Generally speaking, protesters believe that the global financial institutions and agreements undermine local decision-making methods. Corporations exercise privileges that human citizens cannot: moving freely across borders, extracting desired natural resources, and utilizing a diversity of human resources. They are able to move on after doing permanent damage to the natural capital and biodiversity of a nation, in a manner impossible for that nation's citizens. Activists goals are for an end to the legal status of "corporate personhood" and the dissolution of free market fundamentalism or the radical economic privatization measures of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization.
The activists are especially opposed to "globalization abuse" and the international institutions that are promote neoliberalism without regard to ethical standards. Common targets include World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and "free trade" treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In light of the economic gap between rich and poor countries, movement adherents claim “free trade” without measures in place to protect the environment and the health and well being of workers will contribute only to the strengthening the power of industrialized nations (often termed the "North" in opposition to the developing world's "South").
Protest against the G8-meeting in Heiligendamm 2007.A report by Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, notes that "millions of farmers are losing their livelihoods in the developing countries, but small farmers in the northern countries are also suffering" and concludes that "the current inequities of the global trading system are...