Corporate globalization is big business's audacious new strategy to further concentrate power and wealth. This global economic system is based on exploiting people and the planet for profit, resulting in poverty, misery and ecological destruction. Corporate globalization hurts nearly every sector of society, offering the possibility of uniting broad sector into a mass movement capable of making radical change.

The Free Trade Area of Americas (FTAA) is the next step in globalizing corporate greed, not human need. The FTAA is an international business deal that will increase corporate power while endangering the lives of the millions of people who stand in the way of this money making scheme. Initiated in 1994 by the 34 countries of North and South America (excluding Cuba), the FTAA would create the world's largest free market zone - affecting 650 million people and $9 trillion in capital. Governmental FTAA talks have been accompanied by the business sector every step of the way and their discussions of the dirty deal have been held behind closed doors, under a veil of secrecy.

The FTAA is an expansion of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). FTAA would deepen the negative effects of NAFTA we've seen in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. over the past seven years and expand NAFTA's damage to the other 31 countries involved. The dire results of NAFTA prove that the FTAA will provide only disastrous results for the exploited peoples of the American continents.

The leaders of the 34 countries hope to make substantive progress on the agreement at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec City from April 20-22. But thousands of people from all over the Americas - wisened to the hazards of corporate globalization - will be on the streets to make sure that doesn't happen. As in Seattle, Prague, Washington DC, London, Davos, and everywhere else that global capital has come together in the last few years, protesters will use direct action to resist the Summit and its corporate backers. It will be a resistance based on one No and many Yeses. No to corporate greed, violence, exploitation and irresponsibility. Yes to real democracy, human rights, peace and equity. http://www.stopftaa.org/