from the page: "..At the end of the summit's first day, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that member countries had agreed to contribute 1% of their international reserves toward the bloc's main bank in order to create a reserve fund. The Bank of the Alba was established in 2008 with the intention of providing economic support to people-centred regional projects and to contribute to sustainable social and economic development across the region. The Bank is also cited as acting as a continental alternative to the International Monetary Fund... The heads of state also discussed the possibility of increasing the commercial use of the sucre, the bloc's virtual currency. The sucre is currently used for direct trading between the ALBA countries, allowing them to circumvent the U.S dollar and minimise the foreign-exchange risk.

from the page: "Under the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement.., Korean civil servants would be excluded from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA)’s process of price determination... The Ministry of Justice has found a tendency for large companies to apply for arbitration even when the probability of winning the cases is low... Even when it comes to fair policies, the sending of cases for arbitration can mean the state ends up having to pay several million dollars in arbitration and legal fees. The government officials who enacted the policies that the foreign companies object to are often held responsible, which can weaken the chances they will enact protective policies... Korea Post announced on November 11 2011 plans to pass a partial amendment to enforcement regulations for the law on post office deposit insurance, increasing the maximum insurable amount... As soon as AMCHAM expressed opposition to this, saying it violated the FTA, Korea Post withdrew the plan.

from the page: "Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae has commented on a proposal jointly signed in early December last year by Incheon District Court judge Kim Ha-neul and 165 other judges for the creation of an official Supreme Court-affiliated KORUS FTA research team, stating, “Such a forum will have to be created.” Yang made the statement at a new year’s press meeting on January 2 at the Supreme Court in Seocho-dong, Seoul, where he also commented, “Most of the judges [that signed the proposal] did so with the aim of researching the agreement because they did not know about it, rather than in order to get involved in it at all costs.”"

from the page: "Pacific Rim is suing El Salvador for up to hundreds of millions of dollars under the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement for not approving a mining license. Since Canada isn't part of this agreement, Pacific Rim opened a subsidiary in Reno, Nevada... Rather than complying with the environmental permitting process of El Salvador, Pacific Rim launched an attack under the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). They are demanding compensation from the government of El Salvador that could rise to hundreds of millions of dollars. In an abuse of process designed to attract jurisdiction under DR-CAFTA, Pacific Rim moved its subsidiary from the Cayman Islands to Nevada in the United States. The case will be decided by a tribunal at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), associated with the World Bank..."

from the page: "..In the last 15 years there is abundant evidence that this trade [NAFTA] deal has failed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics some 900,000 jobs were lost in the U.S. alone, and millions of Mexican farmers' livelihoods were devastated when they failed to compete with the influx of tariff-free, subsidized crops from the U.S. As with NAFTA, the U.S.-Korea FTA will likely offshore thousands of jobs from an already flailing economy. A large number of the endangered jobs pay around 40.5 percent more than the average wage in the U.S. Of the 159,000 lost jobs projected by the Economic Policy Institute, high tech and green jobs, along with manufacturing, are most at risk... Trade policy has the ugly effect of pitting workers around the world against one another. But when we talk to each other and see that neither side is actually benefiting, we start to wonder, who is? After all, if it's not working for you, and it's not working for me, it must be working for someone...

from the page: "...Mexican malnutrition has its roots in the way NAFTA and other neoliberal programs forced the nation to move away from producing its own basic foods to a "food security" model. "Food security" posits that a country is secure as long as it has sufficient income to import its food. It separates farm employment from food security and ignores unequal access to food within a country... Seventeen years after NAFTA, some two million farmers have been forced off their land by low prices and the dismantling of government supports. ... The areas that adapted successfully to industrial agriculture and agroexport crops are characterized by flagrant violation of the labor rights of migrant farm workers, widespread pollution and water waste... Take the case of Corn Products International (CPI). The transnational filed a NAFTA claim against the Mexican government in 2003, claiming a loss to its business due to a tax levied on high fructose corn syrup in beverages...

from the page: " ...Mexico’s reason for imposing the tax was to save a sugarcane industry that provided jobs for thousands of citizens and played a crucial economic role in many regions... A 2008 NAFTA tribunal ruled that Mexico had to pay $58.4 million to CPI... CPI’s wholly owned subsidiary Arancia Corn Products is among the most powerful food transnationals operating in the country, along with Maseca/Archers Daniel Midland and Cargill. Large agribusiness companies allegedly played a key role in the 2007 tortilla crisis by hoarding harvest as the international price went up, artificially drying up the national market and selling at nearly double the price they paid for the harvest... NAFTA and other FTAs give corporations the power to define what we eat, what we buy at the store, who will have a job and who won’t, and whether a village sustained by local food production will survive or witness the end of generations of livelihoods."

from the page: "..ラチェット規定ってのは..一旦韓国が認めた自由化、市場開放は、えーあとでやばいと気付いても元に戻してはならない。...ISDっていうのは、さっきのラチェット規定もそうですけども、治外法権..。要は、自国の国の基準で、自国の国民の意思で、自分の国の環境、衛生、福祉、安全、そういったことを守れなくすると。だから国家主権・国民主権を制限する。言い換えると、民主主義を動かなくするのがグローバル化...。TPPは条約なので、TPPの締結自体は国会の承認が必要です。だから国会で阻止できるかもしれない。でも、交渉参加の表明は、これは政府の専権事項で、どんなに民主的にみんなが反対しても、世論がみんな反対しようが、政治家が全員反対しようが、首相が交渉参加を表明しちゃったら終わり...。無残な結果になっても、TPP推進論者はですね、こういうんですよ、最後は。『..グローバルな流れに乗り遅れたんだから、淘汰されたんだから、仕方がない』... 新自由主義を唱えた政権ってのは..全部長命政権..。自分たちでフェアに競争して負けたものの面倒を政府が見るのがおかしいんだよ！と。つまり責任を逃れている。自己責任。駄目でも自己責任。"

from the page: "Japanese activists have gathered in front of the US embassy in Tokyo to protest against a planned heliport near the village of Takae, northern Okinawa. The demonstrators shouted slogans against the American military base on Okinawa, demanding the removal of the base from the island... They tried to submit a letter to Washington's Ambassador in Japan John Victor Roos, but they were prevented from reaching the embassy by a wall of Japanese police. Futenma airbase, hosting about half the US troops in Japan, is extremely unpopular with locals who associate it with crime and pollution... The relocation of the air station is not the only unbearable issue for Okinawans, as Tokyo has agreed to construct six helipads (each 75 meters in diameter) for the US Marine Corps' Bell-Boeing V-22 Ospreys around the village... Earlier this week, Japanese people staged another street protest against the trans-Pacific free trade pact, which broadens relationships with the United States.

from the page: "...College and University education is being priced out of the reach of working class people. We are witnessing the death of the liberal arts. The war on public education is a front in the broader class war that pits workers against owners and the working class against the wealthy... The problem isn’t big government; it is the merging of corporations and big business with government and the philosophical system that engenders it: the market fundamentalism spawned by rapacious capitalism. When corporations, which are motivated by profit rather than regard for the public welfare, merge with government, people are removed from the equation and they are replaced by capital. Thus money is equated with free speech and corporations are given the rights of human beings without the social and moral responsibility of citizenship. This is what capitalism does. Free markets are not an expression of democracy; they are a manifestation of corporate fascism and belligerence...

from the page: "US President Barack Obama and other world leaders are due to arrive in the South Korean capital on Thursday for the opening of the G20 summit. But as Al Jazeera's Steve Chao reports from Seoul, union workers and civic groups have already begun one of the largest rallies in the run-up to the Thursday-Friday meeting. The protesters are opposed to a long-delayed free-trade deal between South Korea and the US, which Lee Myung-bak and Barack Obama, respectively the two countries' presidents, want to finalise before the summit. The demonstrators also want the South Korean government to improve labour rights. For their part, authorities have tightened security in preparation for the arrival of 10,000 participants, including 32 heads of government and leaders of international organisations."

from the page: "..no one disputes that 23,000 people have been killed since 2006 in a largely futile military operation initiated by Mexican president Felipe Calderon... The present policy is failing and needs to be changed. The militarization of the war on drugs has been a colossal disaster which has accelerated the pace of social disintegration. Mexico is quickly becoming a failed state, and Washington's deeply-flawed Merida Initiative, which provides $1.4 billion in aid to the Calderon administration to intensify military operations, is largely to blame.. NAFTA, in particular, has triggered a massive migration of people who have been pushed off the land... free trade has not only had a ruinous effect on the economy, but has also created an inexhaustible pool of recruits for the drug trade... It's no coincidence that Kabul and Bogota are the the de facto capitals of the drug universe. US political support is strong in both places, as is the involvement of US intelligence agencies...

from the page: "...The military base agreement needs to be understood in the context of two other U.S. initiatives in Colombia. First, Plan Colombia, which began under President Clinton, committed billions of dollars ostensibly to fight the war on drugs but also to fighting the guerrillas, intensifying the country’s already brutal conflict in rural areas. This has led to increasing displacement of people from areas that are strategically important for mining multinationals. Second, the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, which was signed in 2006, could pry open the country to more U.S. corporate exploitation. But it has been met with opposition in the United States, delaying its ratification. Daza says the signing of the bases deal is part of “a military strategy that complements the push for the free trade agreement.” The trade accord will serve “transnational corporate investments,” and these investments, he says, “are sustained by a military relationship.”..."

from the page: ".. While the US has issued heavily-qualified statements critical of the coup—in the aftermath of the events in Honduras—the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down. The US ties to the Honduran military and political establishment run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some US political or military official(s). ...the US is the top trading partner for Honduras. The coup plotters/supporters in the Honduran Congress are supporters of the “free trade agreements” Washington has imposed on the region. The coup leaders view their actions, in part, as a rejection of Hugo Chavez’s influence in Honduras and with Zelaya and an embrace of the United States and Washington’s “vision” for the region. Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls. "

from the page: "The theory is the Propaganda Model and it rests on the observation that since the media is owned by huge corporations with close ties to state power that there is a filtering process to weed out nearly everything but the "orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question."... In Peru the government issued a decree that allowed them to open up indigenous lands to foreign investment ...and the local indigenous people rose up.... What transpired was a massacre where up to 250 indigenous leaders are missing... Cross-examine this with the Iranian protests and we see considerable more coverage though much less carnage. The ultimate question is: Does covering the events in Peru and Iran serve the interests of private and state power, or not? In cases where events serve those concentrated centers of power it is highly predictable that not only will they receive more coverage but the bias will be as equally predictable."

from the page "There are conflicting reports on a violent incident in Peru’s Amazon jungle region in which both police officers and indigenous protesters were killed. The authorities, who describe last Friday’s incident as a "clash" between the police and protesters manning a roadblock, say 22 policemen and nine civilians were killed. But leaders of the two-month roadblock say at least 40 indigenous people, including three children, were killed and that the authorities are covering up the massacre by throwing bodies in the river... "We have killed each other, Peruvians against Peruvians," lamented indigenous leader Shapion Noningo, the new spokesman for the Peruvian Rainforest Inter-Ethnic Development Association (AIDESEP) - which groups 28 federations of indigenous peoples - said Sunday night. AIDESEP has led the protests that began two months ago, which have included blockades of traffic along roads and rivers and occupations of oil industry installations in various provinces."