THE RECORD
November 06, 2002

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

At the end of my last column I asked the simple question of whether anybody knows of any benefits the NAFTA may have brought to Canada, or knows of anybody who may have benefited. Over the years I have asked this many times, often on professional economist forums, without ever having received a single constructive reply, because there aren't any. There are no such benefits, except in the imagination of PR hacks writing in our daily papers. Even professional economists can only cite some employment and so called "growth" and GDP figures, which are totally irrelevant to the subject. They can't show that a single net job may have been created by free trade with any country.

It makes absolutely no difference how many people are employed in export industries to the USA, without also listing the job loss figures caused by NAFTA, how many people have lost their homes, how many young people have lost their educational opportunities? No such figures exist, or if the governments and Statistics Canada have any they are keeping them under cover to permit the corporate media to mislead the public with claims about what the great benefits free trade has brought to this country. It doesn't seem to sink into their heads that to talk of benefits they must be balanced against the liabilities, or else the picture they paint becomes fraudulent. As, indeed, it is the biggest fraud in the history of this country and of Earth.

In my last columns on this subject I mentioned the glowing terms the CD Howe Institute's Daniel Swanen described the benefits of the original free trade agreement, without mentioning the liabilities. For example, he made a big deal of the growth in machinery exports to the USA. That was the time when literally thousands of Canadian companies also moved south to the USA and to the cesspool of filth and corruption of the Mexican Maquiladores in a strip of land on the Mexican side of the border with the USA, set up in 1965 to produce labour intensive products under preferential, corporate friendly taxation, environmental and labour conditions.

I called Statistics Canada at the time and asked if they knew how many companies had moved to the USA and Mexico? No they didn't keep any records. How many engineers, scientists and other professionals emigrated under the FTA and NAFTA rules? They didn't know. Were there any figures to show the difference between machinery produced for export in Canada and the machinery taken out by emigrating companies? They didn't know. Were the machinery export figures covering only Canadian made products, or have they included machinery imported into Canada, then exported to the USA? They didn't keep separate figures. This means that imported machinery made in Taiwan or Poland, then exported were classified as Canadian exports, raising the GDP. This also meant that the figures published over the years are totally worthless, as is the ideology and economic theory fabricating them.

The much touted "growth" and "productivity" figures of neoclassical economists are just as fraudulent as the above mentioned figures of machinery exports. The Gross Domestic Product, that used to be Gross National Product before our leaders invented so called "borderless globalization" is a worthless propaganda concept the practitioners should be jailed for.
Everything goes onto the GDP, nothing comes off. The rebuilding of towns after major natural disasters, like earthquakes and floods, makes the GDP jump to the clouds, without any deduction of the damage to people and the infrastructure. If Vancouver and Victoria were wiped off by earthquakes, with thousands of lives lost, it would be reported as "growth."

The more accidents we have the higher the GDP on account of the repair and privatized medical costs. We old age pensioners are a drag on the GDP until we die, when our funeral costs give it a jolt. So, as we can also see with the policies our present BC government, the sooner we old folks kick the bucket, the higher the GDP.

The so called "productivity" is another nonsense as it demands the lowest wages paid against the highest sale prices of the product, without any consideration, or deductions on how those figures are reached. The most productive companies are resource extractors that use huge machinery with hardly any human labour. The depletion and suffering caused count for nothing

Then we come to the concept of so called "free enterprise", which in reality should be called private enterprise. The word "free" is used only to permit total lawlessness by the practitioners in search of profit grab at any cost.

A thousand hunters combing the woods for game are private, or if you like, free enterprisers. The majority abide by the laws. But if they organize into fighting units and use their guns to force their will on society, they no longer are enterprisers of any sort, but a mercenary army, or bandits. As are many multinationals operating around the world, engaged in oppressive murder campaigns against indigenous populations.

I find it incomprehensible that while our governments and political parties are so red hot on the examination of prospective immigrants, they are welcoming corporations with long strings of convictions all over the globe for the breaking of laws to the mass killings of people. Corporations like Union Carbide whose carelessness killed thousands in Bhopal, India.

Now, we have the plans of big business to take over our schools under the coming GATS agreement so they can take huge profits out of the country, as predicted by Merrill Lynch, and brainwash children into the concept of permanent war, now disguised as "global competition."

Copyright (c) 2002, West's International