Summary
Proposed North American Free Trade Agreement; includes glossary of economic terms
A global economic crisis cannot be remedied by such trade agreements as NAFTA. The assumption that the treaty will benefit anyone other than large multinational corporations has not been proven. Offshore labor and other factors of the agreement are discussed.See the full content of this document
Extract
The human costs of NAFTA.
"There is as much injustice in the equal treatment of unequal cases as there is in the unequal treatment of equal cases."
--Aristotle, in Nichomachean Ethics The proposed North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico is the logical and perhaps inevitable extension of the 1989 Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada. Both agreements are controversial, and massive public opposition exists in all three countries--for good reasons, as we shall see. The citizens of these three nations have never been provided with a credible explanation of the need for NAFTA. Contrary to the proclamations of NAFTA's proponents, there are no guarantees that the supposed benefits of the free-trade agreement will be realized, nor is it clear who will gain and who will lose. The potential long-term economic benefits are merely assumed to exceed the short-term adjustment costs, so that everybody will eventually gain (the so-called "win-win" scenario). How this will occur is a mystery, since there are no provisions in the agreement for the potential winners to compensate the potential losers. Once again, the dubious mechanism of "trickle-down" is expected to do the job. Beyond all this, it is debatable whether NAFTA will further free trade at all. In fact, a strict interpretation of the economic theory of free trade, classical or neoclassical, would indicate otherwise. NAFTA can be viewed as yet another official reaction to a deepening global economic crisis, as well as an integral part of the emerging "new world order." Despite widespread democratic opposition, strategies like NAFTA are put on the "fast track" and hurriedly implemented with support from numerous officially sanctioned (and subsidized) reports, but with no open discussion or debate and little time for scholarly analysis or critique. Official dominat...See the full content of this document
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