MIAMI: FTAA

commondreams: The War on Dissent by Naomi Klein
Heavy-handed Police and Propaganda Tactics Brought Baghdad to Miami

In December, 1990, U.S. President George Bush Sr. traveled through South America to sell the continent on a bold new dream: "a free-trade system that links all of the Americas." Addressing the Argentine congress, he said that the plan, later to be named the Free-Trade Area of the Americas would be "our hemisphere's new declaration of interdependence . . . the brilliant new dawn of a splendid new world."

Last week, Mr. Bush's two sons joined forces to try to usher in that new world by holding the FTAA negotiations in friendly Florida. This is the state that Governor Jeb Bush vowed to "deliver" to his brother during the 2000 presidential elections, even if that meant keeping many African-Americans from exercising their right to vote. Now Jeb Bush was vowing to hand his brother the coveted trade deal, even if that meant keeping thousands from exercising their right to protest.

And yet, despite the Bush brothers' best efforts, the dream of a hemisphere united into a single free-market economy died last week. It was killed not by demonstrators in Miami, but by the populations of Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia, which have let their politicians know that if they sign away any more power to foreign multinationals, they may as well not come home.

ALternet: Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami

Editor's Note: In an introduction to Solnit's article, Tom Engelhardt,
editor of tomdispatch.com, comments on the growing militarization of
our
culture.

I used to think that, as with what Chalmers Johnson calls its "empire
of bases," the United States was developing a new form of militarism,
unlike every past example, in which you could walk the streets of our cities
forever without seeing anyone in a military uniform. That, of course,
began to change after 9/11. Now, from airports to subways, not to speak of
demonstrations, it's become quite normal to spot well-armed soldiers.
As Rebecca Solnit suggests in her vivid report below on the FTAA
demonstrations in Miami, in the face of protest there's a creeping
militarization of whole cityscapes.