Today's link is a very accessible and effective take-down of "free trade" as a sustainable economic model, courtesy of the Huffington Post.
I really don't have much to add to this, but a basic take-home message. International Free Trade is yet another mechanism for the concentration of capital in the hands of a few. By moving capital and resources around to such an extent that virtually no nation is capable of meeting its own basic needs, agricultural or industrially, a world of corporate slaves is created. Free Trade destroys economies, plunders ecosystems, throws workers from their homes and jobs and pours the life's blood of our societies into Swiss vaults.
Read the link!
Great article. Did an excellent job of putting everything in plain English and clear concepts with comprehensible logical connections.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a grad student in the history of U.S. foreign policy in the non-gay 90s, I remember absorbing the pervasive "Free Trade is Good" ideology as if were a basic, elemental fact about the universe.
Students like me would constantly absorb offhand favorable references to the law of comparative advantage; superficial yet glowing paragraphs about GATT fueling world economic growth after World War II; and sneering derision over cocktails, denouncing anti-free traders as a rabble of anti-intellectual hicks like Ross Perot.
Well, actually come to think of it, there was an anti-free trade minority permitted to exist in the officially-sanctioned U.S. foreign policy community. Such speakers were occasionally tolerated, brought in as if they were part of some strange affirmative program. They were humored and endured, so long as they embraced most of the other orthodoxies of U.S. foreign policy, like the goodness of capitalism, the wickedness of the Commies, and the holiness of American exceptionalism. So a dude from the Cato Institute who questioned free trade was allowed into the club. Noam Chomsky wasn't.
Anyway, good article. Nice to be reminded that free trade, and corporate capitalism more generally, is horrifically bad even if we didn't happen to be living at the onset of global ecological collapse.