Let's get real in trade talks

The Boston Globe ^ | July 29, 2006 | Robert Kuttner

[expat_panama]

Please tell us why US taxpayers must pay for "globalization"?

I was just about to call you some kind of kook until I did a search and I found out that you're absolutely right (click here for official OMB announcement) and we all owe you an apology.

[Nowhere Man]

Then Mexico must be the exception. Free trade has devastated Mexican farmers without creating new jobs in numbers sufficient to employ them, so faced with starvation, they head north.

It's a conundrum that we've created with "free trade" which is nothing but that. As long as there are humans involved and so on, "free trade" and "free market" are nothing but myths. Everything from the consumers, government at various levels (rightly or wrongly), companies, weather, and even intangible things like luck, God, whatever all do play a part. I think the proponents of "free trade" either want to go back to a 19th Century economic system with a huge underclass and a small upper class being guided by a 20th/21st Century "New World Order" mentality but there are other such proponents who do not care as long as they make a buck at it or somehow have bought into the system by the rhetoric of the people pushing such a system.

We have made great reforms in the early to mid part of the 20th Century to bring about the middle class and to give everyone a fair shake from the first farmer's granges in the late 19th Century, to the populism of William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt, the writings of Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips and Jack London, to FDR and the idea of the Eisenhower era Republicans who generally protected the rights of the average person. Today, you have the "checkered pants golf elite" in control of the Republicans and the "barking moonbats" in control of the Democrats, so I really don't like both parties too much and if push came to shove, the Republicans as "the lesser evil" although I think my conscience is winning out where I might vote third party in 2008 or of there are none, write someone in.

If you want to see the world the free traders are taking us too, may I suggest the movie "Rollerball?" (1975) It is where the world is run in blocs, each corporatly controlled. Maybe I'm a sap, but I think the role of the economic is best served when it benefits the most and uplifts the ones furthest from the bottom while supporting the idea of a healthy middle class.

[Mase]

"It embarrasses free-trade ideologues that the most successful emerging economies like Japan, Korea, and more recently Brazil, India, and China, have generated their own domestic savings and entrepreneurs, and have not relied much on foreign investors"?

The author is talking out his butt. Japan had 14 years of deflation from 1991-2004 and their protectionist mentality was partially to balme. Why would anyone invest in their economy during that time? China allows foreign firms to invest in its domestic market on a scale unlike anywhere else in Asia. Since it reformed its economy in 1978, China has taken in over $500 billion in FDI, ten times the total stock of FDI Japan accumulated between 1945 and 2000. According to China's Ministry of Commerce, U.S. firms have invested more than $40 billion in more than 40,000 projects in China.

The amount of FDI in China clearly separates it from the rest of the Asian countries the author mentions. Even Korea's economy is struggling now. Japan and Korea did themselves no favor by trying to protect their domestic firms.

[Mase]

We are free trading fools in a merchantilist world - and we have the trade deficit to prove it.

Hmmmm. As I look at this chart I don't feel very foolish. You?

[Mase]

The sole purpose of the "free trade" system is to redistribute American wealth to other countries so transnational corporations will have 'emerging markets' and protect transnational corporations in case their business deals go south in the communist hell holes they invest in.

Then I suppose you can explain the graph in post #64 showing that our personal net worth increases when our trade deficit grows. As a matter of fact, our manufacturing output, GDP and employment also increase when the trade deficit is growing. If what you say above is true then maybe you can explain away the chart below.

[palmer]

Mexican farm exports have more than doubled under NAFTA. Corruption killed Mexican business, not free trade.

[lucysmom]

The story is supposed to be that "free trade" was moving jobs out of the US and into Mexico.

Free trade IS moving jobs from the US to Mexico and US corn INTO Mexico at less cost than it takes to grow it, thanks to subsidies. That has wiped out small Mexican farmers, particularly in the south. Many more farmers have been left without a means of supporting themselves than jobs have been created to employ them.

On an up note, Mexican GDP is growing and Mexico has more billionaires than any other Latin American country while 40% of the population lives in poverty.

[palmer]

Who is overpaid when it costs on average $500,000 to buy a home in this country?

First that's not the average. Second the high price of houses is a symptom of our being overpaid and bidding them up.

[palmer]

Mexico's billionaires are mostly created by corruption (illegal monopolies, oil contracts by bribed officials, etc). Real wages in Mexico have been rising since 1996. They fell intially after NAFTA 20% because of the peso crisis and are back to where they were.

[expat_panama]

"... the role of the economic is best served when it benefits the most and uplifts the ones furthest from the bottom while supporting the idea of a healthy middle class."

The key is in the details.   There is no such thing as an "economy" that can be hauled into the shop for tweaking and fine tuning.   What actually exists in the real world are folks like you and I that have got to buy and sell things in order to live.  Let's skip to the real world question of just what laws and taxes we should have, and what it is we want to change.

We should be able to agree that America is in better shape than it was 25 years ago, which was better than it was 25 years earlier, and so on.   With that understanding, we might want to be pretty careful about changing things around without first putting in a lot of serious thought.

[bert]

..an authoritarian location conveniently off- limits to protesters....

aka long haired, maggot infested, good time rock and rolling hippies.

[expat_panama]

12 by lucysmom "Free trade has devastated Mexican farmers without creating new jobs..."   67 by lucysmom "Free trade IS moving jobs from the US to Mexico..."

I'm hearing this so much from the Ross Perot/Pat Buchanan crowd that it no longer surprises me.  We had a "giant sucking sound" that moved all the US jobs to Mexico and that's why we're now seeing hordes of unemployed Mexicans being pulled across the border by the high-wage US labor shortage.

This is silly.  I say forget the Mexican economy because it's not transparent (translation: "they strut and shout bit nobody really knows what the hell's going on").  What we do know is that we're better off with less taxes, smaller government, and more freedom.  That's why we're better off with less import tax controls.

[jpsb]

not the domestic producer whom it penalizes for making products here"

BUMP!

[Nowhere Man]

Here is a good site I heard over the Chuck Harder show via shortwave which keeps track of stuff like this and the New World Order:

The August Review - Documenting the Rush to Globalism

Chuck Harder can be heard every weekday on 12160 kc at 3 PM Eastern time plus you can download his podcasts from Talk Star Radio (you might have to do a little fishing from the main page). I download his podcasts to listen to my computer since I can't catch it all the time.

[1rudeboy]

Good one. Will it stay up long?

[expat_panama]

thanks ;-)

I'm a packrat-- I got stuff up that I posted years ago that I'm too lazy to take down.  That 'OMB' site will probably be up until the FBI gripes or something-- which will probably never happen given the comparisons between  http://whitehouse.com/ , http://www.whitehouse.gov/ and http://whitehouse.org/ .

frepmail me if you want me to post some other parody.  The hard part is the ideas; the easy part is cut/paste drag/drop.