Author
Ted
This paper edit, or script, roughly follows the rough cut (or vice versa).
The ending quote (Rev. Jeffrey) didn't get into the audio last night. I hope to add it.
TED: FTAA AND PUBLIC SERVICES -- SCRIPT
[STREET SOUNDS; BIRD SOUNDS; SOUNDS OF KIDS PLAYING; MOVEMENT, etc.]
NAR: During the cooling hours of what had been a balmly Saturday afternoon, approximately twenty-five activists and concerned citizens gather at New Hope Baptist Church in Seattle’s Central Area. They’re attending a public forum on an international tr
e agreement, soon to be negotiated in Quebec. They have concerns about this proposed trade agreement, known as the Free Trade Area of the Americas or FTAA, because it seeks to expand NAFTA to most of the Western Hemisphere and to open up public service
to foreign competition. A draft text of the FTAA has been not been released and so a coalition of local groups concerned with corporate globalization organized the forum to educate the public on the FTAA and its potential ramifications for public serv
es...
[MARTI: “Can you hear? Back there? Everybody should move up, too. We don’t want to occupy the entire church.
NAR: Martha Schmidt, of the King County Labor Council’s Education Committee introduces the topic...
The Free Trade Area of the Americas is the extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement... which went into effect in 1994, and that’s called NAFTA
[MARTI: “What the Free Trade Area of the Americas intends to do is to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement into 34 countries. Virtually the whole Western Hemisphere except for Cuba... The negotiations have been conducted in secret.....We’re g
ng to be talking about one of those sectors today, and that’s the services area.
[MARTI: “Essentially what we’re talking about here is expansion of an area of free trade--so we’re talking about expansion of the number of countries as well as the subjects....
NAR: Ellen Gould is a Canadian trade analyst and a critic of the NAFTA expansion...
ELLEN: “The FTAA necessarily will go further than NAFTA. All of these regional trade agreements, under WTO rules, have to be more liberalizing than what already exists. By liberalizing I mean they have to open up more goods and services to internatio
l competition...So when we’re talking services we’re talking things like water supply, energy services, health, education--things you’d never think of...it’s very comprehensive....This will bring those services directly into the targets of those who wan
to open them up to private competition.
PAT: “If you have a rule that says you can or can’t do something within your country, you have to apply it evenly in your country, and then other countries in your agreement can impose their own standards on you...
NAR: Patricia Davis is President of the Washington Council on International Trade (check)
PAT: “If something is put on the table so that they privatize water, for instance, like they have in Britain...If they allow private companies those water rights in the U.S., then they should, probably allow any company from the countries in the agreeme
to make a bid to buy. Now, whether you want private companies to buy your water supply is something we don’t do in this country. Should we do that, then it would have to be applicable to anybody who wanted to buy whether it be a Canadian company, or
xican one...
NAR: According to trade representative summary reports this FTAA expansion into the services sector would accompany the “investor-state” provisions of NAFTA, which give corporations the right to sue governments, at any level, for “unrealized profits” i
their laws or regulations can be found to unfarily exclude them from trade markets or public service sectors... FTAA critics argue that this would “give unequalled new rights to the transnational corporations of the hemisphere to compete for and challen
every publically funded service of its governments.”
NAR: Larry Keuhn is the Politicial Action Director (check) of the British Columbia Federation of Teachers.
LARRY: 24.28 “So what’s happening is a company says that what the government is doing is a potential barrier to trade and consequently, under theses rules, it must be compensated. As you move that same principle into services, which I say is the bas
of the negotiations going on in GATS and the FTAA, you could be in a position in which a government, if it decided it wanted a new education program that offered some options that hadn’t been there before, and there was a company that already offered t
t on a commercial basis, if the government decided to take that over as a government program, the company could sue the government and demand the unmade profits that are the result of that. 25.30
NAR: Patricia Davis, of the Washington Council on International Trade...
PAT: 7:09 “If the Candians, which I guess are concerned about their educational system, allow privatization ... in their own country’s educational system then usually, by the terms of an international agreement...allow companies from those countries 7:
also to apply to bid on those things...(7:50) If Canada wants to (not?--check) allow privatization of their schools then they have a right not to allow anybody from any other country to come in and try to bid on privatizing their schools...(8:00) Usu
ly what the rule is is that what you allow for one country you have to do for others. Now, how they’re doing this with the services agreement, I’m not sure...
NAR: Ruth Caplan, of the Alliance for Democracy, is wary or such assurances. She claims that privatization of education, by foreign and domestic corporations, already has a foot in the door, and that the Free Trade Area of the Americas would offer th
the legal means to force their entry into public education...
RUTH: 9.30 “Look at the push for vouchers and charter schools--all of this is going on without the FTAA. The FTAA will make things much worse...9.40 Let’s say Edison, which is running a number of charter schools in the states, sets itself up as a sub
diary of a foreign corporation, then if a school board contracts with Edison and finds that it is not performing, Edison’s parent company would be able to sue the u.s. for loss of what they call “intangible property rights,” -- that’s their profits.
NAR: Health care is another focus of concern. For Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, the FTAA expansion of NAFTA poses serious health ramifications beyond the public health care system...
STEPHEN: “If we ask what the FTAA is going to do to health services. Whatever it does it’s not going to be nearly as important as what it’s going to do to the structure of society. Basically, you ask the question, “What makes a population health?” In
ich countries, the factor that most affects the health of a population is some measure of the gap between the rich and the poor.”
“The wealthy elite are the ones who are setting this up--they’re not setting this up to benefit ordinary poor people. They’re setting this up to find more profitable ways of satisfying the shareholders. And, we can rest assured that the gap between r
h and the poor as a result of the FTAA will increase, and that will have a detrimental effect on our health.”
PAT: 9:38 “...these things can be negotiated out...”
NAR: Patricia Davis...
“...and the people who criticize multilateral agreements (or even bilateral agreements among countries) are people who really want to slam the doors on cross-border trade of exchange. And the point is, you don’t do that to solve those problems. You rea
y do sit down and negotiate these hard issues out and then still maintain your trade agreement, or work out your trade agreement. It makes it more fair for everybody...10:03... more opportunity and more market expansion.
NAR: According to trade analyst, Ellen Gould, all public service areas will be on the table at the start of negotiation.
ELLEN: 5:22 “The position right now is its going to be all-inclusive--All services would be covered unless a country got an exemption. That’s what’s called a “top-down agreement.” It means you actually have to bargain to get anything exempted. 5:49 T
t’s a very radical proposal.”
NAR: Several other “top-down” aspects of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas that have come under fire. According to Gould, corporations have a heavy hand in drafting these trade agreements...
ELLEN: 7:22 “Governments take their advice almost exclusively from multinational corporations. They provide a number of forums where multinational corporations can give them their marching orders...”
NAR: Public debate on the FTAA has largely been denied. U.S. trade negotiators will be working from draft texts of the agreement that have not been released to the public, nor to members of Congress. Public debate could be limited further if Congress
rants the President fast-track authority--what trade proponents are calling Trade Promotion Authority--the same process of streamlining congressional deliberation on trade agreements denied President Clinton prior to the ratification of NAFTA .
Ruth Caplan...
RUTH: 14.43 “Fast track authority gives the president of the u.s. a lot of power ... it prevents congress from having any ammendments to a trade agreement, it limits the number of hours congress can debate a trade agreement, and it limits the amount o
time between when the agreement is agreed to by negotiators and when congress has to agree ... it means that theere is no meaningful time for public debate. 15.25 Agreements like the FTAA -- agreements that have to do not just with the movement of good
but with services, which have to do with every aspect of our life, from our birth to our death--15.40 ... These are issues that should be debated in a democracy not just voted up or down by Congress.”
NAR: Dick Burton is a philosophy professor at Seattle Central Community College, and an active opponent of the FTAA...
DICK: “It’s time for everyday working people in the U.S. to rethink how committed we’re going to be to this regimen when we are supposedly committed to democracy...It’s time to call into question the marketplace reasoning that underlines that sort of t
nking...to think that education, or water, or healthcare, or anything for that matter ought to be guided by the notion of selling commodities on the market for a profit is very problematic, and to think further that the profits gleaned from this sort of
xchange are to be controled, determined entirely by an unelected kabal of corporate leaders and shareholders are almostely entirely exempt from any public scrutiny which is fundementally what corporate capitalism is all about--it’s anti-democratic and r
s contrary to the best of what this country has been about.”
NAR: Anti-Free Trade activists, like Reverend Robert Jeffrey of New Hope Baptist Church, and others attending the FTAA forum, will join a coalition of labor, human rights, and environmental activists on April 21st at the Peace Arch on the U.S.-Canadian
order, to protest NAFTA expansion.
REV JEFFREY: “Anyone who’s concerned about what’s going on in the Americas should join--now’s the time to speak...This is the battle, this is the front and i think that people need to understand that corporations are serious, they’re tired of unions, th
’re tired of workers complaining about decent living standards, they’re tired of communities wanting health care. They want to lock arms like the did in the....century, and become the landowners, and the kings and the lords of the world again. And we
st can’t let that happen. We just can’t.
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