Point of the protests

News reporting on the Summit of the Americas and the protests against it has been uniformly biased and oversimplified. (A notable exception is the BDN editorial, “Economics of FTAA,” in Tuesday’s paper.) The point of the talks is reduced to the notion that free trade is good for everyone. Protesters’ objections are reduced to their worry about human rights, loss of jobs and harm to the environment. The root of these objections, disenfranchisement of the people, is reduced to the idea that the negotiations are taking place behind closed doors.

The problem is much deeper than that. The value of free trade is not what is in dispute. Nor is it the details of labor and environmental protections. The problem is that the sovereign power of the state, where the people at least theoretically have some say, is being given away to big business, to the multinationals, whose guiding principle famously is the bottom line, not the common good.

The idea of the current meetings is to extend the rules of NAFTA to the rest of the western hemisphere. Under these rules, foreign investors are entitled to compensation for government decisions which injure their profit-making potential. Claims under this provision are not adjudicated in the courts, but by arbitration panels agreed by the parties. That such claims are made is not even required to be publicly acknowledged. An example of local interest is a current case brought by the world’s principle maker of MTBE against the state of California. Methanex of Vancouver has a $970 million, Chapter 11 claim against the United States on the grounds of California’s ban on that substance in gasoline. If they win, we’re next. The federal government will pay, but who knew we had signed away the right to regulate the use of toxic substances in our environment.

I support free trade. But that support assumes accountability to the people of the world, not to the large corporations. Human rights, the right to fair labor practices, the protection of the environment, all these flow from the people. There is nothing in history to suggest altruistic behavior by what William Greider calls “Sovereign Corporations.” This is the point of the protests.

Michael S. Moore

Veazie