Hand of God slaps Bush. posted by Richard Seymour

Diego Maradona is the Argentinian Mohammed Ali - an international superstar and sporting hero with radical political commitments. He, globally famous as he is, is massive in Latin America, (albeit not spatially any more - he lost a considerable amount of weight recently and now looks as slender if not as graceful as he did in his sporting prime). He has recently been presenting an Argentinian television programme called La Noche del 10, on which he has made repeated and impassioned political statements against Bush and neoliberalism. He urged viewers of his programme to attend a demonstration against Bush at the Organisation of American States meeting in Mar del Plata, an Argentinian Beach resort. He promised he would be there: and he is there, with Chavez, sporting an anti-Bush t-shirt. Chavez got a wild response when he spoke.



Bush is trying to push his Free Trade Area of the Americas, a more extreme version of Nafta. Ralph Nader's Public Citizen site has detailed some of the reasons FTAA is so fervently opposed:

For instance, under NAFTA investment, market access and services rules that are the models for FTAA, corporations are granted special new privileges if they relocate to another NAFTA country. These special benefits--such as an absolute right to open a new service company or acquire land or take over a factory without government interference--are included in the draft FTAA. Plus, draft FTAA rules would guarantee that the goods produced more cheaply overseas because of lower wages, and weaker environmental and safety standards are guaranteed special access back into the U.S. consumer market for sale. The result? A race to the bottom that has no end, where U.S. living wage jobs in the U.S. are transformed into dangerous starvation-wage sweatshop jobs in developing countries, and workers lose out on both ends.

Even the typical $4/day wage in Mexico’s maquiladora manufacturing plants is considered too high by many corporations. Before NAFTA, some 550,000 workers toiled in these plants. After seven years of NAFTA, that number peaked at almost 1.3 million. In mid-2003, the Financial Times reported that almost 500,000 of the 750,000 new maquila jobs that sprouted up after NAFTA had moved on to take advantage of $1/day wages in China, Vietnam and Indonesia

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Similarly:

The proposed investor protections enshrined in the draft FTAA text would grant new rights for foreign businesses to move into currently protected or unexploited areas with governments required to allow them to mine, log or fish. This process already has begun in Chile’s temperate rain forests in the wake of the recently concluded U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Over-fishing of coastal waters and extensive industrial fishing is also an enormous environmental problem in Chile which local activists were fighting to remedy before the FTA dramatically shifted more power to industries. When local communities are powerless to control extraction industries, terrible environmental crimes are committed, as the world is now learning thanks to the rare insistence of one indigenous Ecuadorian community that is suing Chevron-Texaco to clean up an oil drilling site.

Under the proposed FTAA, many more countries would be vulnerable to these damaging “rip and ship” natural resource extraction operations including strip mining, oil and gas exploration in environmentally sensitive locales, large-scale logging operations and unsustainable fishing practices that poison communities, deplete valuable resources and destroy the habitats of numerous animal and plant species.

Some useful links:

Independent on Maradona and Castro; BBC on Chavez and Maradona at demo; Thousands protest Bush; Anti-FTAA protests past; Argentinian crisis; Bolivia uprising.