Trade Area Agreements Damage Democracy

Everybody is aware of the effects of Trade Area policies like NAFTA and CAFTA.  They promise lower prices and prosperity, freedom and happiness, but deliver draconian policies and enforcement mechanisms that hurt workers, the environment, and democracy.  The latest maneuver in this bait and switch approach to trade, which some know as “NAFTA on steroids,” is called the TransPacific Free Trade Area proposal, or the TPFTA.

Moana Nui and Fair Trade Partnerships in the Pacific

Important travel and trade practices that have long formed extended exchange communities of Oceania will be the focus of the upcoming Moana Nui summit of Pacific Islanders to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii November 9, 10, and 11, 2011.

These practices are endangered by a proposed trade agreement comparable to NAFTA, but encompassing countries on the Pacific Rim rather than those in North America. The proposed agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), would have the same devastating impacts on local production networks, trading practices, and populations in the Pacific Rim, as NAFTA on jobs, farms, and other sectors in North America. The United States has drafted Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam into developing the TPP; the number of nations might increase as the conservative trade organization, Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), meets in Honolulu to attempt to finalize language for the TPP.

The topics and the content of the many preliminary discussions leading to the APEC meeting in Honolulu have been kept secret, thereby violating transparency protocols of democratic governments and U.S. President Obama’s explicit promise that the TPP discussions would usher in a new era of transparency in international trade agreement discussions.

Other Sovereignties

Subaltern populations achieve autonomy in many ways under globalization and the War on Terror. Their sites of autonomy rarely come to global public awareness, but when they do they are shaped by the terms under which they make sense to largely bourgeois, news-viewing and academic readers and viewers.  What other terms and logics might be useful for understanding subaltern autonomy?