CWA 1180 - Solidarity Works

The World is not for sale!
Police attack demonstators protesting "NAFTA on steroids"
July 2001

"The world is not for sale" is one of the chants that anti-globalization protesters have repeated as they have confronted government and business elites designing trade policies that enrich corporations and impoverish the rest of us. The most recent clash took place in April at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Some 50,000 people came to the Canadian city to let the 33 heads of state gather there know that the proposed "Free Trade Area of the Americas" (FTAA) that they were negotiating in secret would lower living standards in North and South America, decimate the public sector and further despoil the environment.

The peaceful message of demonstrators was met with 5,000 canisters of tear gas and a police offensive that made the "Battle of Seattle" at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting look tame by comparison. But government repression of the protests began even before the summit started. Authorities built a huge 2.3 mile chain-linked fence around the entire perimeter of the city center, shutting out protest altogether. The fence became the symbol of all that is wrong with the way these trade deals have been negotiated—in private, away from all democratic accountability, for the benefit of a few only. Government officials also cleared jail space before the summit started, and Quebec prosecutors were told to delay bail hearings in order to keep demonstrators off the streets. In the days before the summit people were kept from crossing the Canadian border.

In addition to the massive demonstrations in Quebec City, there were thousands of people who protested across North America, from Tijuana to Kansas City.

The proposed FTAA that governments are so eager to squash dissent over has been described as "NAFTA on steroids." Like NAFTA, it would allow corporations to have local and national laws overturned because they "interfere" with business activity, and it would force "market competition" into the public sector of local economies, leading to privatization and cuts in social service. When politicians talk about FTAA eliminating "barriers to trade," in other words, what the really mean is barriers to unfettered corporate greed.

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