Battle looms at America's summit

[bitwhys]

What with the IMF-blowback pinking of South America as of late this one might be worth keeping an eye on...



By BILL CORMIER

Quote:

---

MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina (AP) - Leaders from 32 American countries and thousands of protesters are demanding the same thing as they converge on this seaside resort: jobs and better wages. But they disagree on how to accomplish that goal, with U.S. President George W. Bush expected to push free trade and demonstrators angrily opposed.



Few believe the summit Friday and Saturday will solve chronic joblessness and poverty, and even those with jobs in Argentina's Atlantic resort of Mar del Plata question whether Bush and the other leaders will end up crafting deals that help the poor.



"I don't know what free trade agreements can do for us, and I don't even know what these presidents are going to talk about," said fisherman Dante Vitelo, 66, hauling nets brimming with sardines to shore from the south Atlantic.



The fourth Summit of the Americas will focus on poverty reduction and economic development, with Bush planning to announce several job creation programs. Prime Minister Paul Martin is also attending.



"We have a great opportunity to deal with job creation or poverty by putting a system in place that encourages economic growth and entrepreneurship," Bush told Spanish language reporters in Washington.



But an ideological battle loomed between Bush and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and outspoken critic of what he calls an "imperialist" U.S. government.



Chavez said Venezuela would object to any attempt by the United States to revive its proposal for a hemisphere-wide free trade zone.



"They are trying to include an article (in a summit declaration) to revive the FTAA. They aren't going to revive it even if they produce a 100,000-page document," Chavez told the Caracas-based television channel Telesur in an interview late Tuesday.



U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez on Wednesday told business leaders in Argentina that free trade is the best way to create wealth and improve living standards for tens of millions of Latin Americans living in misery.



He cited the example of the North American Free Trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States, saying the three have had cumulative economic growth of 40 per cent since NAFTA was put in place in 1994.



"Without the free-trade agreement, these results would not have been possible," Gutierrez said.



But other countries do not want this weekend's summit to be about the FTAA.



Argentine negotiator Victor Hugo Varsky said negotiators were "advancing very slowly" as they decide what level of importance the FTAA should have in the summit's final declaration.



"Some countries don't want any mention," he said. "Others want to progress toward a trade accord."



Washington is not alone in support of FTAA talks. Mexican President Vicente Fox wants the summit to nail down a date for the relaunching of FTAA negotiations, Mexican official Yanerit Morgan Sotomayor said in Mexico City.



Previous FTAA deadlines have not been successful. A January 2005 deadline for wrapping up the talks has already come and gone.



All 34 countries except for Panama and Honduras were to be represented by heads of state at the summit.



Other differences over the summit's declaration have also emerged. Venezuela wanted the declaration to state that 37 million people lived in poverty in the United States, a clause the United States didn't support.



Leftist activists got their message out early by staging a so-called People's Summit and vowing to stage a large-scale march Friday to reject free market programs.

---

Bush v Chavez should turn out to be rather entertaining.

[Rev9Volts]

jobs and better wages from government- feck socialism...



chavez is a putz

[bitwhys]

Quote:

---

Bush planning to announce several job creation programs

---

if you say so

Edited by: bitwhys at: 11/4/05 14:51

[bitwhys]

did someone say Socialist?



Bush faces mass protests, opposition to trade pact in Argentina



By Bill Van Auken

2 November 2005

Quote:

---

Wracked by multiple political crises at home and receiving the lowest approval rating for any recent US president, George W. Bush is leaving the country Thursday to face an even more hostile audience.



The two-day quadrennial Summit of the Americas being held in the Argentine seaside resort of Mar del Plata Nov. 4-5 will be marked by one of the largest demonstrations in the country’s history—called to repudiate the policies of the Bush administration.



On the eve of the summit, the Argentine daily Pagina 12 reported a poll showing that six out of ten Argentines oppose Bush’s presence in the country. By contrast, 75 percent welcomed the visit by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who has been vilified by Washington and has in turn denounced US foreign policy.



Protests began yesterday over the Bush visit—three days before his arrival—with blockades of bridges and highways in the Buenos Aires area and the appearance of posters throughout the Argentine capital bearing the slogans “Stop Bush” and “Fuera Bush,” in some cases superimposed over photographs of wounded Iraqi children.



Nor are the protests limited to Argentina. Last Wednesday, some 6,000 people marched on the US Embassy in Brasilia in an anti-Bush protest. The US president is scheduled to visit the Brazilian capital following the summit, going from there to a stop in Panama before returning to Washington.



The presence of the US president in Argentina has been preceded by the imposition of a massive security clampdown. An army of 7,000 additional police has been deployed in the resort city, which has been divided with three concentric circles of chain-linked fencing. Residents of the area surrounding the summit site have been identified and provided with passes to enter and leave their own homes. “We’ve been imprisoned,” one of them told a local television network.



A 100-mile no-fly zone has been declared surrounding the city, with orders to shoot down unidentified planes.



In addition to the blanket of security imposed by the Argentine government, Bush is arriving with an entourage of some 2,000, much of it composed of security personnel. Last Friday, two giant US military cargo planes arrived in Buenos Aires carrying large quantities of arms and two helicopters for use in guarding the US president.



On Friday a mass march expected to draw as many as 100,000 people will take place in Mar del Plata. Leading it will be popular football star Diego Maradona and Argentine Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.



Bush is “a torturer, violator of human rights, an assassin, a violator of United Nations resolutions, of international treaties and of the sovereignty of peoples, as has happened in Iraq,” Pérez Esquivel said in a radio interview Saturday explaining his participation.



Maradona, who now hosts one of Argentina’s most popular television shows, said, “In Argentina, there are people who are against Bush being there. I am the first. He did us a lot of harm. As far as I’m concerned, he is a murderer; he looks down on us and tramples over us. I am going to lead that march along with my daughter.”



Also participating in the march will be Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier slain in Iraq, and Javier Couso, the brother of the Spanish television cameraman who was killed when an American tank fired on the Hotel Palestine, the headquarters of international journalists, during the US storming of Baghdad in April 2003.



Nora Cortiña, of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line, said that her group was also joining the march. “We will not only say no to Bush, we will say no to the politics of subordination and dependency,” she said. “The best homage we can pay to our children is to be independent and free as they wanted us to be.”



Meanwhile Argentina’s Association of State Workers has announced a nationwide strike on Friday to protest Bush’s presence in Argentina. The walkout will include national, state and municipal workers. The Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (Argentine Workers Federation) has called for strike action as well.



Thousands are expected to participate in a “People’s Summit,” being held in Mar del Plata. Venezuelan President Chávez is the only Latin American head of state expected to address this opposition gathering.



Bush is widely regarded as persona non grata in Argentina. Last July, the mayor of Mar del Plata, Daniel Katz, commented on the upcoming arrival of the US president by describing Bush as the “most unpleasant guy in the world.” Attempts were made to get a court order barring his entry into the country.



On Monday, a campaign was initiated in Argentina via email and text-messaging calling on people to hang black flags from their homes and cars as a symbol of “mourning” over Bush’s presence.



The “mourning,” the message read, “is so that we can show not only our rejection and indignation, but also our respect for all those who have died and are dying because of this perverse character.”



Residents have already hung homemade signs and banners denouncing Bush from apartment balconies both in Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata.





Summit split over free trade zone



Within the summit itself, Bush faces little prospect of success. Washington’s aim is to use the gathering to jump start the stalled negotiations on creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and to push for closer subordination of the Latin American governments to US militarism in the name of the “global war on terrorism.”



This is the fourth Summit of the Americas, the first being held in 1994 in Miami in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s implementation between the US, Canada and Mexico. That summit declared its support for widening this free trade zone “from Alasaka to Ushuaia,” Argentina’s—and the world’s—southernmost city.



Subsequent summits in Santiago, Chile in 1998 and Quebec City in Canada in 2001 reaffirmed the goal of enacting the hemispheric-wide trade zone by 2005. The deadline for the agreement, however, came and went without any FTAA agreement being concluded. No meetings have been held to push the process along in the last year and a half.



This year, instead of trade and security, the theme of the summit, selected by Argentina, is “Creating jobs to fight poverty and strengthen governance.”



Now, diplomats in Argentina are working down to the wire in an attempt to craft a common declaration that can be signed by all 34 countries participating in the summit. The sticking point in these negotiations is how the FTAA will be mentioned. Originally, Argentina reportedly opposed including any reference to the US-backed trade deal, but subsequently relented.



In Washington, the Argentine ambassador to the US, José Bordón, denied Monday that Argentina had agreed to back the FTAA in exchange for US support in negotiating a new debt agreement with the International Monetary Fund, the AFP news agency reported. “There is not going to be any kind of give and take,” Bordón declared.



Brazil and Venezuela have put up the stiffest opposition to the FTAA. Argentina’s President Néstor Kirchner, elected in 2003 on the basis of overwhelming popular hostility to the IMF and the so-called “Washington consensus” model of economic development, has also voiced opposition to the pact, but now appears more malleable.



The FTAA has nothing to do with freedom, in trade or otherwise. It is a blueprint for a regional trading bloc that would subordinate the economies and markets of Latin America to the needs of Wall Street, allowing for the greater mobility of finance capital and thereby creating the best conditions for pitting workers of the different countries in the hemisphere against each other while driving down wages and social conditions.



The proposed free trade deal has met with widespread popular opposition in Latin America. Two decades of so-called economic reforms—privatization of key industries and social services, the opening up of markets, deregulation of financial sectors and the abandonment of production for domestic consumption—have led to economic stagnation, rising unemployment, widespread poverty, massive indebtedness and a series of catastrophic economic crises.



Nowhere is this truer than in Argentina, where the economic collapse of December 2001 devastated what had been among the continent’s highest living standards. As a recent report spelled out, today nearly 39 percent of the country’s population—and 55 percent of Argentine children—live in poverty.



The Brazilian government has opposed the FTAA agreement because of its one-sided favoring of US interests. Washington has refused to amend its massive agricultural subsidies program, which effectively bars the access by Brazilian agribusiness and its products like sugar, citrus and soy beans to US markets.



Venezuela, whose only major export is oil, with the US as its biggest customer, has no real economic interest in the FTAA, and Chávez has promoted Latin American economic integration in opposition to opening up the continent’s markets to unrestrained penetration by US capital.



In the face of opposition from Latin America’s largest economies, the Bush administration has attempted to forge unequal deals with the region’s weakest and most dependent states, concluding a Central American Free Trade Agreement with Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.



Meanwhile, American capitalism faces competition from its economic rivals on a scale that is unprecedented in what Washington previously referred to as its “own backyard.”



Mercosur, which includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, with six associated countries (Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela), is currently working to conclude a free trade agreement with the European Union. A meeting between the two trading blocs is scheduled for the beginning of next year.



Chile and China have concluded negotiations on a free trade agreement, the first such bilateral deal reached by Beijing in Latin America, following a concerted push for Chinese investment and trade deals throughout the continent.



With little hope of achieving anything of substance at the Mar del Plata summit, the Bush White House is fearful that the images that come out of the meeting may do little to help the embattled administration. The president’s supporters appear to be obsessed with the threat that Bush could be forced to directly debate Venezuela’s President Chávez and come out the worse for it.



At a conference on the summit convened last Thursday by the right-wing Washington think tank, the Hudson Institute, the principal speaker spoke of Chávez “lying in wait” at the summit to organize an “ambush of President Bush.”

---

[Rev9Volts]

if they do not want to do what we say we should stop giving them any money

[bitwhys]

Quote:

---

if they do not want to do what we say we should stop giving them any money

---

but that would result in defaulted loans,Wall Street would be WAY out of cash and the debtor nations could get on with improving their domestic economies.

[Rev9Volts]

then we invade and take over them... steal their oil... Let the CEO's of oil, paper and other companies rule the countries...

[bitwhys]

heh



that hasn't worked so far.

[Rev9Volts]

yea we keep sending in troups and then setting them free...

[bitwhys]

ya uh huh



free to resume selling tickets to the Bretton Woods gravy train



Iraq's Foreign Debt Status

[Rev9Volts]

i am talking about that although that and especially the UN is a waste. They should put the UN in Alaska instead of New York. Then they might do their work and go back home instead of living on our taxes in NYC.



I am talking about the direct aid like what we give ti Isreal... way too many billions for dem Jews...

[bitwhys]

yeah



well



although I haven't personally give up on the UN...



you got me on both accounts.

[Rev9Volts]

usa gives isreal 3 billion a year, but it is really more than than. hell we gave them 3 billion to stay out of quate (sp?)war. @#%$ let them fight. but what the hell "we are god's chosen people"... feckin' snobs... they always were zionist and killed anybody they wanted for what 5000 years... the winner writes the history books... they won they wrote the old testament.... and paul reed smith is a jew...

[HKRockChick]

Rev - aid to israel - you speak sense here. As for being Gods Chosen People and Gods Chosen Land, that is such a crock I see red everyone someone claims that. ugh.



Ask the average american and he has no clue that any of his tax $$ are going to israel...

[Rev9Volts]

yep hrchick... how many americans does it take of their tax dollars all their life to support isreal 1 year?



isreal slaughtered cannonites, amalakites and lots others including jerico so they wrote the "history" book...