FTAA and a Challenge to the EU

Although the European Union has faced numerous obstacles in recent months to further integration, it still poses a potential economic and political threat to American global hegemony. It is imperative that the United States and the rest of North and South America rise to meet this challenge. The European Union has sought supranaionalistic political integration as well as economic integration. This led to substantial protests from far left and far right political constituencies on the European continent, while England still even holds out against full economic integration. The pursuit of this Customs Union-style integration should be a lesson to those of us in the United States and elsewhere in North and South America, as we examine the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. FTAA is a trade union, in contrast to the customs union of the EU. Trade unions maintain national political sovereignty as well as sovereignty over monetary policy, while having a unified position on trade barriers and subsidies.

The elimination of trade barriers and subsidies in all countries, coupled with each country being able to maintain its own monetary policy and political autonomy gains all of the benefits of EU brand customs unions without nearly as much of the domestic political backlash and integration woes. By not adopting a common currency, and rather continuing to allow flexible exchange rates between the member countries of the trade union, North and South America will not have to deal with the dilemma of maintaining a singular monetary policy for economies at quite different levels of development. The EU, for example, needs to maintain growth-oriented interest rates for the sluggish economies of Western Europe (Germany, France, Italy), while simultaneously needing to curb inflation in the booming economies of Eastern Europe. These sorts of inequity problems will not plague the FTAA, by contrast, for reasons mentioned above.

The greatest challenges to the FTAA are the US government's unwillingness to end agricultural subsidies and the presence of radical left-wing communist/socialist protests in countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uraguay. The United States, Canada, and Mexico can attest to the vast successes of NAFTA, and should push forward with other freedom-oriented countries in North and South America to ratify an agreement that will benefit everybody, and if the hold-out countries want to limit their economic growth potential, we should let them alone; they will be coming back in a few years when they have witnessed the effects of free trade in their neighboring countries.

Partisanship on Parade

Maybe it was the time change throwing me off, but it seemed like Chuck Schumer had begun his press conference to denounce Judge Alito before the President had finished his own announcement. I am honestly perplexed at how Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer can possibly believe that their rhetoric is not overheated. It seems that the Left (and, no doubt, the Right sometimes too) thinks that the hotter the rhetoric, the more likely they are to be believed. I imagine quite the opposite is true, or is at least coming to be true. The sky hasn't fallen. It's not likely to fall. Sure, we have some serious problems in this country (and globally) that we need to address, but the doomsayers of history generally end up being proven wrong, because right-minded people take action. This isn't to say that doomsayers have no place in the public discourse, because they do. The problem is when legitimate doomsaying cannot be distinguished from the boy who cried wolf. Schumer, for example, said that Alito is somebody who will divide the country, and that the President is being divisive by naming him to the court. Alito was confirmed 100-0 to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals; hardly seems divisive to me. Granted, Schumer wasn't in the Senate then, but Ted Kennedy was. How will Ted Kennedy answer for his vote in 1990? It seems hard to say that Alito is less qualified for the bench now than he was 15 years ago. Essentially Kennedy's position is untenable (not that such things have ever stopped him before) because at the foundation, his reasoning must be something like this: "Qualification for the bench is sufficient for confirmation when it is the Court of Appeals, but being qualified alone is not sufficient for confirmation to the Supreme Court." If the Supreme Court is to be truly independent, then it seems that qualifications are solely the factor in determining whether or not to confirm a nominee. I am not the first to remind people that Ginsburg and Breyer were both confirmed almost unanimously, in spite of their strong ideological differences with Republicans in the Senate at the time. Elections have consequences. I earnestly hope that Alito will be a measured jurist and not a Conservative activist. Activism of any flavor is antithetical to proper constitutional jurisprudence. However, undoing previous acts of activism does not itself constitute activism. I pray that Judge Alito, along with the rest of the court, can properly distinguish those two concepts.