NORWAY – Matt Schlobohm, a Bates College alumnus living in Greene, explained the implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas to participants at the Public Interest forum at Norway Memorial Library Thursday evening.

He reinforced his comments with printed hand-outs titled, “FTAA for Beginners.”

Implemented in 1994, NAFTA is the trade agreement signed by the United States, Canada and Mexico that was supposed to create new jobs but which has resulted instead in the documented loss of at least 413,123 U.S. jobs as of July 31, 2002, he said.

It established new rights for corporations while weakening rights and reducing wages for workers, weakened environmental protections and undermined democratic rights, he said.

NAFTA changed the rules, he said, by creating sweeping “investor protections that gave corporations an incredible amount of security.” For the first time in history, it allowed corporations to sue governments to recover investments they had lost through government action, but corporations can only sue governments of other NAFTA countries, not their own governments.

“Emboldened by these new investor protections and enticed by $5-a-day Mexican wages, corporations moved hundreds of thousands of jobs across the border,” Schlobohm said.

Corporations, he said, are using their new rights not just to protect themselves, but to go on the offensive against environmental regulations that cut into their profits.

“One corporate lawsuit under NAFTA already pressured Canada’s government into repealing a ban on MMT, a suspected carcinogen. Canada was also forced to pay MMT’s manufacturer $16 million.” Allowing corporations to sue nations for lost money is one of the most shocking and frightening results, he said.

But if the proposed new trade agreement, the FTAA, tentatively scheduled to be voted on by Congress in December 2005, were to be voted into law, things would be even scarier, the speaker assured the group.

“FTAA is NAFTA on steroids,” he said. It would include 34 countries, all of the Americas except Cuba, rather than NAFTA’s three. It could lock 34 nations into a corporate-dominated legal system that would be very difficult to reverse.

Corporate backers of the agreement, Schlobohm said, are trying to get FTAA passed by the end of 2005. The next big negotiation is set for November 2003, and there will be a “big, contentious debate involving thousands of people.” The only way ordinary people can have any influence on this kind of issue is to get organized, he said.

Acceptance of FTAA into law has the potential to privatize essential services such as water, education and health care, he said. It could expand investor rights already given to corporations by NAFTA into the area of public services and enforce a trade rule called “national treatment” that means that foreign companies must be treated at least as well as domestic companies. For example, if a state gave subsidies to a local company, it would have offer the same subsidy to foreign companies, or there would be unfair competition.

Trade representatives from 34 countries meet but there’s no seat at the table for the general public, the speaker said. The only way they’ll be able to implement their policies is to keep the public out, and they won’t release the text of their discussions so the public can scrutinize them.

The speaker said it’s a lesson for social movements. “We can’t rest on our laurels.”

Schlobohm may be reached at 946-4478.

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