Excerpts from "Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami"
by Rebecca Solnit
The future was being modeled on both sides of the massive steel fence
erected around the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami on November
21st. Inside, delegates from every nation in the western hemisphere but Cuba
watered down some portions of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
agreement and postponed deciding on others in an attempt to prevent a
failure as stark as that of the World Trade Organization ministerial in
Cancun two months before. Outside, an army of 2,500 police in full armor
used a broad arsenal of weapons against thousands of demonstrators and their
constitutional rights.
Since the Seattle surprise of 1999, it has become standard procedure to
erect a miniature police state around globalization summits, and it's hard
not to read these rights-free zones as prefigurations of what full-blown
corporate globalization might bring. After all, this form of globalization
would essentially suspend local, regional, and national rights of
self-determination over labor, environmental, and agricultural conditions in
the name of the dubious benefits of the free market, benefits that would be
enforced by unaccountable transnational authorities acting primarily to
protect the rights of capital.
The corporate agenda of NAFTA and related globalization treaties is
demonstrated most famously by the case of MTBE, a gasoline additive that
causes severe damage to human health and the environment. When California
phased it out, the Canadian corporation Methanex filed a lawsuit demanding
nearly a billion dollars in compensation from the US government for profit
lost because of the ban. Under NAFTA rules, corporations have an absolute
right to profit, with which local laws must not interfere. Poisoning the
well is no longer a crime; stopping the free flow of poison is.
The FTAA, modeled after NAFTA, was originally intended to create a
borderless trade zone that would encompass the whole hemisphere (except, of
course, for Cuba). That globalization is an economic disaster for many
existing industries is so apparent that, while paying lip service to a
borderless economy, both Presidents Clinton and Bush have attempted to
protect the US steel industry from cheap foreign imports, though neither has
done anything about the export of former union jobs to the maquiladoras of
Mexico (and now those jobs are fleeing Mexico for yet cheaper venues in the
infamous "race to the bottom," while more and more white-collar US jobs,
from programming to data processing, are also being exported).
And it's the fact that even the richest nations ‹ the United States and the
European Union ‹ won't live up to their own rhetoric of
capitalism-without-borders that trips up the globalization agendas they
pursue. Both maintain high agricultural subsidies that undermine the ability
of poorer nations to generate export-crop income or in some cases ‹ as with
corn in Mexico ‹ even to compete successfully domestically. NAFTA, which
will be a decade old this New Year, devastated hundreds of thousands of
Mexican subsistence farmers. Florida's citrus industry would be devastated
by tariff-free Brazilian imports, and small Kentucky tobacco farmers are
going out of business because of developing-world imports of the crop. The
question now is not whether globalized commodities are profitable but who
profits, and the answer is usually the already rich, while the rest get
poorer.
The solution to the collapse in Cancun and stalemate in Miami will be
pursuit of a similarly splintering agenda ‹ bilateral trade agreements,
mostly with nations the US can bully. As the WTO was collapsing, the US was
already turning to the FTAA, and as it becomes evident that the FTAA would
flop, the US has stepped up its pursuit of bilateral trade agreements with
Latin American, southern African and other nations.
One of the functions of this Miami police mobilization was to adjust the
American public to the militarization of public space and public life, to a
John-Ashcroft-style America.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of "As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape,
Gender and Art"
Back to Peace Talk Index,
Winter, 2003 - 2004