The United States has a mixture of policies. Its calling for liberalization and free trade in many areas.

On the other hand, its also calling for enhanced protection in areas where the US is strong. Take so-called services like banking. The US is calling for a liberalization of services in the Third World, which would have the instantaneous effect of swamping and overwhelming all Third World banks and nancial institutions by western ones, since theyre so much richer and more powerful. That would eliminate the possibility of any national industrial development programs within the Third World. Thats the kind of liberalization that the US is in favor of. It means that Third World economies would be managed by western banks and those who run them and the governments that are tied to them. On the other hand, the US is calling for more protection in other areas, particularly intellectual property rights, which includes anything from pop music to cinema to software to patents. Right now the US is racing ahead in patenting what may turn out to be parts of genes. The idea is to patent the genes of corn, or for that matter humans, so that future biotechnology, which will involve various kinds of genetic engineering, will be in the hands of mainly US private rms. They will control that eld, and they want to make sure its protected. So they want long patent rights and so on. That means that drugs, software, new technology, new agricultural forms, any form of biotechnology that may involve health will be in the hands of Merck Corporation and others like them who will make tens of billions of dollars in prots. It means that India which could duplicate a lot of this much cheaper, duplicate Merck drugs at a fraction of the cost, will not be permitted to do it. The U.S also demands product rather than only process patents, to insure, say, that Indias pharmaceutical industry doesnt invent a cheaper way to produce some drug a barrier to efficiency and innovation, but a boon for prots.Thats understandable on the part of the rich. They want to control the future, naturally, and that means control technology. Keeping the rabble in line - Noam Chomsky