can someone explain the free trade agreement?

[medeak]

Why Chavez against...Mexico for?

[NorCalDem]

1. Because Mexico is part of NAFTA

and might get a small economic boost if we can bring the rest of our hemisphere into a "free trade" agreement. Not because the agreement is good, but because the economies of the countries involved will go to shit, leaving Mexico as not the only one anymore :)

Note: This isn't serious, but I'm sure it's how many Mexican's feel :D

[Vincardog]

2. Because FOX is aWoL's poodle. The free trade agreement is

the banks telling the whole hemisphere that they have to open their markets and put their resources up as collateral. Then the banks manipulate the exchange rates and force countries into default seize the resources and cook up some 'recovery plan'. That plan always involves cutting any aid or benefit to the citizens and raping the resources. Welcome to the New World Order all power to the Corporate thugs.

For example if company A has a plan to level country B's forest and poison it's water but country B decides not to go along; then "Free Trade Agreement" says that country B will owe company A the profits it would have made poising the water and leveling the forests.

[Village Idiot]

3. I'll expain Chavez's opposition in a song:

Call it Democracy
by Bruce Cockburn, written Nov. 1985

Padded with power here they come
international loan sharks backed by the guns
of market hungry military profiteers
whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
with the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
who render rage a necessity
by turning countries into labour camps
modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
who makes the gun into a sacrament --
the only response to the deification
of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
idolatry of ideology

North south east west
kill the best and buy the rest
it's just spend a buck to make a buck
you don't really give a flying fuck
about the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
takes away everything it can get
always making certain that there's one thing left
keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
passing themselves off as leaders
kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
and they call it democracy
and they call it democracy
and they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
trying to make the best of it the way kids do
one day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
to find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
they call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
takes away everything it can get
always making certain that there's one thing left
keep them on the hook with insupportable debt