Is it possible for a powerful corporation to threaten the national sovereignty of an underdeveloped country?
Not only is it possible, the history and foreign policy of the USA revolves around this principle exactly. Read Gen. Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” and Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” and you’ll understand that wars are always waged to promote corporate interests, and that heads of state who resist the US pressure to sell out their country’s resources are signing their own death warrant. All the presidents the US doesn’t like, like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Ahmadinejad, and even Saddam Hussein, are or were on the US’s s***t list because they fought for their country’s sovereignty and didn’t bow to pressure.
January 1, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s implementation. NAFTA promoters — including many of the world’s largest corporations — promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports. NAFTA opponents — including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups — argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards. Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment — never before had a merger of three nations with such different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas settin
