Today, as people prepare to take to the streets as part of hemisphere-wide opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the importance of these actions deserves some closer inspection....

This is NOT about some sort of nationalist defence of sovereignty. People have had it up to here with those sham democracies which were already riddled with corporate manipulation even before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came along.

After all, let’s face it. NAFTA did not really change the essence of things. It just revealed what was already there – corporate manipulation – and gave it freer expression... magnified it. The wealth of North America was already highly concentrated in the eighties; NAFTA distilled it further, allowing it to achieve an even higher proof. The FTAA will continue this relentless process.

At each stage, what these processes essentially do is to assault whatever vestiges of democracy may have escaped corporate predations at the national level. Any power remaining within the people’s reach is removed and then brokered, if necessary, by trade lawyers who are servants to a set of rules which put the first priority on property rights. Property rights over people rights. Here are some recent examples:

On March 11, 2002, one of NAFTA’s infamous ‘tribunals’ – the triads of trade lawyers mandated to mete out this ‘trade justice’ – decided that the confidentiality of documents used within NAFTA trumps Canada’s access-to-information laws.

On October 21, 2002, Canada was ordered to pay $8.23 Million to S.D. Myers to compensate the American company for “lost profits