Like NAFTA, Euro free trade threatens to enslave us

He was about as presidential as Kermit the Frog. But there was great wisdom in what this former candidate for the U.S. Presidency in 1992 said during the campaign.

Regarding what turned out to be NAFTA, Ross Perot predicted: “There will be a giant sucking sound going south.” That’s because Mexico has practically no standards for its workers, its environment or other even minimal benefits that must be counted by industry as labour costs in Canada and the U.S.

Parity would come, he predicted, only when Mexico’s $1-an-hour labour costs rise to, say, $6-an-hour and the U.S. and Canada’s drop to $6 an hour. So make that figure $10-$12 an hour in today’s prices and sometime around 2020 before this parity is achieved between our country with the current narco-state of Mexico and the emerging military-police-state of the U.S.

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Most Canadians opposed NAFTA, for obvious reasons. But it was forced on us because it was wanted by the (mostly foreign) corporate giants who bribe governments and politicians to gain unfair advantage for greater profits.

That’s why we heard the “giant sucking sound” in Ontario as our factories and jobs went down to Ciudad el Cheapo Trabajar Rapido or depressed parts of the U.S. south.

Free trade deals are negotiated in the dark and the European agreement takes up 2000 pages which can be seen only days before the vote is held.

That’s a tactic Stephen Harper uses on so-called “omnibus” bills that can contain all sorts of horrid and corrupt items too buried in text to locate on a short timeframe.

Harper, you may have noticed, prefers not to be doubted or disputed. He may have been elected by way fewer than half the Canadian voters, but he’s got the mandate or so he believes.

It’s a mysterious and I think utterly crooked European Free Trade deal that Steve has signed on your behalf.

He’s able to do that because it’s not just Tories who either think it’s a great idea or have been compromised.

As with NAFTA, which lets Americans and Mexicans impose their wills on Canadian government levels and industries, Euro-Trade will let any basket-case countries that are EEC members come here and push us around.

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It’s done on behalf of “globalization,” which is pronounced as if it’s unavoidable and non-toxic. In fact, globalization may be the worst thing that can happen to Canada. If you like NAFTA’s great sucking sound, just picture a bunch of European corporations demanding the right to own and sell back to you your city water, your sewer lines, your electricity, your hospitals, your you-name-it.

Mike Harris started that perfidious ball rolling by selling a Spanish corporation one of your highways and gave foreigners a right to cancel your car’s licence plate if you owe the Spanish corporation money.

See where this is headed?

We already have Nestle, another foreign corporation, selling us water it draws from Ontario at a massive mark up in plastic bottles that infuse it with toxicity in the form of bisphenol.

The Swiss company, which is monstrous in size and scope of its profitcentres, is allowed to pump, free, 265 million litres a year of our water to sell back to us at a massive markup. They think you have no right to water: click here

So the benefits of having foreign companies operating in Canada are hard to uncover, if there are any.

Sure, they’ll create some jobs for a few locals, often after extracting legal bribes from round-heeled provincial or federal officials who help finance the existence of a factory or other facility with loans or grants.

Companies that moved here years ago to make ketchup or automobiles because of our feeble dollar vis-à-vis the greenback are headed back south and, of course, east.

There is no such thing as charity from a corporation, especially a transnational one. Never. Even if they’re gifting all sorts or worthy causes, they’re doing it strictly for financial advantage.

It may be a public relations effort to aid sales, or it may be because of tax advantages that enure to them. It’s always in that lofty corporate mission to “enhance shareholder value.”

Villainy increases with size in the corporate world. The more profits, the better to bribe public officials and enact favourable legislation to insure the bottom line.

As a percentage of their earnings, transnational corporations pay less in taxes than a burger-flipper in one of their malnutrition joints. But “corporations are people, my friend,” as losing presidential hopeful George Romney pronounced about the corrupt privileges granted to corporations.

Barack Obama has done nothing to improve that. His gift to corporations in the insurance game by imposing unaffordable Obamacare against his people.

Plus there’s his warlike posture in aid of the many defence-related corporations by giving them new blood to shed, making Obama another octave of George W. Bush.

Same on this side of the 49th parallel where you can’t really tell the difference between Tories and Grits when it comes to bucking big business.

Harper’s European Free Trade deal is a secret. It’s done in the public darkness of government offices surrounded by lackies, lobbyists and corporate big-shots, defended by armed troops and police. If it’s such a good thing, why is it secret?

Of course that’s because it is a good thing for them, but it’s a horrid thing for the rest of us.

Canada is a nation blessed with everything short of swimmable beaches in the winter. We have energy resources that, if it weren’t for foreigner corporations busily  sucking it out and selling it abroad, we could pay such low prices for energy that our manufacturing industries would be booming.

We have water. (Well, Nestle has water here.)

We grow practically everything but bananas and mangoes. And we could likely do that, too, with our cheap energy.

There is very little that Canadians need to buy from foreigners. We used to have a lively garment industry. Now it’s moved to Bangladesh. We still could revive it.

And we don’t need to import cheap foreign labour to our shores because the big corporations want it. Let them pay Canadians living wages. There are a lot of fit, unemployed Canadians who would pick fruit and veggies for a decent wage.

There is an economic principle called “local advantage.”

It’s what globalization wipes out insofar as consumers are concerned. Sure, a Canadian region may have lots of apple trees, for example, but that doesn’t mean the folks who live there get any usual price break. They pay “market” prices, which include all the expenses of packing and shipping that don’t really apply to locals.

Globalization works like that.

It’s wrong.

It’s ruinous and it robs Canadians of our sovereignty.

Is that what “control-freak” Stephen Harper is hiding?