Thomas Friedman once said the hidden hand of the market needs the hidden fist of the military. The TPP and the Obama administration’s Pacific Pivot pack both.
NAFTA gave multinational corporations the right to sue governments to block regulations they don’t like, undermining democracy and local sovereignty.
In the United States and throughout North America, NAFTA has accelerated the industrial consolidation of agriculture and pushed out smaller, more sustainable food producers.
Twenty years since its passage, NAFTA has displaced workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, depressed wages, weakened unions, and set the terms of the neoliberal global economy.
While a militarized enforcement regime has long existed in the U.S-Mexico borderlands, its far more intense post-9/11 version is also proving geographically expansive. Now, the entire U.S. perimeter has become part of a Fortress USA mentality and a lockdown reality. Unlike on our southern border, there is still no wall to our north on what was once dubbed the “longest undefended border in the world.” But don’t let that fool you. The U.S.-Canadian border is increasingly becoming a national security hotspot.
The United States recently announced that Canada and Mexico will join negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a secretive U.S.-led multinational trade and investment agreement currently being negotiated with eight other countries in the Pacific Rim region. On the other side of the Pacific, Japanese legislators are defecting in droves to try to stop the country’s entry into the negotiations. But the situation is much different in Canada and Mexico, which were admitted to the table with much fanfare during the G20 summit in June.
The passage of an anti-protest bill finally attracted the attention of the United States.
Each year Conn Hallinan’s blog Dispatches From the Edge awards news stories and newsmakers that fall under the category of “Are you serious?”
The continentalists are out of the cupboard: The United States and Canada are taking another crack at North American integration, this time without Mexico. Civil servants are dusting off their policy playbooks, business lobbyists are flexing their muscles, and politicians are sexing up their communications strategies. Their opponents, activists fighting for a new economic model, are preparing a counteroffensive that we hope will succeed — again.
Canada offered to “discreetly” assist the United States as it prepared to invade Iraq even as the ruling Liberal party trumpeted its foreign policy independence from Washington.