STOP CETA!

January 5, 2012

CETA: Stop negotiations immediately and scrap the deal!

Young Communist League demands a Charter of Youth Rights, not Corporate Rights

Shrouded in secrecy, the Harper Conservative government, the European Union, and major trans-national corporations recently concluded the final round of negotiations for the largest free-trade agreement in Canada’s history since NAFTA.

The Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is a over-arching Bill of Rights for big business – at the expense of all the non-corporate population, not least youth and students. The Agreement is now being ‘fine tuned’ by representatives of government and big business for release in Spring 2012.

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The clash for the cash

Download and read the full report in PDF here.

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The AFL-CIO and Colombia

by ALBERTO C. RUIZ

Ernesto Guevara “feels that in social and political matters the role of Latin America has been one of neglect. As an example of this, he remarked on one occasion, ‘Five thousand workers are shot down in the Bolivian highlands, and maybe there is one line in the New York papers, which mentions that there is labor unrest in Bolivia.’ He wonders if the United States so-called international labor unions would take an interest in the South American worker and if it might help to raise the living standards of the Latin Americans to a level which might come closer to that of the North Americans.”

–CIA biographical report on Che, 1958 (as reproduced in Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder).


Many of us have wondered the very same thing about “the so-called international labor unions” in the U.S. and whether they would take a real, sincere interest in the workers of Latin America. For some time, it has appeared that, for whatever its faults in other countries such as Venezuela, the AFL-CIO has taken a bona fide interest in the workers of Colombia. Specifically, it has seemed that the AFL-CIO has taken a good line in opposing the unprecedented anti-union violence in that country – “the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist” as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has opined each year for the past many years. The diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, however, show a more equivocal role.

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