The 'Other Americans' Say NO to FTAA!

This piece comes from CBS Marketwatch a Dow Jones Co. aligned with the 'business community'(code phrase: Bush sycophant)

Note: Access to source article may require registration, or simply a copy and paste into Google(that works, too)

Okay. Without further ado:

Hopes of uniting the hemisphere from Canada to Chile within a common free trade zone were stalled until further notice as the Americas Summit wrapped up Saturday without even a blueprint for advancing the proposal.

President George Bush attended the two-day summit in Mar Del Plata, Argentina hoping to burnish relations between the United States and the region, as well as inject new vigor into the decade-old proposal to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

But the resort area just south of Buenos Aires quickly became a magnet for anti-U.S. demonstrators led by Venezuela's populist leader Hugo Chavez and became the scene of fiery violence as some protestors torched stores and battled with riot police.

Chavez, who has repeatedly accused Bush of wanting to invade his oil-rich nation, triumphantly gathered with local icons, such as famed soccer player Diego Maradona, and declared the deal dead at a peacefully stadium rally that attracted more than 20,000 protestors.

"Every one of us has brought a shovel, because Mar del Plata is going to be the tomb of F.T.A.A.," Mr. Chavez told a crowd carrying banners calling Bush a "fascist," "child-killer" and "genocidal-beast," the New York Times reported.

"F.T.A.A. is dead, and we, the people of the Americans, are the ones who buried it."

Chavez believes Latin American and Caribbean nations should band together and reject U.S. style capitalism, instead adopting more socialist inspired ideals.

Whether or not Chavez is paranoid should certainly be open to reasoned debate, but what is beyond debate is that the US will allow capitalism without democracy, but is not openly fond of democracy without capitalism. Indeed, a close look at US trade policy shows the second option to be intolerable.

Even I don't think that Bush deserves the epithets cast his way. Not ALL of them anyway.

As I noted in an earlier post, I'm not going to address all the negative aspects of neo-liberal trade policies. In fact, I'm not going to address any of them without a proper exegesis. So there!

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For a much fuller view of the FTAA breakdown - other than Chavez is the root of all evil - see News A La Mexicana