Word: ftaa
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...Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), an initiative to expand North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere (with the exception of Cuba), brought thousands of protesters to Miami this past week, as well as a delegation of Harvard students sent by the Institute of Politics to observe the action. Media mogul Conrad Black has labeled activists who resist trade liberalization “the political equivalent of football hooligans.” He maintains that, “They are incapable of coherent articulation and they should be dispelled with as little force...
...Black’s universe of compassionate conservatism, a kinder, gentler pepper spray or water cannon might be in order. The benefits of FTAA should be so obvious that only social “misfits” and “foreign carriers of the anti-American lunacy” are apt to challenge its triumph. This week’s issue of U.S. News & World Report noted that security police had apparently taken such advice to heart and were indeed searching for less violent techniques to deal with incipient anti-FTAA unrest; but one Miami shop clerk claimed...
Earlier in this month, several female workers from Honduras came to Harvard and explained to students their conviction that FTAA would likely worsen conditions in their country’s maquiladoras. Making clothes for the firm of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs (a.k.a. P. Diddy), Lydda Eli Gonzalez told of poverty wages, long overtime hours, firings for pregnancy and water supplies found to be contaminated with stomach-churning levels of fecal matter. For these denizens of the sweatshops, so-called free trade is not fair trade. Designed to strengthen the freedom of capital, FTAA brings...
There is also concern about the safety of the protesters. Police actions have injured hundreds at past trade protests, including dozens with rubber bullets outside the last regional FTAA summit in Quebec City...
Other students added that what some are already calling the “Battle of Miami” may do the same for the FTAA...