Protesting More of the Same

Naomi Klein / TomPaine.com 14apr01

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies

The argument for barreling ahead with the Free Trade Area of the Americas is based on an unshakable ideological belief that what's good for business will be good for everyone -- eventually. Opposition to free trade has grown, and grown more vocal, precisely because private wealth has soared without translating into anything that can be clearly defined as the public good.

The slogan "people before profits" is dismissed as unfocussed by free trade defenders, but it neatly encapsulates the sentiment running through the campaigns converging in Quebec City.

There is always a ready excuse for why the wealth liberated by so-called free trade is stuck at the top: a recession, the deficit, the Peso crisis, political corruption, and now another looming recession. There is always a reason why it should be spent on another tax break instead of social or environmental programs.

Only economists worship wealth creation as an abstraction; only the very rich fetishize it as an end in itself. The rest of us are interested in those rising numbers on the trade ledger for what they can buy. Does increased trade and investment mean we can afford to rebuild our health care system? Can we keep our promises to end child poverty? Can we fund better schools? Build affordable housing? Can we afford to invest in cleaner energy sources? Do we work less, and have more leisure time? In short, do we have a better, more just, sustainable society?

The free trade critics know -- know all too well -- how much money is being made under free trade. The numbers point to increases in exports and development, but the trickle-down effects promised as the political incentive for deregulation -- tougher environmental standards, higher wages, better working conditions, less poverty -- have all been pitifully incremental or non existent.

The labor and environmental side-agreements tacked onto the North American Free Trade Agreement have had a spectacularly poor track record. Today, seventy-five percent of Mexico's population lives in poverty, up from forty-nine percent in 1981.

Trade may be creating jobs in Canada but not enough of them to keep up with the number of jobs that have been eliminated; by 1997, there had been a net loss of almost 300,000 jobs. Total pollution has doubled in Mexico since NAFTA was introduced, according to the Sierra Club. And the U.S. has become a climate change renegade, chucking out its Kyoto commitments wholesale. It turns out that defiant unilateralism is the ultimate luxury item in the free trade era, reserved for the ultra rich.

When economic growth is severed from meaningful measures of social progress, thinking people begin to lose faith in the system. They start to ask tough questions not only about trade, but about how economists measure progress and value. Why can't we measure ecological deficits, as well as economic growth? What are the real social costs of deregulation in cuts to education, in increased homelessness?

Such are the questions to be heard in Quebec City. They will come from people such as Jose Bove, the French cheese farmer whose campaign is not against McDonald's but against an agricultural model that sees food purely as an industrial commodity, rather than as the centerpiece of national culture and family life. They will come from health care workers questioning a trade system that defends patents for AIDS drugs more vigorously than millions of human lives. They will come from university students, paying more for their educations each year, while their schools are invaded by advertisements and their research departments are privatized one study at a time.

What the protesters are saying is that human dignity and environmental sustainability are simply too important to be patiently prayed for like rain during a drought. They should not be belated side-effects, but the very foundations of our economic policies. Thankfully, the protesters are resisting the pressure to come up with a one-size-fits-all alternative to free trade and are instead defending the right to genuine global diversity and self-determination.

Rather than one solution, there are thousands, slowly coalescing into an alternate economic model. In Brazil that means free generic AIDS drugs for anyone who needs them. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, it means insisting that water is not a commodity but a human right, even that means throwing out the international water conglomerate Bechtel. In British Columbia, it means First Nations and non-Native rural communities demanding the right to manage "community forests" which combine selective logging, tourism, and local industry, as opposed to granting industrial tree farm licenses to logging multinationals. In Mexico and Guatemala it means coffee farm co-operatives that guarantee living wages and ecological diversity.

Some defenders of free trade say that if the protesters were serious, they would be on the other side of the chain link fence that now protects the leaders, politely negotiating side-agreements on labor, democracy and environmental standards.

But 13 years after the first free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. it's not the details of the deal (we still don't know them) but the economic model itself that is under fire because the numbers just don't add up.

Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Jean said that thousands are coming to Quebec City to "protest and blah blah blah." Quite the opposite. They're coming to Quebec to protest because they've had it with the blah blah blah.