THE RECORD
November 20, 2002

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

Never before in history have ordinary people been in a similar position to watch and observe the manipulations, trickery and violence used by would be Masters of the World to reach their goals. And, never before have people had such an opportunity to watch them self destruct by their insatiable greed for power.

There was another pompous meeting a few weeks ago in Quito, Ecuador, organized by and for the Ministers of all the American countries, with the exception of Cuba. They were pushing the idea of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, against growing opposition on both North and South continents. The negotiations for the FTAA have been going on for about seven years in deep secret, so the idea is not new, but it needed some window dressing to convince people how great it is going to be when a few multinationals can set up offices in all countries and start trading with each other, reporting large "growth" figures, while people are starving in the streets.

Of course, there were the usual demonstrations by what our PR hacks call "professional opponents of wealth creating globalization." In reality, thousands upon thousands of destitute Ecuadorians took to the streets, now even stripped of their own monetary system and forced to deal in the US Dollar.

While our controlled media is filling pages and airwaves with endless stories of punks beating up each other, drug related executions and traffic accidents, there are huge demonstrations against further globalization and loss of human rights every week and almost every day somewhere on Earth, sometimes involving millions. Yet, our brainwashed public never hears these cries of desperation, as they might upset our "consumer confidence" People are not supposed to know and think, only to buy, buy, buy!
For the first time that I know of, 40 people from the demonstrations were permitted into the conference room in Quito to address the 25 assembled Ministers, including our Pierre Pettigrew. The first one to speak was Peter Rossett of Food First, who shouted at US Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick that he should be ashamed for pushing a treaty that will destitute not only Latin Americans, but many people in the USA as well. It was reported that Zoellick was staring at and admiring his own shoes, as he didn't dare to look into the face of the brutal facts. It is well known by now that these so called free trade agreements, the WTO and the IMF, are American controlled colonization policies and nothing else.

A long line of speakers followed, representing many sectors of civil society, while the Ministers were squirming in their seats, impatient to get on with selling out their own peoples. One of the last speakers was Leonidas Iza, representing the Ecuadorian Indigenous Federation. "We are in desperate shape," he said "you who were born in golden cradles and never have suffered. But we don't have food to feed our children. Our markets are flooded with cheap imports. Imported milk is dumped in Ecuador for half of what it cost to produce it, but transnationals, mostly Nestle, sell it back to us at $1.80 per litre. We have no way to live and the FTAA will make it worse. When we complain, the US government calls us terrorists. We are not threatening anything, but we're hungry and tired and things have to change." (By the way, Nestle, like many other multinationals, is operating under hundreds of different names around the globe. This used to be called communistic collectivization, but now it is free enterprise)

There were women's representatives, claiming that the FTAA would destroy women's jobs and families, and speaking of despair and starvation. Polls consistently show that even the majority of US citizens reject any further free trade talks, but as soon as the humans left the room, the programmed Ministers were back to the job at hand: How to force through this new monster springing from the heads of warped, Friedmanite economists. These people hold sway in our university Economics departments and dominate such agencies as the Fraser Institute. They get their orders from their corporate sponsors and then pass them on to governments as "sound economic policies." Our friend Gordon Campbell was allegedly taken to task by the Fraser Inst. just lately for not dismantling BC fast enough.

Robert Zoellick hardly put his beautiful shoes on US soil after his Ecuadorian sojourn, when he wrote an article in the Nov.5 issue of the Wall Street Journal, under the title of "Free Trade, Free People."

The article is the usual collection of neoclassical economic nonsense, lauding the efforts to create a US- African free trade zone that would create wealth by exporting agricultural products to America. No mention is made that the exporters will be multinational agribiz companies, who at first will have to toss millions of small, subsistence farmers off their lands, as they have in Mexico under NAFTA. Then they proceed with monstrous mono-cropping, genetically modified seeding, and chemicalization, to grow "cheap food", while the locals starve. Some of the worst starvation figures already are from food exporting countries.

Then he goes on and on, praising the benefits of free trade, like "The rule of Law", as long as the corporations call the shots. "Private property rights," but first indigenous peoples have to be kicked off their land and pushed into city slums. "Competition." The sacred buzzword of every economic nutcase, without mentioning that the purpose is the expropriation of human lives, it increases costs and wastes resources.

Zoellick ends with: "Ultimately, free trade is about freedom. This value is at the heart of our larger reform and development agenda. Just as US economic policy after World War II helped establish democracy in Western Europe and Japan, today's free trade agenda will both open new markets for the US and strengthen fragile democracies in Central and South America, Africa and Asia."

Very touching. No word about undemocratically appointed presidents by crooked vote and the monstrous spy machine being built in the USA, watching over every move of every citizen by certain, self admitted empire builders, who now are proudly proclaim their real purpose with their insane permanent war.

These pathetic nutcases should try to read history and look at what happened to all would be empire builders. They ran out of steam and came crashing down. Empires are not knocked over by their enemies and the so called "barbarians", but by the stupidity of their own leaders.

Copyright (c) 2002, West's International