CAFTA: an outsourcing and foreign aid pact.

According to a 75-page analysis published by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WATW), an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America union, the six nations of the "CAFTA region" compose "a tiny export market for high-tech goods," summarized the May 11 San Jose Mercury-News.

Taken together, the nations of the proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement--Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua--"accounted for just 1.4 percent of all U.S. information-technology exports in 2004." Pro-CAFTA information industry groups claim that the agreement would translate into a $75 million annual savings on export tariffs. However, notes the WATW report, that would "not even be a blip on the radar screen of the U.S. information-technology industry--much less the boon that would lead to increased U.S. high-tech employment levels."

Writing in the May 18 Washington Times, Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council pointed out that the CAFTA nations have an aggregate population approximately the size of "California and New Jersey combined" and a combined economic output "about the equivalent of New Haven, Connecticut."

"Anyone who believes opening trade with these impoverished mini-markets can boost growth in the $12 trillion U.S. economy must have bought an elevator pass in high school," Tonelson sardonically comments. The "CAFTA 6," he concludes, "aren't mainly markets for exports at all. They're sweatshops. And because they are too poor to create genuine two-way exchange, CAFTA isn't really a trade agreement at all. It's an outsourcing agreement."

This reality is implicitly acknowledged by many of the agreement's supporters, including President Bush, who used his May 14 radio address to extol CAFTA as a way to "help the new democracies in our hemisphere deliver better jobs and higher labor standards to their workers...." Which is to say, its chief supposed "benefit" would be to provide economic aid to the impoverished CAFTA region, rather than opening avenues of mutually beneficial trade between legitimate economic partners.

The most brazen defense of CAFTA as a form of disguised foreign aid came from Pentagon adviser Thomas RM. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map (a blueprint for decades of war to consolidate a global system administered by the UN and World Trade Organization). Passage of CAFTA is imperative, insists Barnett, because "we need to reward that region for moving from the civil wars and civil strife of the 1980s to something far more stable today. If you make that journey, you need to be rewarded, plain and simple. Because if we don't do it, others certainly will, and Latin America is our most-needed and all-important labor pool to in-source in the future."

To those not eager to "reward" Latin American nations by eviscerating our economy and "in-sourcing" their surplus low-wage labor, Barnett sneered: "Save it for someone ... who wears his racism on his made-in-white-America sleeve." Barnett could never be accused of such candid racism. His racism--a variation on the "White Man's Burden" notion of "civilizing" the globe through brute imperial force--is more subtle.