Free trade or slave trade? How the EU's free trade agreements in Colombia and Peru reward human rights abuses, destroy livelihoods, promote land grabbing and strip governments of their sovereignty to regulate capital flows.
Boris Kagarlitsky, Dr. Chaohua Wang, Research Scholar in Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
21 January 2011
Multi-media
The economic elites are turning to a neoliberal Keynesianism to save the crisis of capitalism, which is doomed to fail because it does not address its root causes.
The flawed neoliberal notion behind India's hosting of the Commonwealth Games, that 'development' starts with attracting foreign capital investment - has brought only corruption and the destruction of communities to Dehli.
The neoliberal FTAs pursued by the EU with Colombia and Peru threaten to exacerbate human rights abuses - which include killings of trade unionists, forced expropriations of indigenous people from land, and environmental destruction - for the sake of corporate profit.
The language contained in agreements being negotiated by the EU through the WTO with their southern counterparts often deliberately diguises real political goals, obscuring the negative economic implications for those countries of the neoliberal agenda.
Why the EU's so-called "Economic Partnership Agreements" and free trade policies will have exactly the opposite effect of development on Least Developed Countries' economies.
Despite repeated democratic rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Commission pushed ahead with it via the EU Constitution via a private, technocratic and non-democratic process. Susan discussed the treaty and its implications in a workshop at the EA4 summit in Madrid, 15 May 2010.
"The banks are ours!" Public money was used to bail out the banks, and now they are lending back to the public at interest, while governments ignore the social and environmental crises that confront society. It is time to demand real solutions that will work not only for the sake of the economy but for the lives and conditions of people on whom it depends.
Programme and background to Peoples' Tribunal on "Neoliberal Policies and European Transnational Corporations (TNCs) in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
Call to all the social networks and organisations, trades unions, political forces and civil society movements to join the Peoples' Alternative Summit in defense of peoples' sovereignty, human rights, participatory democracy, labour rights, the rights of women and indigenous peoples, social justice, the defense of the environment in the face of climate change, and the establishment of peace.
