisure time? In short, do we have a more just, sustainable society?
The opposite is the case. We have stagnant wages, economic disparities and a deepening environmental crisis. And when economic growth is severed from meaningful measures of social progress, thinking people begin to lose faith in the system. They start to ask difficult questions not only about trade, but about how economists measure progress and value.
Why can't we measure ecological deficits, as well as economic growth? What is the real social cost in cuts to education, in increased homelessness? These are the types of questions that will be heard in Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas this week.
They will come from people such as Jose Bove, the French cheese farmer whose campaign is not against McDonald's but against an agricultural model that sees food purely as an industrial commodity, rather than the centrepiece of national culture and family life.
They will come from healthcare workers questioning a trade system that defends patents for Aids drugs more vigorously than millions of human lives. They will come from university students, paying more for their "public" education every year, while their schools are invaded by ads and their research departments privatised one study at a time.
The slogan "people before profits" is dismissed as unfocused by free trade defenders, but it neatly encapsulates the sentiment running through the campaigns that are converging in Quebec.
The argument for barrelling ahead with the Free Trade Area of the Americas is based on an unshakeable ideological belief that what's good for business will be good for everyone - eventually. Even if that dubious argument is true, the timeline is unacceptable. According to the governor of the Bank of Mexico, at the current rate of economic growth, it will be 60 years before Mexico doubles its per capita income and ends its extreme poverty.
Rather than one solution, there are thousands, slowly coalescing into an alternate economic model.
In Brazil that means free generic Aids drugs for anyone who needs them. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, it means insisting that water is not a commodity but a human right, even if that means throwing out the international water conglomerate Bechtel.
In Canada's British Columbia, it means demanding the right to manage "community forests" which combine selective logging, tourism and local industry, as opposed to granting industrial tree farm licences to logging multinationals. In Mexico and Guatemala it means coffee farm cooperatives that guarantee a living wage and ecological diversity.
Some defenders of free trade say that if the protesters were serious, they would be on the other side of the chain-link fence politely negotiating side-agreements on labour, democracy and environmental standards. Indeed the fence itself is being justified by the summit organisers on the grounds that a handful of "civil society representatives" have been issued personal invitations to enter the gated city.
But 13 years after the first free trade agreement with the US it's not the details of the deal (we still don't know them) but the economic model itself that is under fire - the numbers just don't add up. Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien was quoted as saying that thousands are coming to Quebec City to "protest and blah blah blah". Quite the opposite. They're coming to Quebec to protest because they've had it with the blah blah blah.

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