Miami Dispatch: 11/12

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MIAMI -- I'm sitting in another gray cement-walled warehouse in yet another city. Already the walls are full of signs, schedules, lists of the scarce housing resources here in Miami, schedules for the workdays and marches and puppet fests planned for the next few days, sign-up grids for staffing and security, a small pile of tarps that will be used to catch rain and to cover the serving area in the parking lot where Food Not Bombs will feed us all. Beautiful young women are sprawled on old couches in the center of the space, busy helpers are arranging informational material on long tables. In the room next door, activists earnestly check their e-mail and write stories on the computers set up in the small Indymedia Center that is already up and running more than a week before the ministerial is due to begin. The weather is balmy-tropical, but I am sunburned from a long press conference earlier today in the blazing noon heat, and suffering deeply from caffeine deprivation. There is nowhere in this building to heat water. But I'm happy. The mobilization is underway.

We've come here to protest the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a trade agreement that will be negotiated in a ministerial here in Miami November 20-21.

The FTAA has been described as "NAFTA on steroids." It extends throughout the entire hemisphere, far beyond the territory covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which currently affects the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Since NAFTA was signed in 1994, the U.S. has lost 785,000 manufacturing jobs. Mexico has gained jobs but lost hundreds of thousands of small businesses: average income from manufacturing has fallen by 21 percent

The FTAA is being negotiated without true public participation. CEOs of corporations and other top business leaders are afforded a chance to give meaningful input through the American Business Forum, meeting here during the week before the FTAA ministerial, but the text of the agreement is not being released to the general public and environmental and labor groups are offered only a token meeting with the ministers. The FTAA contains a clause that allows corporations to sue governments for loss of their "projected profits" if environmental or labor regulations cut into their bottom line. Rulings on those suits are made by tribunals in secret hearings not open to the public, by bureaucrats who are not elected nor accountable to us, and their rulings override the laws we make.

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