CAFTA: Democracy Sold Out

At 12:03 a.m. on July 28, the House of Representatives approved CAFTA, the Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement.

The bill, which would expand NAFTA to Central America and the Dominican Republic, would devastate farmers, privatize essential public services, and accelerate the race to the bottom on wages in the U.S. and all over Central America.

At the end of the allotted 15 minutes of voting time, the count was 180 to 175 against CAFTA, so the Republican leadership kept the vote open for over an hour, in order to bully legislators into approving the bill. In the final tally, which was 217 to 215, a full 15 Democrats voted in favor of big business by supporting CAFTA, while 25 Republicans defied the Bush Administration and voted against it. The full roll call vote is available here.

One of the two Republicans who refrained from voting, Charles Taylor, R-N.C., is now saying that he voted against CAFTA, and the clerk failed to record his vote. The other one had a much better excuse -- a spokesman for Jo Ann Davis, R-Va, said she "would have voted against CAFTA but was on her way to her district to attend a Boy Scout Jamboree event." The event was canceled because of bad weather.

Yet stiff criticism also goes to the Democrats, who could have prevented handing Bush a win on a silver platter by sticking to labor and their environment rather than corporate interests, particularly New York Representatives Greg Meeks and Ed Towns, members with safe seats.

It seems that some Representatives have not reviewed the record of the massive failure of NAFTA, the agreement that cost a million U.S. jobs and increased poverty in Mexico. NAFTA also caused the loss of 38,000 U.S. family farms, while pushing 1.5 million Mexican farmers off their land. Still, others, like Hilda Solis, D-Calif. -- the only Representative from Nicaragua -- gave passionate and compelling arguments against CAFTA.

CAFTA was approved. That will be the bottom line for communities in Central America and the U.S. that now face years of falling living standards and wages, erosion of environmental protection, and the loss of family farms because of CAFTA. There are also the 275,000 HIV-positive Central Americans who will be cut off from life-saving generic medicines because of the patent monopolies embedded in the treaty.

Once again, the people of the US -- and the Democratic Party -- lost an opportunity to deliver a crushing blow to the Bush Administration. Yet House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., predicted that Bush's win on CAFTA "will be a Pyrrhic victory for him, because we will take our message to the American people that we are the ones looking out for them."

Twisting Arms Until They Break into a Thousand Pieces

Since CAFTA was so damaging to American workers, the environment, and Central Americans, it wasn't able to pass on its own merits. CAFTA's passage was bought by an outrageous amount of pork-barrel politics and fake side deals. Earlier this month, Republican leaders -- in no secret maneuver -- casually linked transportation and energy bill giveaways to support for CAFTA.

A report issued earlier this month by Public Citizen demonstrated that 89 percent of side deals negotiated to gain votes for previous trade deals have been broken. The side deals on sugar, labor, and textiles have all been exposed as band-aids that hardly cover the festering wounds of job loss that CAFTA will cause. And the China-punishing legislation hastily approved to buy another couple of votes was shown by the AFL-CIO to contain fewer protections for American jobs that other China legislation already in committee.

Unpacking the Rhetoric

A central tenet of Republican arguments is a projected theory that free trade delivers economic prosperity, ergo CAFTA will deliver development. Had the situation not been so tragic, it would have been comical to see Republicans repeatedly claim that CAFTA would help poor Central American countries develop thanks to increased access to U.S. markets. The problem with the theory is the results of the theory when applied.