Danilo Mandic: Could I please get your views on the recent World Social Forum that was held a few months ago in Porto Allegre, Brazil. Over 150,000 people from 135 countries participated, an unprecedented number; and they covered a wide range of issues including economic equality, labor rights, war, and global corporate power. What has the social justice movement done since the first forum five years ago?
Noam Chomsky: The forum itself is a place for people to get together and discuss and plan many activities from all over. For example, if you take the first (the year 2000) Social Forum - which was more western hemisphere oriented then the other ones which have been much broader - one of the things that came from it was a massive popular program to try to block or alter the so-called Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, which is not free and is not about trade and was certainly not an agreement, at least if people matter. And that lead to local activities in many countries and to very large-scale demonstrations at the hemispheric summit in Quebec in April 2001, which were sufficient to derail the efforts to ram through a NAFTA-style program in the hemisphere. Since then it has just continued.