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Why A “Globalization Impact Bill”?
Toward Passage of H.374 in 2008

From NAFTA to the Burma Bill, and now SPP, global corporate rule poses a continuous threat to local democracy

by Dave Lewit, Boston-Cambridge Alliance for Democracy

AMERICA IS IN TROUBLE, AND WE ALL KNOW IT. Why trouble? What can we do about it—particularly here in Massachusetts?

Globalization is another name for empire—not actually the empire of the United States, but the empire of the world elites, managers of the transnational corporations many of which are US-based. They are represented by the men and women who meet annually at the well-publicized World Economic Forum at the Davos ski resort in Switzerland to bolster and adjust their objectives and methods for managing the world. Their assumptions (e.g., corporate efficiency, genius, trickle-down) and methods (e.g., privatization, infotainment, debt, massive firepower) are the System by which we are all expected to live.

With a government ever more secretive and concentrated in Washington, with 60 lobbyists for every member of congress (1), with a supreme court assuming that corporations have citizen rights (2), with most families needing two or more wage earners, with democracy more an occasional vote ritual than regular participation, with a standing military partnered with a corporate paramilitary, and with media nearly monopolized by a few giant corporations, the gentlemen of Davos have co-opted our already under-responsive government. We—as a democracy and as earthly creatures—are in trouble.

With globalization as a development strategy, corporate directors have seized upon certain conditions which make it feasible, while ignoring other factors which may eventually doom it. Although we can say that globalization began with Columbus or even with Greece and earlier trading empires, it accelerated with population expansion and modern industry, especially as science and technology have given us chemistry and metallurgy for manufacture and war, electric and electronic devices for communication and control, drugs and genetically modified organisms for fostering consumer populations, aeronautical/space engineering, and so on. Globalization has piggy-backed on (or driven) wars such as the Spanish-American war with its overseas conquests, and World War II which provided unparalleled opportunity for the US to expand markets in Europe and elsewhere and provide weapons to grateful authoritarian allies in the cold war against the USSR and their own dissident forces.

Perhaps most important for their boldness were the conditions which enabled corporations, starting after the Civil War, to claim the privileges and immunities of “personhood” under US law tapping our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. What seems to many today to be a form of corruption may then have seemed Destiny—the “unstoppable force” of westward expansion (at Indians’ and African slaves’ and Mexicans’ expense) and industrial production—still current with the Thatcher-Reagan notion of “There Is No Alternative” to unregulated trade and investment—neoliberalism. Corporate privilege has invaded our federal government to the extent that, with the “fast track” legislative funnel and now the “unitary executive’s” bypassing of treaty enactment, and with a pro-corporate majority in our winner-take-all congress and the courts, there is no legitimate, national-level challenge to either economic or military globalization—except under the 10th Amendment which is hardly effective at this point. But—despite the impotence of a public doped by commercial TV, fatigued by overwork, and frightened by “terrorism”—peak oil, declining real income, and ecological failures are stepping up consumer costs and stress, thus waking up increasing numbers of citizens—numbering the days of lawful mega-corporate advantage and schemes like those described below.

Dangers of Free Trade: NAFTA
Globalization has worked for the audacious and their investors in the short run. It has failed to meet its stated goals of prosperity and safety for all, and it has weakened or devastated the majority of people on earth, including the bulk of Americans especially by dramatically shrinking democracy. It has accelerated the destruction of the earth upon whose ecosystems all life depends. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) exemplifies the institutions by which the elites of Canada, the United States, and Mexico—linked with the World Trade Organization (WTO), which drew from the same neoliberal principles as NAFTA—expect to have their way.

NAFTA is a system of corporate-inspired rules, adopted by the national legislatures of three neighboring countries, which requires “freeing” business operations of democratic constraints —by allowing corporations to challenge national, state, and local laws and regulations as “burdensome”—laws which protect public health, safety, workers rights, local markets, environment, and many other conditions which company directors consider “barriers to trade” and investment. Further it privileges companies to monopolize inventions and cultural creations, and to sue governments directly (rather than through a government prosecutor) in a secret NAFTA court (which can award severe damages) against governments for interfering with their chances to make profits.

The effects of NAFTA after 14 years are clear. Although NAFTA has benefitted some large corporations (in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, etc.), it has had devastating effects on workers, consumers, and citizens. In the US, trade surpluses have turned into deficits. More than a million quality US jobs— net—have been lost to Mexico, Canada, China, etc. NAFTA-related wages in the US have decreased while NAFTA-related prices have increased. Two million Mexican farmers have been displaced, forced by economic necessity to seek jobs in the US, while child malnutrition in Mexico has increased due to food insecurity (3).

Wrapping Up North America: SPP
Now, since 2005, a secretive, corporate-driven NAFTA-Plus agreement has been reached by the three heads of state which they euphemistically name “Security & Prosperity Partnership” (SPP). Unlike NAFTA’s 900 pages of rules (which few congress members actually read in the “fast-track” rush before they narrowly approved it), SPP has issued no such document. Indeed, SPP programs in the US have started—with funding from the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal departments—with no congressional debate or oversight. A spectrum of ten cross-border economic working groups are busy planning, as are three security working groups (4).

Membership of the 13 groups is concealed. There are specialized groups strategizing on *manufactured goods & sectoral and regional competitiveness, *movement of goods, *energy, *environment, *e-commerce & information communications technologies, *financial services, *business facilitation, *food & agriculture, *transportation, *health, and ***three on security issues. Because NAFTA itself is so permissive to corporations and restrictive to others, it’s hard to know exactly how SPP will further expand corporate power. But the neoliberal “free-trade” trend is clear.

It is known that the plan includes integration of armed services command of the three countries under US NorthCom, and similarly for national police such as agents of Homeland Security/FBI. Whereas it will be easier—mandatory in some cases—for water, oil, commercial vehicles, certain goods, and of course money/capital to cross borders unimpeded, people will be impeded in a supposed search for terrorists. Many internment camps and transport trains have already been built in the US (under contract to Halliburton), and Canadians are complaining about Homeland Security’s demanding personal data on passengers in Canadian planes merely crossing US territory (5).

A system of privatized “superCorridors” up to 400 yards wide and taking up acreage equivalent to the state of Vermont— carrying trucks, cars, rail, water and fuel pipelines, and cable— eventually to connect superports in Mexico and Canada with “inland ports” in the US—is already under construction in Texas despite resistance by the state legislature. Whose land will be condemned? What impact will mammoth vehicle exhaust have on global warming and soil/water safety? What animals and plants will be cut off from their ecosystems? What cities and towns with their small businesses will be bypassed and polluted in this heroic effort to flood the country with foreign goods? After all, does Congress have enough information?

An amendment introduced in Congress last July by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) to stop Department of Transportation funding for SPP pending congressional oversight was passed by a large bipartisan majority in the House (6).

The whole undemocratic SPP enterprise is run by the three governments with exclusive advice of the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) composed of top executives of 30 US-, Canadian-, and Mexican-based megacorporations such as Lockheed-Martin, Wal-Mart, and New York Life. Canadians call this “deep integration” while some Americans call this a “North American Union”—with anticipated loss of US and Canadian sovereignty with a common “amero” currency and trilateral control of citizen activity through electronic ID cards. Thus both right- and left-leaning movements oppose SPP, which you can find on blogs and organization web sites, especially from Canada, but not on TV. So who’s listening? In Boston, legislative aides to Senators Kennedy and Kerry had never heard of SPP when I recently asked!

State Responsibility
Globalization, as exemplified by NAFTA and SPP, needs to be controlled and transformed— democratically. Congress—even a 2009 Congress with more Democrats—is unlikely to do more than cosmetic work on these or other trade regimes, since most of their campaigns are significantly funded by giant corporations profiting from NAFTA or related to NACC, and since their constituents know little about these agreements, especially SPP. State legislatures at least have the duty to oversee federal legislation and programs, in order to protect their residents (7). Closer to the people, they may be more effective in investigating and challenging globalization agreements and plans.

Indeed, Massachusetts only 12 years ago passed the Burma Law which blocked state purchasing from companies doing business with that military dictatorship. Four years later the US Supreme Court invalidated the law, challenged in lower courts by a corporation, saying that Congress’ subsequent embargo on Burma superceded the Massachusetts restrictions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that states, like municipalities, can’t have foreign policies and laws to implement them (8). Nineteen states, mostly in the West and South, are considering or have passed resolutions opposing SPP or North American Union (9). After all, it may be cities and states which will lead America out of its imperial morass.

The Massachusetts Globalization Impact Bill (H.374) may be a powerful vehicle to rein in secretive and unfettered expansion of corporate globalization and, as with SPP, its encroachment on private and public property, unwarranted use of military force, spying, and internment. It proposes to do this by establishing a watchdog commission to scrutinize international agreements like SPP, NAFTA, WTO, GATS, CAFTA, and bilateral agreements with the governments of Korea, Peru, Colombia, etc. The commission would recommend to the legislature and the public what the Commonwealth should or should not support. Such authoritative information may break the silence of the media, strengthen local resolve, encourage similar responses in other states, and lead to revocation of the anti-democratic provisions and processes of these “free” trade and investment agreements.

Massachusetts Concerns
What does Massachusetts have at stake? All US trade agreements since the early 1990s carry much the same anti-democratic “neoliberal” principles or consequences as NAFTA and WTO—export focus rather than domestic development; deregulation at the expense of labor, health, environment, etc.; monopoly patents rather than shared scientific advances; disempowerment of states and municipalities; emphasis on punishment—sanctions—rather than cooperative advances, and so forth. SPP carries the additional weight of militarization and international police justified by the ill-defined “war on terror”. Massachusetts citizens, laws, and regulations are at risk in particular ways to be identified by the commission established by the Globalization Impact Bill. Consider three concrete cases:

• Construction of a SuperCorridor through eastern or western Massachusetts will involve massive condemnation of land with all the problems of the ill-fated Southwest Corridor (I-695) of 1962-72 (10).
  
  
• Feared seizure and detention of persons suspected of connections to “terrorism”, at Logan airport, bus terminals, along I-95, I-90, and other highways, and even on our streets—persons who would be denied the due process of the Massachusetts Constitution.
  
  
• Erosion of Massachusetts’ “sovereign immunity”—a legal right which has blocked the plans of the Canadian developer Mondev to take land in downtown Boston designated for public development. Mondev filed suit under NAFTA in 1999, and worked its way to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. As of mid-2007 the case remained undecided (11).