The FTAA has nothing to do with free trade. In the face of the intensifying competition of world capitalism, where the tiny handful of multibillionaire families of finance capital compete for market share, raw materials, and cheap labor to enhance their sagging profit rates, Washington initiated the FTAA as a club against its imperialist rivals in Europe and Japan. The moves around the trade pact go hand in hand with Bush's recent trips to Europe, where he advanced the U.S. rulers' drive to assert their political and military domination of the world.

Despite extolling the virtues of free trade as the "road to prosperity" for "poor countries," Washington has no intention of abolishing protectionist weapons it wields to reinforce the unequal trade relations it maintains with semicolonial countries, whether they involve subsidies, environmental laws, antidumping rules, or other measures aimed at restricting imports.

Like other trade pacts and economic and political agreements initiated by Washington, the FTAA is geared to undermine the sovereignty of Latin American and Caribbean countries, perpetuate and deepen their dependency on U.S. capital, and wipe out or severely restrict the development of independent commodity production in the semicolonial world.

This is the lawful functioning of the parasitic system of imperialism, in which the wealthy class uses its governments and economic system to reap enormous wealth at the expense of the toiling majority. This system means that today at least 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day and 1.3 billion do not even have clean water to drink. Some 40,000 people die of preventable diseases every day.

Meanwhile, the wealthy bondholders and their representatives in Washington and elsewhere demand that regimes in Third World countries never miss a payment on the foreign debt, which already exceeds $2 trillion. In the last decade more than $900 billion in interest payments has been sucked out of Latin America into the coffers of the imperialist banks. This creates the conditions for more explosions and new financial collapses, such as those unfolding in Argentina and other Latin American countries. The demand by working people for the cancellation of the Third World debt--which is unjust and has been repaid many times over--echoes that made by revolutionary Cuba since 1985.

Workers and farmers in the United States have a stake in demanding that Washington and Ottawa remove all tariffs and other protectionist instruments that block imports from Latin American, Caribbean, and other semicolonial countries. At the same time the efforts of these nations to develop their industries and agriculture and protect them from the predatory maws of the imperialist monster need to be supported by all working people. It is the world imperialist system that is responsible for the growing social crisis and lack of industrial development in Third World countries. International working-class solidarity will be strengthened by joining Cuba's call for:

Plebiscites in the Americas against the FTAA!

Cancel the Third World debt!
 
 
Related articles:
Argentine general strike condemns austerity drive
Cuba calls for plebiscite against 'free trade' pact
 
 
 
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