Marx on Free Trade

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Tue Sep 28 20:55:38 PDT 1999


I recently heard a Canadian international trade lawyer state that NAFTA [specifically, chapter 11] and the GATS 2000 project of the WTO spells the death of their health care system via litigation ad nauseum.

As for the claim that National courts don't enforce Nafta, what are all those lawsuits [chapters 6, 7, 11 below] doing in US and Canadian courts?

http://www-tech.mit.edu/Bulletins/nafta.html

These treaties are litigatory boondoggles for trade lawyers; nothing like expanding market opportunities in rent seeking, what with zero-sum games in oligopolistic markets becoming increasingly likely and the possibility of stagflation always around the corner.

The core problem isn't sovereignty; it's the transcendence of democratic accountability and representation and the balance of interests tests that have sustained federalist approaches to economic governance that is at issue with these new regional and global economic "constitutions".

BTW it's state and local governments that really get the shaft with these agreements.

See volume 31 number 3 Cornell International Law Journal: "Sovereignty by Subtraction: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment" by Robert Stumberg.

Ian



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