Fact-Checking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is in a tizzy [1] over my post yesterday [2] about the corporate-written Colombia trade deal that it is trying to ram through Congress over the deep opposition of the American public. The Chamber purports to "fact check" my post [1], so let's do some fact-checking of the fact-checking - just to show you how corrupt these people are.

CLAIM: The world's population loves our current trade policy.

The Chamber says it isn't true that free trade is unpopular in many Latin American countries and the developing world in general.

FACT: Free trade is unpopular in many Latin American countries and the developing world in general.

Here's the gold-standard: The 2008 BBC World Service Poll [3] of 34,500 people. It reports: "In 22 out of 34 countries around the world, the weight of opinion is that 'economic globalization, including trade and investment,' is growing too quickly." Looking country-to-country on page 9 [4], you find large segments of the developing world unhappy with the current NAFTA-style trade model epitomized by the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That includes majorities or pluralities not only in places like Chile and Argentina, but in Africa and Asia. And, of course, there is this from the Los Angeles Times [5] - with "market economics" (as usual) being the euphemism for "free trade":

"Trust in market economics [in Latin America] is declining, according to a poll released in November by Latinobarametro, a Chilean opinion research firm. Millions are frustrated that privatization and falling trade barriers have done little to mitigate income inequality. Survey respondents in Central America were particularly downbeat, despite that region's recent embrace of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which includes the U.S., the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. In a separate 2007 opinion poll, Mexicans said they disapproved of NAFTA by 2 to 1, according to the Mexico City-based polling firm Mund Americas."

CLAIM: Because legislators vote for something, it means the public supports it.

The Chamber claims that NAFTA-style trade deals that throw farmers off their land, privatize social services and inflate medicine prices in the developing world are wildly popular among the masses in the developing world. The proof? "Over the past four years, democratically-elected legislatures in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Peru all approved trade agreements with the United States with more than 85% of legislators voting in favor."

FACT: Democratic legislatures are very often bought off (see Congress, United States).

You have to look no further than our own U.S. Congress or state legislatures to know that "democratically-elected legislatures" often become the rubber stamp of corporate policies that the vast majority of the country opposes. In just the last few years, we've watched Congress pass trade deals, bankruptcy laws, financial deregulation schemes, corporate tax cuts, resolutions perpetuating the war - all policies unpopular with the American people. Citing support from a "democratically elected legislature" for a corporate-written policy that crushes workers and the environment proves nothing more than those legislatures are as bought off as our own.

CLAIM: The Colombian government has no association with paramilitary gangs.

The Chamber notes that I wrote that the Colombian government has a "known association with paramilitary gangs." The Chamber goes on to insist that "it is associated with them as the entity that has shut them all down."

FACT: The Colombian government and political elite has associations with paramilitary gangs. additionally, the Colombian government runs its own military operations like such gangs.

I'll let the Washington Post, Associated Press, BBC and the New York Times do the talking for me:

"Some of Colombia's most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities." - Washington Post, 5/22/07 [6]

"In his five years as president, Alvaro Uribe has repeatedly denied accusations that he's been cozy with Colombia's murderous right-wing militias, whose thousands of victims include suspected rebel sympathizers and union activists. Yet newly uncovered video of his 2001 campaign shows him shaking hands with a militia leader who was arrested only weeks later on suspicion of involvement in multiple murders, and is now a fugitive with a price on his head." - Associated Press, 6/17/07 [7]

"Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the [Colombian] government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas...But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say." - Washington Post, 3/30/08 [8]

"A cousin of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has resigned from the Senate to avoid a Supreme Court inquiry into whether he had ties to paramilitaries. Mario Uribe's resignation comes amid a scandal that has seen dozens of politicians accused of paramilitary links and 14 jailed awaiting trial. A jailed former leader of the AUC, Salvatore Mancuso, has alleged that he met several times with Mario Uribe who asked him to support his senate campaign in 2002." - BBC, 10/5/07 [9]

"Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo resigned on February 19. Araujo's resignation, in response to the unfolding paramilitary scandal...The minister's resignation coincided with new expressions of discontent by US congressional Democrats about the unfolding scandal, underlining the sensitivity of the issue for the Uribe administration as it seeks US ratification of a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) and funding for a second phase of Plan Colombia." - New York Times, 2/21/07 [10]

CLAIM: The Colombia Free Trade Agreement is all about tariffs.

The Chamber of Commerce would have us believe that the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is only about reducing tariffs on American goods. The organization says "92 percent of imports from Colombia enter the U.S. market duty free...By contrast, Colombia imposes tariffs on imports of U.S. manufactured goods of 14%, and often twice that for agricultural products. For American workers and farmers, that’s just not fair. The pending trade agreement would put U.S. trade relations with Colombia on a fairer, mutually beneficial footing by eliminating Colombia’s tariffs — most immediately. That means new sales, new exports, and new jobs. So how would that destroy our economy?"

FACT: Trade deals are all about investor rights, outsourcing and imperialism - the latter of which stokes anti-Americanism.

The Chamber's move is a standard sleight of hand when it comes to trade - focus on a topline number, and ignore what trade deals really are: investor rights agreements. The reason trade deals are thousands of pages long is not because it takes so much paper to lower tariffs - that would take a page or two - it is because these deals are chock full of special interest provisions granting investors more rights than citizens and governments. For instance, corporations can use these trade deals' provisions (known as Chapter 11 [11]) to sue national, state and local governments in international tribunals for profit losses brought on by environmental, human rights and consumer protections. Another example: This trade model bans [12] government procurement procedures that target taxpayer contracts to domestic, job-creating firms. And, of course, these trade deals are filled with pharmaceutical patent protections that inflate the cost of medicine in the developing world [13].

These "investor rights" provisions not only help corporations pad their profits, but also provide them the kind of legal frameworks they like when they outsource jobs. And that's why the push for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is at the top of the Chamber's agenda: Because, as the Denver Post recently reported [14], corporate America sees Latin America as the next big place to outsource American jobs and therefore cut labor costs.

Finally, the whole idea that it is awful that Colombia protects part of its market with tariffs displays a stunning disregard for Colombians and for basic economic history. One of the reasons so many Latin Americans oppose these free trade deals is because they force developing countries to allow multinational corporations to take over their economies, throw farmers off their land [15] and generally treat the country like a colony for exploitation. As economist Ha-Joon Chang shows in his new book "Bad Samaritans," [16] every single developed country - including our own - built up its economy by protecting parts of its economy from economic colonization. Our nation's push to force countries to allow such colonization is one of the major reasons anti-Americanism is brewing in the Southern Hemisphere. Listen to a speech by any of the new Latin American populists, and their rhetoric is rooted in a critique not so much of our military adventurism, but of our economic imperialism as epitomized by our trade policies. Many of these populists take their rhetoric to places that are unacceptable, but we ignore the roots of such blowback at our peril.