But it has also functioned as a convenient battering ram for business to resist social regulation. Metalclad Corp., also based in the United States, filed suit in a Mexican state court demanding to be permitted to open a toxic waste dump. As a result, American companies that shift production to Mexico outrun hard-won labor and environmental protections in the United States. Business, in other words, is keen to harmonize property rights, but not labor, environmental, or consumer rights. Brazil, for example, takes a very different view of pharmaceutical patent protections than the United States.
Brazil treats life-saving drugs as social goods.
American pharmaceutical companies, not surprisingly, treat Brazilian policy as patent infringement. Beneath the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas and kindred arrangements lurks an intriguing new ideology. This ideology holds that corporations are really agents of the spread of democracy. I recently participated in a debate at Columbia University sponsored by the Reuters Foundation, on the health of democracy. One debater was Nancy Boswell, the managing director of a worldwide organization called Transparency International.