Letter to the Editor 3/6/09 #2

To the Editor, ‘ ‘ ‘ I am writing in response to Mark Kozlowski’s column, ‘Protectionism a… To the Editor, ‘ ‘ ‘ I am writing in response to Mark Kozlowski’s column, ‘Protectionism a road to economic ruin.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ The idea that we need to encourage ‘free trade’ and other global trade agreements like NAFTA is absolutely despicable. These trade agreements harm everyone except for the greedy transnational corporations. ‘ ‘ ‘ The so-called trade agreement requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores, new patent rules that raise medicine prices, limitations on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries, and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a ‘trade’ agreement is completely misleading. NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors an astonishing set of new rights and privileges that support relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care. ‘ ‘ ‘ Ironically, many of NAFTA’s most passionate supporters, like Al Gore, never read the entire 900-page agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term ‘free trade’ attached to it. Re-negotiating NAFTA is not protectionism, it’s striking down on corporate fascism. Jordan Romanus, philosophy and political science student