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Sample Letters to the Editor
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To the Editor:
Remember NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement)? Imagine it extending its powers (and its associated job loss, environmental degradation and human rights abuses) throughout all of the Americas.
Sound like a nightmare? Well, negotiations are currently underway to secure a new trade agreement for the entire Western Hemisphere. It is called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
The FTAA will extend NAFTA to 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere, further expanding the power of corporations and eroding environmental, labor, and human rights laws both locally and nationally.
The FTAA will grant multinational corporations even more rights then they already possess. It will take away people's and governmentsı ability to protect natural resources from privatization and impede their ability to ensure that local economic development is a priority when foreign corporations enter their country. The policies that are expected to be in the FTAA were already defeated once in the form of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998 and again at the Seattle Ministerial of the World Trade Organization in 1999.
The FTAA negotiations have been under way since 1994 and neither the US Congress nor the American public has seen a draft text yet. The public is being deliberately excluded from the negotiation process. However, the Americas Business Forum, a group of corporate leaders from around the Hemisphere, is invited to speak and give presentations at every FTAA meeting to raise concerns and recommendations. When the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers asked if they could establish an Americas Labor Forum to have a similar voice at the FTAA meetings, they were rejected.
The entire process of the FTAA is anti-democratic, because it excludes the voice of the public and will nullify national and local laws throughout the Western Hemisphere that protect human rights, labor and the environment. The FTAA must be stopped.
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