Someone please educate me

[Catch22Dem]

I want to understand NAFTA but my research just makes my head spin. Can someone give me some easy to digest particulars? This issue seems to cross party lines. Also, let's keep this on the down-low because in my public life, I pretend to know everything. :)

[laura888]

1. kick!

I would like to know too!

[im4edwards]

2. to REALLY simplify it

think of it as Canada and Mexico as just being two more states in terms of business dealings only the taxes go to their own governments and not ours and they are not bound to EPA or OSHA et al regulation.

Hope that helps.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

3. i could use a NAFTA for Dummies book myself

[ElsewheresDaughter]

4. try here...type "NAFTA" in the search window

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=378

NAFTA & FTAA: Who Benefits?

Seventy-five percent of Mexico's population lives in poverty today, compared with 49 percent in 1981, before Mexico underwent reforms that paved the way for NAFTA-the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The number of Mexicans living in severe poverty (living on less than $2 a day) has grown by four million since NAFTA began in 1994.

NAFTA has generated booming industrial development but little investment in the environment. As a result, environmental pollution and related public health problems have increased on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

In the first four years of NAFTA, 15 wood product companies, including International Paper and Boisie Cascade, set up shop in Mexico, cutting some of North America's largest intact forests.

Hundreds of thousands of US jobs have shifted to Mexico under NAFTA. 260,000 U.S. workers have qualified for a special NAFTA retraining program. Especially hard hit are the apparel and electronics industries, major employers of women and people of color.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), currently being negotiated by 34 countries, is intended by its architects to be the most far-reaching trade agreement in history.

Although it is based on the model of NAFTA, the FTAA goes far beyond it in scope and power, potentially granting unequalled new rights to corporations to compete for and even challenge publicly funded government services, including health care, education, social security, culture and environmental protection.

Trading Democracy
In what one attorney called ''an end-run around the Constitution,'' corporations are using a little-known provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to challenge public laws, regulations and jury verdicts not only in the United States, but in Canada and Mexico as well. And they are arguing those cases not in courts of law, but before secret trade tribunals.