FTAA Should be the Hottest Election Issue

Politicians are talking about lots of issues this election season, many of them important. But they aren’t talking about the one issue that can have the most impact on Americans' well-being in the next few years: the legislation creating the "Free Trade Area of the Americas," or FTAA.

The FTAA is intended to be a "broadening and deepening" of NAFTA to encompass all of North and South America except Cuba. The broadening consists of the inclusion of more countries. Deepening means increasing the jurisdiction of the various international regulatory bodies to usurp much more national sovereignty than currently allowed by NAFTA.

FTAA was proposed by the Clinton administration, then adopted as policy by the Bush administration. President Bush hopes to have the agreement negotiated by January 2005, and implemented by Congress soon thereafter.

This deadline is coming up fast, so one would expect that such a major action would be the subject of controversy during this year's election campaigns. Have you heard any politicians debating this issue? I haven't, and I'm concerned that such a vast change might be made with so little public discussion. It behooves us to spread the word about the dangers of FTAA before the president and Congress can quietly saddle us with it.

Proponents of FTAA argue that the agreement, along with its predecessors GATT and NAFTA, is intended to improve the atmosphere for international trade. Last year, a press release by US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick claimed that "CAFTA [a preliminary step to FTAA involving Central America] will streamline trade; promote investment; slash tariffs on goods; remove barriers to trade in services..."

FTAA and related agreements will not streamline trade. How could it, given that transactions will be regulated by thousands of newly organized bureaucrats? In June, when Georgia was lobbying to have the FTAA headquarters established in Atlanta, they estimated that it would bring 27,000 bureaucratic jobs and a $500 million budget to that city. I don't think turning loose that many more trade regulators is going to make trade any easier to carry out.

FTAA will indeed promote investment. It will most likely create a hemispheric development bank that, if it operates like all other such banks, will use our tax money to guarantee risky investments outside the US. Thus we'll be taxed for the privilege of sending more of our jobs somewhere else in North or South America. Are we supposed to be happy about this kind of investment?

Worst of all, FTAA is the next step in the process of transferring our national and state sovereignty to international bodies. Back in 1993, when NAFTA was first being discussed, supporter Henry Kissinger enthused that it "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the cold war, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere...not a conventional trade agreement, but the architecture of a new international system."

In a 1993 then-classified memo to President Clinton, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake stated that "Hemispheric institutions, including the OAS and International American Development Bank and now the NAFTA institutions, can be forged into the vital mechanisms of hemispheric governance."

From the first, the intent of those guiding the design and implementation of "free trade" agreements has been to bring about regional – in this case hemispheric – government to supercede national governments. The model often cited is the evolution of the European Common Market (a supposed free trade agreement) into the European Union, a supra-national government. FTAA is simply a further step in the process for North and South America. NAFTA and the WTO have already declared some US laws to be violations of international regulations. FTAA will give such unelected bodies even more control over our national and state governments.

In the race to stop FTAA, we here in Indiana, and especially the Ninth Congressional District, are starting from behind. Our two senators and Representative Baron Hill have taken every possible opportunity to vote in favor of the process of transferring sovereignty to FTAA and its predecessors. Senator Lugar voted for NAFTA, GATT/WTO, "trade promotion authority" for the president, and the trade agreements with Singapore and Chile. Senator Bayh and Rep. Hill were not in Congress for the NAFTA and GATT votes, but they supported all of the other measures. Unless their constituents make this an issue very soon, our legislators are unlikely to change course and vote against FTAA.

I recommend that concerned readers who want to look more closely at the dangers of FTAA do so on the internet at www.stoptheftaa.org.