Say 'no' to CAFTA

The US House of Representatives is expected to vote on the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) bill when they return from their July 4 recess. CAFTA would expand the sovereignty destroying and job exporting NAFTA to include the nations of Central America. It is also regarded as a necessary precursor to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), sometimes known as "NAFTA on steroids." Now is the time for us to urge our representatives to vote against this dangerous agreement.

CAFTA by its very name claims to promote "free trade." This is a questionable claim on many counts. The sheer size of the agreement is the first clue that something is wrong: 2400 pages! How can implementing that much new rulemaking bring about freedom of anything?

To the extent that trade would be made more free, it would be a one-sided freedom. Central America would have immediate free access to the US market. On the other hand, American farmers and industries would obtain gradual access to Central American markets over a period of years.

Not that anyone is waiting with bated breath for the privilege of exporting to Central America. According to the Center for Security Policy, which supports CAFTA, the Central American market is "an almost imperceptible fraction of US trade." Alan Tonelson, a trade analyst for the US Business and Industry Council, had this to say: "Add up the six CAFTA economies and you get a market the size of New Haven, Connecticut."

What Central America does have is a large supply of people willing to work at agricultural or manufacturing sweatshops for a few dollars per week. The same companies that moved their operations from the US to Mexico under NAFTA are salivating at the prospect of doing the same to Central America under CAFTA. NAFTA has cost us almost a million jobs so far. Does it make sense to multiply that by moving more jobs even further away?

Worse than the impact on our economy is the loss of American independence represented by CAFTA and the upcoming FTAA. For example, Chapter 11 of NAFTA creates an international court with the power to review judicial proceedings in the US. According to a New York Times article on April 18, 2004, the tribunal has ruled against a Mississippi state court's decision, saying "The whole trial and its resultant verdict were clearly improper and discreditable and cannot be squared with minimum standards of international law and equitable treatment."

Abner Mikva, a former US Representative and federal judge, is now one of the "judges" on the NAFTA tribunal. According to the Times article, Mikva stated that "If Congress had known that there was anything like this in NAFTA, they would never have voted for it."

Chapter 10 of CAFTA would create a tribunal reputedly even more powerful than NAFTA's. It's bad enough if Congress really didn't know what was in the text of NAFTA when they voted for it. Surely they do know by now, and they do know that CAFTA is at least as bad. Given that, any member of Congress who supports CAFTA is flouting his oath to defend the Constitution and thumbing his nose at his constituents.

Finally, passage of CAFTA is considered essential for restoring the faltering momentum in favor of the FTAA. Where NAFTA and CAFTA extend from Canada through Central America, FTAA would extend its rule over all of North and South America. It is intended to be the start of a European Union style "community" of the Americas, and would signal the end of our "noble experiment" in self government. Kill CAFTA in its cradle, and it will be very difficult to continue building the FTAA.

Representative Mike Sodrell is on his July 4 recess along with the rest of Congress. The coming week will be our best opportunity to give him our thoughts on the upcoming vote. Let's send him back to Washington with no doubts about the seriousness of the opposition to CAFTA.