What is all of this fuss about free trade? Why are we having so many disruptions at the international trade meetings? The new trade agreements being promoted by our capitalist system are a continuing process. Our negotiators are continuously seeking a better deal for our multinational corporations. These corporations already have a head start in capturing control of the international Service sector (the Banks, insurance companies, the tourist industry, telecommunications, and brokerage houses). The demand that goes forth at trade negotiations is always to improve the edge these corporations already hold. So far, the results of these trade agreements have produced massive poverty in Latin America. Now the average American can see that it is also affecting his ability to sustain himself and his family.

What the average American doesn’t understand is that our government is protecting and acting on behalf of rich corporations that have no moral obligations to enrich society, foreign citizens, nor the majority of US citizens. As they say, the only responsibility they have is to affect the bottom line. Our political and economic institutions are now at the stage where it will be difficult to hide what is happening. We are creating billionaires and millionaires (in terms of the world population, a few) and billions of people in different stages of poverty.

We’ve got three years to stop the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It’s a trade deal that will bring 34 countries in this Hemisphere into a globalized market dominated by the US. For the poor it promises a dark night. For the wealthy it means a taste of utopia with capital’s increased ability to move unimpeded throughout the region.

Trade agreements bang away at democracy. They’re born out of secrecy and lopsided power relationships that favor corporations that dominate global trade. And with each new trade arrangement the dominant finds ways to slip in language that will allow them to move capital without any sense of social responsibility. And they do it with impunity. Not a bad deal for those who have. For those who don’t: it means terror.

Terror lurks behind some of the statistics: Latin America in 2001 received $85 billion in Foreign Direct Investment 11 % less than in 2000 and 22% less than in 1999. And Venezuela, a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration and transnationals, had 24% less investment. Standard and Poors, which has so much power over economies by its advisories to the investment world to move or withdraw money from a nation’s economy didn’t help Venezuela when it declared the oil-rich country an investment risk.

This violence has to do with a form of terrorism that few talk about: it robs the power of people to organize and defend economic rights that clash with interests of big corporations.

This trade arrangement that the Bush Administration needs to clinch by the year 2005 means impoverishment for most of the hemisphere’s poor. In 1990 Latin America had 160 million poor. Now the number surpasses 240 million.

The FTAA promises big profits for those who make their money in the Service Sector that comprises 80% of the GDP of our economy. Insurance companies, banks, telecommunications, tourism and brokerage firms end up as the beneficiaries. The FTAA is a trade deal crafted without you in mind.

Wealth accumulation takes place at its best in the Service Sector: it’s the soil that the 500 wealthiest people in the world till well. In 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became law, this sector made up 56% of our economy. Powerful transantionas behind NAFTA, the same ones behind FTAA, wanted to expand this sector into the global market where the service sector only comprised 20% of trade.

Powerful transnationals, since NAFTA, tried to come up with trade legislation that came down on the side of those who control the Service Sector. They wanted to insert it into the financial veins of the Third World. They met resistance. They tried to pass the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). It’s the treaty discussed in secret by OECD countries, and the twenty-four power economies nearly had a trade deal 95% complete. When civil society got wind of it through a leaked document put out on the internet public outrage prevented its passage. At the WTO in Seattle, brokerage firms, banks and telecommunications transnationals attempted to introduce another version of the MAI which 50,000 demonstrators made sure never passed. At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec, with the Bush Administration’s muscle, a strong Service Sector component made it into an initial draft of the FTAA which civil society never viewed until it was practically completed – leaving little room for imput. The same happened with NAFTA when labor had no say whatsoever in the final document.

The strong Service Sector insertion in the FTAA has consequences: it will exacerbate the already huge disparity between those who have and those who don’t. Access to services in education, health and water by the poor will become more difficult as the US-dominated treaty demands the privatization of everything with profit-potential behind it. It will destroy local economies. Powerful transnationals will stand on a par with local businesses and they’ll get away with having no responsibility to the local.

The Service Sector scotches job creation. It snubs labor in favor of capital. Speculative capital, money invested in stock, bonds and derivatives, moves around the world in lightening speed in search of investment opportunities. This bullish growth sector has no relationship to bread and butter issues: it’s about creating billionaires, millionaires and forcing most of the hemisphere’s people to live in poverty. Passage of the FTAA means that poor economies have little control over this “hot money” that stays in a country on an average of two weeks.

Trade legislation with little social responsibility behind it makes it almost impossible for countries to do any economic planning with the poor in mind. It benefits 280 thousand millionaires in Latin America, 180 thousand of them in Mexico and Brazil. Most money flows into the pockets of the 500 billionaires, who in 2001 controlled $1.2 trillion. In a year’s time they increased their wealth by $200 billion, more than all the money of the 46 poorest countries in the world together.

Argentina and Brazil offer painful illustrations as to who wins and who loses. You’ll hear lots about winners and losers in the upcoming debate on the FTAA. The dominant wants to tell us its all part of doing business. Tell that to the Argentines with twenty percent unemployment and thousands of local businesses that went under due to inhuman belt tightening measures. Tell it to Brazilians strangled by an overwhelming debt to the IMF and World Bank. A recent IMF 30-billion-dollar loan to Latin America’s largest economy appears more to benefit Fleet Bank and Citibank than it does the Brazilian people. Citibank makes a whopping 20% of its profits in Latin America.

But hope abounds in Brazil with Lula’s remarkable victory: pulling in more votes than any President in Latin America history. He has the poor behind him. He dumped purchasing jets in order to meet campaign promises to end hunger in his country. The nation waits to see what Henrique Meirelles, Lula’s appointment to head the country’s Central Bank will do. He knows the world of finance too well critiques of the appointment say for he once held the position of worldwide president of the US FleetBoston Financial Group. Another appointment that raised concern was the appontment of Antonio Palocci as Minister of Finace. He’s a former PT mayor of Ribeirao Preto, and while in charge of the city enacted IMF-World Bank privatization demands.

The key question comes down to who reaps the benefits with service sector expansion and privatization? Not the poor. In Latin America small and medium sized businesses that account for over half the employment in Latin America receive a mere 5% of speculative capital that circulates in the area. Will the FTAA change this? I think not. And there lies the problem. The one certainty that we have is that poverty will spread and wealth will flow into fewer hands, it will continue to flow North. And it is one of the reasons that throughout the region opposition swells among those who will bear the consequences of such an arrangement. Juan Somavia, the director of the International Labor Organization, points out the UN Copenhagen Summit that prioritized poverty-alleviation collapsed and it’s never been revived since, in spite of Bush’s platitudes about confronting poverty at the UN Monterrey meeting early this year. The President made it clear: in order to get US aid nations needed to enthusiastically support market reforms a gesture that would mean their demise. He implied jumping on board on a global war against terrorism as well.

It’s a trade deal written without you in mind. And there’s where the violence lies. Most US citizens realize that trade arrangements don’t benefit them.

The FTAA promises little trickle-down. The money stays on the top so that in the United States we have a new millionaire every seventeen seconds and someone landing in jail every seventy-five seconds.

But the impact on those south of our border looks even bleaker. Already in Central America 80% of the population lives in poverty. And the heads of state have bought into a Bush plan that would make the Isthmus a free trade zone by the year 2003, which will hurl millions more into poverty.

The imposition of a globalized economy on Central America has destroyed local economies in the region. This imposition means that more than two hundred thousand women work in sweatshop prisons. The countries export in order to pay off debts. They cater to tourism. Without billions coming in from refugees in the United States sending back remittances the regions economies would collapse. Local elites no longer make money from cash-crop agriculture but from control of financial capital, which ties them into those who control financial centers in New York and London. They relate more to them than to their own people.

A few drive home their trade rules with unheard of ferocity as they batter weak economies to buy into trade rules premised on their impoverishment. The FTAA will take the place of gunboat diplomacy that ruled for the first part of the last century and that characterized much of US foreign policy. In the next three years, there is still time to change it and create an economy that serves people rather corporations.