This
really upsets me. All I can think is :wtf: I hadn't realized they built this into NAFTA! Oh for the happy times when we didn't know so much :(
I was stunned to find this out recently (in a really informative thread hosted by Anti-NAFTA:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=315065#316097 )
The FTAA, the WTO, and the Assault on Public Interest, Services, and our Water
Today, services constitute a bigger share of the economy than ever before. A service is anything you can't drop on your foot: the work of lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, teachers, child care and elder care employees, librarians, and other professionals are services. Services also include water collection and distribution, electricity generation and distribution, trucking, shipping and other sorts of transportation, oil drilling, waste incineration, and sewage treatment. Services constitute between 70 percent and 80 percent of the United States' economy, and make up more than 60 percent of the global economy.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiators have included services as one of the many items covered by the treaty's rules. Under the FTAA, trade in services would be "liberalized" to create "certainty and transparency" for investors. In practice, this means that our health, labor, and environmental laws would be eroded, all under the guise of reducing "barriers to trade." The proposed FTAA rules would also speed up the process of deregulation and privatization already underway throughout the hemisphere, a process that is eliminating public oversight of essential services. Essentially, the FTAA rules for services threaten to launch an unprecedented corporate expansion into the lives of the 800 million people of the Americas. The FTAA would give multinational corporations vast new abilities to control our children's education, our elder's health care, our mail service, and even the water we drink. The FTAA's services agenda represents a massive increase in corporate power at the expense of the ability of ordinary people and governments to determine their future.
<snip>
"Since services do not face trade barriers in the form of border tariffs or taxes, market access is restricted through national regulations. Thus the liberalization of the trade in services implies modifications of national laws and regulations."
In other words: To meet the FTAA requirements, countries will have to change their laws governing the obligations placed on business. The FTAA will prevent governments—national, state, or local—from passing regulations that are "more burdensome than necessary." That frighteningly vague definition will discourage governments from passing and enforcing meaningful environmental, health, and labor laws.
EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/ftaa/FTAAWTOServices.html===
Mexican Electric Workers Union Builds Massive Coalition Against Privatization
Appeals for International Solidarity
It's no accident that the Mexican government, following the dictates of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and transnational corporations, waited so long to try to privatize the country's electric utility industry. They've been privatizing for a decade: telephones, railways, the steel industry, the banks and some 1100 state owned operations, but they've held off on electricity because to sell off this precious state asset they'll have to go to war with one of the country's oldest, most democratic, and militant unions, the SME (Mexican Electrical Workers Union). At stake in the war are thousands of jobs, one of the country's best union contracts and the SME's existance. On the government's side, the stakes are its neoliberal program and future privatizations and perhaps control of the labor movement.
The Zedillo government is rushing to push through the Constitutional changes necessary to privatize electricity before next year's Presidential campaign and a possible backlash. The government's propaganda campaign to terrify the public into acceptance claims that only private investment can save the utilities, that without money from the sale, the government budget for health and education will be insufficient. The head of the Mexican Chamber of Industries warned that without privatization there will be blackouts and "the majority of Mexicans will be condemned to live in the shadows."
<snip>
http://www.ibew1613.org/library/privatization.html===
The FTAA's Threat to Our Most Precious Resource—Water
Even without the FTAA, the privatization of public services is already well underway in Latin America, thanks to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As part of the structural adjustment conditions attached to the loans they give, the IMF and the World Bank have directed poor countries to sell off many of their publicly controlled services. In Mexico, the phone system has been privatized. Under pressure from the IMF, Guatemala, the second poorest country in the hemisphere, has sold off its telephone and electric companies, its rail service, and its postal system. Nicaragua has privatized its health and education systems.
As discussed above, under the FTAA this privatization process will likely accelerate. And the FTAA will further open the door to the privatization of one of the world's most important resources—water.
The world is facing an acute water shortage. Already, more than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and 30 countries are struggling with water scarcity. As the world's population grows, the problem will likely get worse. It is estimated that by 2025 as much as two-thirds of the world's population will be suffering from water shortages or absolute water scarcity. Once considered a human right, water is increasingly being viewed as a valued commodity. As Fortune magazine has noted, "water will be to the 21st Century what oil was to the 20th." The website of a Canadian water company, Global Water Corporation, makes the same point more bluntly: "Water has moved from being an endless commodity that may be taken for granted to a rationed necessity that may be taken by force."
Major multinational corporations are eager to turn scarcity into profit and to make water, like oil, a commodity you will have to pay dearly for. Water privatization is already a $400 billion dollar global business, and multinational corporations are hoping to use international trade and investment agreements such as the FTAA to increase their control over the supply of water.
Under the FTAA, if a locality is charging residents for water—and therefore, according to the FTAA's definition, offering the service on a "commercial basis"—any multinational corporation will be able to enter that market and compete for the water services. Because of the FTAA's "national treatment" requirements, the local government will not be able to give preference to local service providers who may have a greater commitment to the area and who it may be easier for the community to oversee. And, as with other services, once the door is opened there is no way of closing it. For example, if a Chilean company were granted the right to export water from the country's glaciers, US multinationals would then have the right to help themselves to as much of the Chilean water as they wished.
<snipped: The experience of Cochabamba, Bolivia and more>
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/ftaa/FTAAWTOServices.html
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