Democracy Sold Out - CAFTA Approved by Pork and a Hill of Beans; Razor Thin Vote Seals Fate Against More Expansion of NAFTA

Published on Thursday, July 28, 2005 by http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0728-20.htm
And Friday, July 29, 2005 at http://www.alternet.org/story/23788/

At 12:03 am on July 28th, the House of Representatives approved the Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA. CAFTA, which would expand NAFTA to Central America and the Dominican Republic, would devastate farmers, privatize essential public services, and accelerate the race to the bottom on wages in the US and all over Central America.

At the end of the allotted 15 minutes of voting time the count was 180 to 175 against CAFTA, so the Republican leadership kept the vote open over an hour, in order to bully legislators into approving the bill. In the final tally, which was 217 to 215, a full 15 Democrats voted in favor of big business by supporting CAFTA, while 25 Republicans defied the Bush Administration and voted against it. Democrats deserving of punishment include Representatives Bean (D-IL), Cooper (D-TN), Dicks (D-WA), Cuellar (D-WA), Hinojosa (D-TX), Jefferson (D-LA), Matheson (D-UT), Meeks (D-NY), Moore (D-KS), Moran (D-VA), Ortiz (D-TX), Skelton (D-MO), Snyder (D-AR), Tanner (D-TN), and Towns (D-NY). The full roll call vote is available at http://clerk.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.asp?year=2005&rollnumber=443.

One of the two Republicans who refrained from voting, Charles Taylor, R-N.C., is now saying that he voted against CAFTA, and the clerk failed to record his vote. The other one had a much better excuse -- a spokesman for Jo Ann Davis, R-Va, said she 'would have voted against CAFTA but was on her way to her district to attend a Boy Scout Jamboree event.' The event was canceled because of bad weather.

Yet stiff criticism also goes to the Democrats who could have prevented handing Bush a win on a silver platter by sticking to labor and their environment rather than corporate interests, particularly New York Representatives Greg Meeks and Ed Towns, members with safe seats.

It seems that some Representatives have not reviewed the record of the massive failure of NAFTA, the agreement that cost a million US jobs and increased poverty in Mexico. NAFTA also caused the loss of 38,000 US family farms, while pushing 1.5 million Mexican farmers off their land. Yet others, like Hilda Solis (D-CA), the only Representative from Nicaragua, gave a passionate and compelling argument against CAFTA.

CAFTA was approved, and that will be the bottom line for communities in Central America and the US who will face years of decreasing living standards, falling wages, eroding environmental protection, and losing family farms because of CAFTA - not to mention the 275,000 HIV positive Central Americans who will be cut off from life-saving generic medicines because of the extremist patent monopolies embodied in the treaty.

In tonight