Campaign Against Foreign Control Of Aotearoa | Tuesday, 23 September 2008
US Free Trade Agreement A Poisoned Chalice For NZ
Chief Reporter
For a succinct, detailed critique of that original proposal, go to http://nznotforsale.wordpress.com/danger-ahead/ on the New Zealand Not For Sale Website.
But for this to suddenly morph into a fullblown Free Trade Agreement with the US is catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. We say this not because we are "anti-American". All such FTAs -- such as with China, or the existing P4 partners, for instance -- pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of "xenophobia" but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.
So it's a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the current trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).
A full blown US FTA will:
- Remove any remaining "restrictions" on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ's (purely token) oversight regime as "discriminating" against US transnational corporations
- push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;
- make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;
- attack our GE controls and food labelling,
- weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.
Both Labour and National myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of "free trade". It's actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.
