The ITT List
Thursday Jun 30, 2005 5:39 am
Report: US Blocked Release of CAFTA Reports
The Associated Press just reported the U.S. Department of Labor has been trying to hide results of a report that showed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is not all its cracked up to be... far from it.
Also read "Three Dimensional Economics" by ITT Senior Editor David Moberg. The article reports on the negative impact that the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) will have on both Central American and U.S. workers.
“CAFTA isn’t likely to expand markets by reducing Central American poverty much either. Flooding their markets with subsidized U.S. corn will hurt many of the rural poor. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the model for CAFTA, offers scant inspiration. Over NAFTA’s first eight years, Mexico lost 1.3 million jobs and suffered declining real wages … and the United States lost 880,000 jobs, according,” Moberg writes.
Also read "Three Dimensional Economics" by ITT Senior Editor David Moberg. The article reports on the negative impact that the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) will have on both Central American and U.S. workers.
“CAFTA isn’t likely to expand markets by reducing Central American poverty much either. Flooding their markets with subsidized U.S. corn will hurt many of the rural poor. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the model for CAFTA, offers scant inspiration. Over NAFTA’s first eight years, Mexico lost 1.3 million jobs and suffered declining real wages … and the United States lost 880,000 jobs, according,” Moberg writes.
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When came NAFTA
we got SHAFTA.
If we HAFTA
accept CAFTA
ever AFTA ???
no more LAFTA!
CAFTA and NAFTA, and the general trend of globalization, are the end results of a long and dishonorable history of allowing capital to seek its own levels of profit. That, after all, was how the New World was settled to begin with. Industrialism began with the transformation of labor-intensive feudal agriculture to capital-intensive commercial agriculture, with its coincident transformation of a peasant and slave workforce into a semi-autonomous industrial workforce controlled and regulated by military means. In other words, the peasants were forced off or revolted from their estates and enlisted to enforce the authority of those who owned the means of production, either individually or collectively. In other words, communism and fascism are the two principal subsets of capitalism, with all other forms government, from socialism to laissez-faire liberalism, located at the intersection of the two.
The current expansion of post-industrial capitalism is entirely dependent upon a cheap source of energy, petroleum, which made industrial production and distribution possible. Highways, air and sea transportation, electrical generation, industrial and agricultural production, urban, suburban and exurban development, and military defense are all almost entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, and will decline and contract with their eventual depletion.
Be careful of what you wish for. The alternative is likely to be much worse.
“Industrialism began with the transformation of labor-intensive feudal agriculture to capital-intensive commercial agriculture, with its coincident transformation of a peasant and slave workforce into a semi-autonomous industrial workforce controlled and regulated by military means”
Or said another way, many of us left the farm and went into the city to make our fortune.
“In other words, communism and fascism are the two principal subsets of capitalism,”
Well, at least right now, capitalism seems to be displacing those oterh, much MUCH worse systems. Thankfully.
Not a single crook connected to this corrupt and felon-ridden administration will be held to account for any crime whatsoever. You can bet the ranch on that.
It seems that the unwritten commandment of the mainstream media reads: Thou Shalt Not Accuse! The accusations are now the crimes, and the myriad of crimes remain undisclosed.
For starters….how many documents were doctored, altered, or secreted to cover up lies by the Bush White House? We have evidence of dozens of such manipulations…so what makes you think for a minute the Iraq intel wasn’t made to order?
Important read on this topic:
CLICK HERE
I LIKED YOUR ARTICLE ON NAFTA AND CAFTA IF I AFTA SAY IT WAS VERY GOOD WHAT CAN BE DONE TO BRING TO LIGHT WHAT THE POLITICIANS ARE AFTA
Many of our ancestors did not simply ?leave the farm? to make their fortune in the cities, but were literally driven from the estates in which they and countless generations of their own ancestors labored for their common livelihood. The ?fortune? they ?made? in the emergent industrial towns and villages was even more brutish than their traditional peasant preoccupations among the landed gentry, which was why so many of them were shipped off to the colonies or impressed into military service to wage imperial wars of conquest in Europe and the New World, or revolutionary workers? wars in Russia, China and throughout the Third World, formerly referred to as the New World. If you choose to believe that this process of social transformation from feudalism to capitalism resulted in the production of a ?better world? for those who survived the slaughter, you might be right, for what it?s worth. But the price for this amazing transformation was the wholesale destruction or displacement of billions of people who could not more constructively adapt to the more wretched conditions of life they inherited from their rulers.
Communism and fascism are only the more recent, intermediary stages of that transformation from feudalism to capitalism, in which an emergent, more educated administrative middle class mediates the demands of a ruling class to its subject working class. When that class is integrated with the ruling class, fascism is the result. When that class is integrated to the working class, communism is the result. In either case, the end result is modernism, from socialism on the left to laissez faire liberalism on the right. Your glib defense of capitalism ignores the tremendous costs paid to reproduce the privileges we currently enjoy. Capitalists usually ignore the costs which they feel entitled to externalize.
In many ways the CAFTA agreement will not alter US/Central American trade relations much because so much of the exports of many of those countries, including the Dominican Republic, come into the US duty free by virtue of such prior regional trade agreements as the Caribbean Basin Initiative and other treaties which established sugar and coffee quotas. The real change will come in the elimination of labor standards provisions by CAFTA that were present in the other earlier agreements (though they were weak and rarely enforced)! This is the real danger! The race to the bottom continues!
The race to the bottom can best be represented by Hubbard’s peak oil normalized regression function:
N(T, Nsubm, Tsubm, k) = Nsubm*exp[-((T-Tsubm)/sigma)^2/2]
which correlates past oil production to future fossil fuel depletion. Modernism - capitalism - is the product of five hundred years of industrialism fueled by the prospect of progressively less expensive energy. Postmodernism will be the product postindustrialism, spurred by the progressive depletion of fossil fuels.
What does the race to the bottom have to do with oil depletion and Hubbard’s Peak? I thought the race to the bottom was when countries engage in competitive wage reductions to keep domestic manufacturing jobs.
The industrial revolution would not have occurred without the exploitation of fossil fuels. The emergence of capital-intensive, mechanized industry initially freed a significant proportion of the population to pursue martial, colonial, and less traditional occupations which, in turn, made possible further advances in the development of science and technology, and a progressive improvement in the general welfare of all, including those at the bottom of the social heierarchy, those, that is, who survived the social dislocation.
The depletion of fossil fuels, as I see it, will reverse the direction of that race to the top, until an alternate source of energy can be developed. In the mean time, a huge proportion of the population, one which depends upon the comfort and affluence generated by industrial production, will be forced to rely upon more a labor-intensive, post-industrial means of production, a post-capitalist system of production which relies upon a hereditary, technocratic aristocracy and a labor force of neo-feudal peasantry which is disciplined and indoctrinated by the remnants of a middle class religious nationalism.
Those, that is, who survive the relocation.
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