Towards the Corporate States of the Americas

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By Katherine Sciacchitano, Dollars and Sense

Which is closer to your vision of North America?

Vision A: Three interdependent countries with vibrant social movements, respect for labor rights, and environmentally sustainable economies anchored in provision of social needs and respect for cultural autonomy?

Or Vision B: An unequal alliance dominated by the United States, complete with pumped up oil and gas production, increasing militarization, corporate transnational planning groups, and guest worker programs to ensure cheap, vulnerable labor?

If your answer is Vision A, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that this past August at a summit of the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico in Montebello, Quebec, labor, environmental and globalization activists braved riot police and tear gas to demand democratic input into North American decision-making. The bad news is that the summit was about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) -- the real-world name of Vision B.

While left activists and researchers in Canada and Mexico have been spreading the word about the SPP for several years, so far in the United States the SPP, which was officially launched in March 2005, has mainly caught the attention of the right wing, which sees it as a stealth plan to impose a European Union-style government on the continent.

The SPP is not a North American version of the European Union. But it is a stealth plan -- one aimed at bypassing the kind of international solidarity that halted the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. The European Union emerged after years of public debate and a treaty ratified by member states. By contrast, the SPP is not a treaty and will never be submitted to the U.S., Mexican, or Canadian legislatures. Instead it attempts to reshape the North American political economy by direct use of executive authority. And while the European Union maintains an explicit role for government in addressing inequality within and between countries, the SPP's foundation is an unequal alliance where the United States retains the political and economic trump cards.

Designed to shore up the United States' weakening position as a global hegemon, the SPP's primary goals are to link economic integration of the three countries to U.S. security needs; deepen U.S. access to oil, gas, electricity, and water resources throughout the continent; and to provide a privileged -- and institutionalized -- role for transnational corporations in continental deregulation. The stakes for labor, the environment, and civil liberties in all three countries couldn't be higher. Yet because of the SPP's reliance on executive authority to push the agenda, many of the SPP's initiatives remain virtually invisible, even to many activists.

Katherine Sciacchitano is a former labor lawyer and organizer. She currently teaches at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland.

http://alternet.org/module/printversion/76648

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Why does it have to be so black-and-white, Steven? I'm sure there's room for a happy medium somewhere along the way. It might just be a little tougher to find, that's all.

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Why does it have to be so black-and-white, Steven? I'm sure there's room for a happy medium somewhere along the way. It might just be a little tougher to find, that's all.

(from the full article)

U.S. corporations and elites that dominate continental production chains clearly stand to gain the most from the SPP. But in fact, the SPP's earliest roots lie in proposals by Canadian businesses and think tanks for what Canadians call "deep integration." Essentially a strategy for bypassing U.S. protectionism, deep integration seeks to leverage Canada's geographic proximity for greater access to U.S. markets. The idea received a serious boost in the days after 9/11. The United States buys 80% of Canada's exports, and so when the United States closed its borders following the attacks, Canadian businesses lost millions of dollars every hour. Canadian elites promptly concluded -- correctly -- that the price of continued access to U.S. markets was deeper cooperation on security matters.

Canada, like Mexico, quickly signed a "smart-border" agreement and began conforming its security practices to the needs of the Bush administration's war on terror. In 2002 Canadian officials provided information that helped the U.S. deport a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was tortured. The Canadian government has since apologized, and Arar, a software engineer whose wife stood as a candidate for the New Democratic Party in 2004, has signed on to a public demand that SPP provisions be submitted to Canadians for a vote.

But the SPP's dangers for Canadians go beyond threats to civil liberties. Like NAFTA and the Canadian U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) before it, the SPP is a Trojan horse aimed at trapping Canadian workers into a downward spiral of global competition and neoliberal policies.

http://alternet.org/module/printversion/76648

Edited February 11, 2008 by Mister Fancypants

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Which is closer to your vision of North America?

Vision A: Three interdependent countries with vibrant social movements, respect for labor rights, and environmentally sustainable economies anchored in provision of social needs and respect for cultural autonomy?

Or Vision B: An unequal alliance dominated by the United States, complete with pumped up oil and gas production, increasing militarization, corporate transnational planning groups, and guest worker programs to ensure cheap, vulnerable labor?

If your answer is Vision A, there's good news and bad news.

What if your answer is Vision B? :