Customer Reviews

Integrating the Americas: FTAA and Beyond

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The book takes the so called "benefits" of NAFTA one step further expanding over all of the Americas. While free trade agreements open up more doors to trade and high traffic exchange, this book comes to show exactly how free trade also motivates drugs and arms trade, thus elevating brutal violence, as has occurred in Mexico increasingly since NAFTA came into effect.

The problem is not the book's research and lectures, but the fact that it strongly highlights only one side of the benefits of an FTAA. As with NAFTA, which has not fulfilled any of the progress that it promised, and in many cases has damaged cultural and environmental paths, the FTAA is surely to become a huge mistake that is being considered far too early without true and significant arguments in its favor.

It is not realistic or responsible to bring high income level goods to countries with low income levels, as it triggers an un-necessary boom in want / envy / violence, and from a corporate standpoint equals domination and conquest. Likewise, as happened in Mexico, free trade translates into heavy and extremely rapid modernization, which in countries such as Nicaragua, Bolivia, and once Mexico, wipes out traditional methods, such as local organic farming replaced by, i.e. imported, genetically engineered corn, or fast food, which in turn dulls people's passion for life, creates lazyness, etc.

Ultimately, the reason I don't recommend the book is because: why read something deceptive that doesn't help you contribute to the bigger picture?