According to the protestors:
What’s wrong with the FTAA?
• The FTAA allows corporations to bypass democratically adopted environmental or worker protection laws, increasing corporate power while endangering the lives of millions of people, disproportionately affecting women and people of color.
• The FTAA threatens to commodify our lives by turning over the control of our schools, electricity, water, and food to corporations whose only interest is more profit.
• The FTAA is being negotiated in secret. Initiated in 1994 by the 34 countries of North and South America (excluding Cuba), governments have included the business sector in FTAA talks every step of the way, but have kept the text of the treaty secret from regular people and their elected representatives. 50 members of the US House of Representatives have written to the Bush administration demanding that the text be released.
For more examples of what's wrong with the FTAA
Can the FTAA be stopped?
Since the system corporate globalization hurts nearly every sector of society, it paradoxically offers the possibility of uniting broad sectors into a mass movement capable of not only stopping the FTAA, but creating radical social change. The history of the international movement against globalization shows the challenges, but also the possibilities of globalizing human need, not corporate greed. By reclaiming control over our daily lives through community and mass action we can overcome. The movement for direct democracy has already begun!
STOP THE COMODIFICATION OF OUR LIVES!
Learn More about the FTAA
Resist the FTAA in Quebec City April 20-22
The leaders of the 34 countries hope to make substantive progress on the agreement at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec City from April 20-22. But thousands of people from all over the Americas - wisened to the hazards of corporate globalization - will be on the streets to make sure that doesn't happen. As in Seattle, Prague, Washington DC, London, Davos, and everywhere else that global capital has come together in the last few years, protesters will use direct action to resist the Summit and its corporate backers. It will be a resistance based on one No and many Yeses. No to corporate greed, violence, exploitation and irresponsibility. Yes to real democracy, human rights, peace and equity |
