USMCA IS ANOTHER CORPORATE POWER GRAB

[popularresistance.org]

(Corporate trade deals like USMCA are modern colonialism. They uphold and refine the extractive economy that goes hand in hand with the militarization of indigenous, and black and brown communities. The Zapatistas who rose in resistance to NAFTA in 1994 said that NAFTA would be a death sentence for indigenous communities in the Americas. This has been true for so many. Trump’s new NAFTA has no objectives that seek to guarantee and enforce the rights of indigenous peoples nor does it seek reparations or decolonization which need to be prioritized in any new trade deal.)

(Corporate trade destroys food and seed sovereignty. NAFTA favored agro-chemical corporations at the expense of small and indigenous farmers, local food systems, and consumers. In the US, 250,000 small and medium scale family farms went out of business. In Mexico, over two million farmers left agriculture because of NAFTA, mostly because agricultural export dumping, or flooding Mexican markets with corn, wheat, and rice from the US at below the cost of production. Small farmers simply could not compete. The USMCA ensures the continuation of this practice, one of the main causes of Mexican migration and refugees to the US.)

Manufactured problems that we end up paying for. Small to medium farming on both sides of the border can't survive, creating migration we tend to spend on walls and border security to fight against. Then there's all that in subsidies to keep certain other farmers afloat because of price manipulation. Between the border and Russiagate issue, our legislature and media has been tied up for over 2 years in these issues alone that could have been spending time on other issues of concern.

(Since NAFTA, ISDS has been used by corporations to challenge government regulations that may curb their profits. In ISDS court rulings, tax-payers have paid billions of dollars–that should be going towards essential public services–to corporations for toxics bans, land-use rules, regulatory permits, water and timber policies and more. For instance, Ecuador was forced to pay $1.4 billion to Occidental Petroleum “after the government terminated an oil concession due to the U.S. oil corporation’s breach of the contract and Ecuadorian law.)