CAFTA Is a Bad Deal for the United States — June 2005

The United States signed CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) in May 2004 with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. On August 5, 2004, it was expanded to include the Dominican Republic (sometimes called DR-CAFTA).

U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick sent a letter to the governors of 50 states in September 2003 asking them to “sign on” to the government purchasing regulations contained in all the trade agreements he was then negotiating. More than half replied with a letter of consent. When the draft text of CAFTA was first made available on January 28, 2004, these states discovered they were bound by the 2,400-page agreement and were specifically listed in Chapter 9. A third have since rescinded their support of CAFTA.

The governors are hearing from their state legislators who are beginning to understand how these foreign-trade agreements usurp the states’ constitutional and legislative powers. These agreements take away state legislative authority over regulating utilities, controlling land use, and the granting of taxpayer-funded contracts.

CAFTA includes hundreds of pages of grants of vague authority to foreign tribunals. It wouldn’t take a very activist foreign judge to read his own interpretation into language that requires us to use the “least trade-restrictive” regulations and to change our laws so they are “no more burdensome than necessary.”

Meanwhile, states are feeling the heat from their constituents who discovered that some state agencies were paying out taxpayers’ money to corporations that outsource their labor, particularly programmers, engineers and call-center workers. Anti-outsourcing bills have been introduced in 35 states.

It is clear that CAFTA would prevent any state that has “signed on” from giving preference to in-state contractors or prohibiting tax dollars from going to contractors who outsource jobs. Any Central American country could file a complaint.

If President Bush is successful in starting private accounts in Social Security, WTO rules would require us to let foreign money managers and insurers bid to manage our retirement.

It’s not as though we weren’t warned. In line with the ancient axiom that coming events cast their shadows before them, the shadows of CAFTA’s harm have been visible for years from the anti-American decisions of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the 1995 World Trade Organization (WTO).

On February 6, 2001, a NAFTA international tribunal ordered the U.S. to open all U.S. roads to Mexican trucks. The ruling repeatedly referred to NAFTA as a “treaty,” although NAFTA was never submitted to the U.S. Senate as a treaty, but instead was rushed through Congress by a simple majority vote. Congress passed the WTO using the same treaty-ducking shenanigan.

Former Congressman (D-IL) and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Abner Mikva, who served on a NAFTA panel in 1998, said, “If Congress had any idea what they were voting on back then, they never would have passed NAFTA.”

Last fall, a World Trade Organization tribunal outlawed Utah’s ban on gambling, opening the door to millions of dollars in penalties against all states with anti-gambling regulations. Antigua and Barbuda had charged that Utah’s ban on gambling violates America’s obligation not to discriminate against foreigners providing “recreational services.”

The Geneva-based WTO’s tribunals have ruled against the United States in 24 cases. Some of those decisions were very costly to the U.S. economy.

The pro-CAFTA lobby tells us to relax and enjoy it because CAFTA is part of inevitable globalization. But trade agreements are not handed down from on high, and they are not free-market actions; they are man-made rules created by politicians and lobbyists to serve the interests of the corporations that pay the lobbying costs.

The pro-CAFTA lobby’s promise of big trade with the CAFTA countries is a pipe dream. How can anyone expect many customers for U.S. products from countries where half the people live below the poverty line?

El Salvador’s principal exports to the United States are its vicious MS-13 and other street gangs. Hundreds of these young criminals have brought an unprecedented level of murder, violence, mutilation, and brutality to cities all over our country. Nothing in CAFTA will stop this influx of illegal aliens from Central America.

The real purpose of CAFTA is to allow multinational corporations to exploit the abundance of cheap labor and the scarcity of taxes and safety regulations in CAFTA countries. The combined GDP of all six CAFTA countries is only about the same GDP as that of New Haven, Connecticut. Trade with CAFTA countries will consist of round-trip trade: products shipped there for assembly at low-wage plants and then back to the U.S. for sale in the U.S. in competition with companies that try to keep jobs for Americans.

As Bill Clinton did with NAFTA in 1993 and WTO in 1994, the Bush Administration pretends that CAFTA and FTAA are not treaties requiring ratification by the Senate. Instead, the Administration will submit legislation to implement CAFTA (and later FTAA) under the “fast-track” procedures of Trade Promotion Authority, which President Bush signed in 2002 after the House passed TPA by one vote in December 2001.

TPA allows only 60 days for Congress to approve or disapprove the CAFTA legislation: 45 days in which House and Senate Committees may hold a non-binding “non-markup” session (to air concerns but make no changes), followed by a final floor vote in each House 15 days later. There is no conference committee (because both Houses must pass the identical bill) and, of course, no Senate filibuster is permitted.

Congress should defeat CAFTA and reassert the primacy of our Constitution, which states that only Congress has the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” and that treaties are valid only if ratified by two-thirds of Senators.

Read our alert: JUST SAY NO TO CAFTA Tell Your Members of Congress to vote NO on CAFTA!

Europe’s Warning to America 
The European Union (EU) should be a warning to America because global-governance and open-borders advocates in the United States look upon the EU as a model for using trade agreements to morph the United States into continental integration with the entire Western Hemisphere. Mexico’s President Vicente Fox made it clear in a 2002 address in Europe that this means hemispheric open borders that allow the free movement of money, goods, services, and people:

“Eventually our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes [such as] the future prosperity of North America, and the movement of capital, goods, services, and persons.”

NAFTA came first, under which a foreign tribunal was able to override U.S. laws and give Mexican trucks access to all our highways. The next step is CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement), the plan to integrate our prosperous economy with the poverty of Central America.

Then will come FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) which, according to the Quebec Declaration signed by President Bush in 2001, will bring about economic and political “hemispheric integration.”

So, let’s take a closer look at the EU. It was not birthed democratically. It was formed by the elites of the several nations without the informed consent of the people, and its entire structure is institutionally undemocratic. The citizens of most countries never had a chance to vote.

When the people were allowed to vote in France and the Netherlands, the new EU Constitution was soundly rejected, but they are still stuck with the European Union superstructure which the politicians already imposed on them.

The politicians and bureaucrats who dream of world government, or at least continental government, to be run by a commission of technocrats who think they are wiser than ordinary people, started with the Common Market and then morphed it into the European Union (EU), which is run by the bureaucrats whom Margaret Thatcher labeled the paper-pushers in Brussels, Belgium. The sovereignty and self-government of nation-states were bypassed in a series of very undemocratic, deceptive maneuvers.

The EU Council of Ministers in Brussels now has effective control of all areas of commerce, industry, social and labor policy, the environment, agriculture, fish, and foreign trade. The EU nations are expected to obey the Brussels bureaucrats or face unlimited fines imposed by the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which is not a court of law as we understand it. It is an agency of EU bureaucrats who are free to indulge in imaginative judicial activism to implement “the ever closer union of the peoples of Europe.”

The EU makes laws in the labyrinths of the unelected bureaucracy. The Commission has the monopoly to propose all new laws which are then negotiated in secret by the shadowy Committee of Permanent Representatives, and the Council of Ministers makes the final decisions by secret vote. The parliaments of the member states are excluded from the process except to rubber-stamp EU decisions after they are made, and national parliaments are not allowed to know how their country’s representatives voted in Brussels.

Ask yourself: wouldn’t you think we had lost our right of self-government if Congress took its votes in secret and we couldn’t find out how our representatives voted?

The EU is a top-down enforced togetherness of different nationalities, with different cultures and languages, many of whom don’t like each other. That’s a prescription for conflict, not peace. The European nations’ loss of sovereignty to the EU should be a warning. We cannot let NAFTA-CAFTA-FTAA take us down the road of Western Hemisphere economic-political integration in the European model. Americans who want to retain American sovereignty should speak up now.

Mexican Guide Book for Illegal Aliens

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The Mexican Government printed and distributed millions of copies of a comic book instructing people in Spanish how to enter the U.S. illegally and, if caught, how to claim the rights of American citizens! On this page are exact reproductions of three pages from this guide book. Illegal entry over our southern border is the same route used by the vicious Salvadoran gangs and by OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) who enter to commit crimes against Americans. Millions of illegal aliens are not only a threat to our safety, but are a burden to U.S. taxpayers who must pay for their emergency health care, their diseases, schooling for their children, and incarceration for the crimes they commit.

It is our government’s job to protect us from this invasion.

But Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) have teamed up to make the problem worse. They have introduced a bill to give the illegal aliens in the United States permanent residency and put them on the track to full citizenship. The bill would also admit 400,000 new foreign workers every year and put them on the track to full citizenship.

We must defeat Kennedy-McCain Amnesty!

Alien Diseases Threaten Us All 
When immigrants enter our country legally, they must show proof that they are free from communicable diseases and drug addiction. But nobody is giving a health exam to the 4,000 illegal aliens a day who sneak across our borders, including OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) from the Middle East.

The U.S. has always been practically free of Leprosy, that fearful disfiguring disease known since Biblical days. Suddenly, 7,000 cases of leprosy have been diagnosed, especially in the northeastern states, brought in by illegal aliens from India, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Mexico.

The Centers for Disease Control has announced that the first American victims of Chagas disease have died. Chagas disease is caused by a parasite (T. cruzi) that is spread when a “kissing bug” bites a human and defecates while it feeds. The feces contain the parasite, which can enter the human when the bitten person rubs or scratches the bug bite. One can also contract it by eating uncooked food contaminated with infective feces of “kissing bugs.” Chronic Chagas infections can lead to various neurological disorders including dementia, obstruction of the colon and esophagus, and damage to the heart muscle. There is no effective cure, and up to 40% die when their hearts or intestines explode.

Unknown in the United States until recently, the appearance of Chagas in the U.S. was traced to a Central American immigrant. Health officials estimate as many as 100,000 Latin American residents in the U.S. may carry the parasite. More than 16 million people are said to be infected with the parasite in Central and South America.

Medical attorney Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., J.D., has exposed many of the health threats and costs of the diseases brought in by illegal aliens. She is president of Medical Equity Inc., a national medical law consultancy since 1980.

Tuberculosis had virtually disappeared from the United States, thanks to our excellent hygiene and modern medications. A new TB called Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB), until recently endemic only to Mexico, is expanding rapidly in our country as each alien infects 10 to 30 others.

The Centers for Disease Control ascribes 50% of all new TB cases to “foreign born” persons, with 66% of those coming from Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam. The Queens, New York health department attributed 81% of new TB cases in 2001 to aliens, and other TB outbreaks have occurred in Minnesota, Maine and Florida. TB suddenly had a 17% increase in Virginia in 2002, and TB in Prince William County rose 188%. Public health officials traced this rise to illegal aliens from Mexico.

Dengue Fever, another very rare disease, recently had a virulent outbreak in a Texas county on our southern border.

West Nile Virus was unheard of in the United States prior to 1998. Brought to our country from Africa, this mosquito-borne disease now infects tens of thousands of people in 21 states, and many have died.

Malaria had been obliterated from the U.S., but is now reemerging in Texas. Since 1991, the U.S. hasn’t had a case of a native-born American getting Polio (except from the oral polio vaccine) but aliens are bringing back polio, too.

E-coli intestinal parasites are widespread in Latin America and are now coming into the United States. A restaurant worker in Pennsylvania exposed 3,000 people to Hepatitis A, and two died.

Over 50% of Hepatitis B cases in the U.S. are found among Asian-Americans. Yet, nearly all American newborns are inoculated with the Hepatitis B vaccine, subjecting low-risk babies to possibly dangerous side effects.

Think about these foreign diseases when you knock on the door of any of the dozens of hospitals that have closed because they can’t cover the costs of these non-paying illegal patients.

In Los Angeles County alone, 10 trauma centers and 18 emergency rooms have closed. Arizona’s Cochise County Health Department spends 30% of its annual budget on uncompensated care of illegal aliens.

Think about the entry into our country of these deadly and expensive time-bomb diseases every time you breathe the air in public places or are attacked by mosquitoes in your backyard. Think about this every time you pay the income and property taxes you are forced to pay because of Congress’s unfunded mandate (EMTALA, Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) that all hospitals treat all illegal aliens who show up at the Emergency Room. Think about these costs when you find the maternity wards filled by illegal pregnant women giving birth to “anchor babies” who are granted instant U.S. citizenship plus generous welfare benefits for the newborn and the whole illegal family.

Then ask your two Senators and Representatives why they don’t protect us from the diseases of illegal aliens?