A look under the CAFTA hood: Halliburton contracts & corporate lawsuits

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Thursday, July 28, 2005

CAFTA not merely about free trade

By LIZA GRANDIA
GUEST COLUMNIST

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/234211_cafta28.html

Any naïve Congress member who thinks CAFTA is merely about free trade should look carefully at its provisions on government contracts and corporate lawsuits.

Government contracts. For any purchases of more than $117,000 (eventually to be lowered to $58,000), CAFTA forces governments to open bidding to transnational corporations. That means that states will no longer be able to give preference to home-based businesses, and so mom-and-pop stores in Central America and the United States will suddenly be competing with the Bechtels and the Halliburtons of the world.

Corporate lawsuits against governments. Perhaps CAFTA's most worrisome provision expands the rights that corporations received under NAFTA to challenge any laws they perceive as barriers to trade and foreign investment. For instance, when California banned a carcinogenic gasoline additive called MTBE because it was seeping into the state's drinking water, the chemical manufacturer, Methanex, sued California for infringing on its trade rights under NAFTA and demanded $970 million in compensation. Such suits are a direct threat to democracy because they prioritize the profits of foreign corporations over a country's own environmental, social and labor laws.

Already corporations are planning more such lawsuits. If CAFTA passes, a subsidiary of Harken Energy (on whose board George W. Bush once served) has said it will demand $58 billion from Costa Rica (whose entire GDP is only $37 billion) in compensation for hypothetical future lost profits, if the company is not allowed to drill offshore in Costa Rica's protected Talamanca region -- one of the planet's richest marine ecosystems. CAFTA also encourages privatization, especially for government services in health, water, energy and social security. In agriculture, it will allow transnational agribusiness cartels to dump food commodities at below-market prices. It will forbid the public health sector from buying life-saving generic drugs for such diseases as AIDS.