A couple of days ago, I wondered in Flotsam and Jetsam whether the Central American Free Trade Agreement was on the rocks. Today, Elizabeth Becker of The New York Times writes that, “Social Security is not the administration’s only economic initiative that is in trouble in Congress.

The current centerpiece of President Bush’s trade agenda, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is facing unusually united Democratic opposition as well as serious problems in overcoming well-entrenched special interest groups like sugar producers and much of the textile industry.”

The problem with Becker’s piece is that it fails, as is fairly common within the MSM (Main Stream Media, for those not up on the Internet lingo and epithets) to question the very premise of so-called “free trade.” My own mantra for a number of years is that the actual words “free trade” are a bad frame for us to use because (a) who is against something that’s free? and (b) who’s against the idea of trading? My own view is that we should use the term “corporate trade” because that”s the more accurate description of what these deals are: they define the rules of engagement for corporate investment, and leave labor rights (or frankly, any citizen rights) as after-thoughts.

As my good friend Mark Levinson, chief economist for UNITE-HERE, told the Senate Finance Committee a few weeks ago:

These rules make large corporations more mobile, and, at the same time, less accountable to local communities and governments. They dramatically shift the balance of power away from democratically elected governments and towards private companies. They also increase the bargaining power of employers vis-a -vis their own workers. While companies gain powerful new rights, the basic human rights of workers are largely unprotected. As a result, wealthy and mobile companies are able to pit workers against one another in a desperate race to the bottom in wages and working conditions.

More important, Mark does a beautiful job of showing what a liar Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez is—or, at best, how Gutierrez is grossly misleading the public. Gutierrez says in the Times piece that “I’ve been associated with Mexico for almost four decades and Mexico is better than it has ever been. It now has its lowest inflation rate, and its growth last year was 4.5 percent.”

That statement has almost nothing to do with the reality of average Mexicans. As Mark pointed out in his testimony:

Real wages in Mexico today are actually lower than they were when NAFTA began. The poverty rate today is higher than before NAFTA began, particularly in rural areas. More than a million small farmers in Mexico have lost their land to floods of agricultural imports and become economic refugees. They are forced to seek work in factories along the border zones or in the U.S.. Undocumented immigration from Mexico to the U.S. has continued to increase under NAFTA. The most basic rights of these migrant workers are systematically violated in the U.S., resulting in regular abuse and exploitation in industries ranging from meatpacking to landscaping, from agriculture to construction.

The AFL-CIO has good material on CAFTA on its website. Maybe this CAFTA sucker is a goner.