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Zalatix

(8,994 posts)
Mon May 21, 2012, 03:26 AM May 2012

There are certain issues that Free Traders always avoid discussing.

Bring up these points and watch how the discussion gets miraculously taken off-topic!

1) One major and fatal problem with offshoring is that the "poor nations of the world" rely on taking American jobs and exporting goods to us, for their prosperity.

America's offshoring-driven unemployment will catch up with us and drag our currency OR our core economy down long before the poor nations of the world become self-sustaining. America will dry up as an export market before they can service their own economies. And China, for instance, is not self-sustaining. If their exports to us dry up any time in the next 10 years, their economy will go to hell.

Finally, eventually America will eventually run out of jobs to ship offshore. And that will also spell doom for the poor nations of the world who export to us.

Offshoring discriminates against American workers. Globalism prevents American workers from having access to foreign job markets, while enabling others to poach on ours This vampire economy cannot sustain itself; eventually the victim runs out of blood. Free traders cannot and will not address this because past that point, there is no future for the third world.

2) For free trade to even exist, one nation has to stay dirt poor so that importing from them is cheaper than producing those goods domestically. That's why, for instance, the United States tried to stop Haiti's government from giving their textile workers raises[/url: higher wages for Haitians meant more expensive clothes for America.

Ask your neighborhood free trader about that. How do they like their government keeping poor people's wages in the gutter so they can have their cheap clothes? Oh but they're helping the poor people of the world, right? Again, notice how the subject gets changed when you bring this up.

3) There's an even bigger problem to be looked at as well - and the free trade crowd won't even dare come near this. At the rate that the third world is polluting itself and crapping in its own food plate to produce goods for America, it won't even matter if they become self-sustaining. They will choke on their pollution. China has a drinking water crisis that America's media won't talk about, and it's caused by their industrial pollution. India has the same problem. In fact, the free trade movement is DESTROYING THE THIRD WORLD by doing absolutely nothing about the fact that America is exporting its heavy pollution overseas. Ever wonder why the globalism crowd never discusses this, or detours around it?

They detour around it because the solution is to force those nations to clean up their environmental act. Free traders detour around the environmental effects of offshoring because to clean up the mess overseas would make manufacturing goods overseas so expensive that offshoring would disappear. Cleaning up the environment at an offshore factory would cost the "poor people" their jobs. But failing to do so, is killing them.

4) I think that you the gentlereader can take it from here about human rights abroad. You know what safe workplaces, real democracy, and workers' rights do to the cost of imports. It drives it all upward. Byebye cheap shoes and iPads. Remember, the free traders are all about "but it'll raise prices for Americans and we can't have that". Again, notice how the conversation gets diverted when you bring this up.



What the third world needs, in order to become self-sustaining, is first world wages, and first world environmental protection standards. But they will not get that. Why? Because America wants its cheap stuff. The free traders want their cheap stuff. And to get their cheap stuff we must have foreign poor people working for crap wages in cities that are rapidly outranking American cities in the terms of who has the worst pollution levels.

One has to ask the free traders... what are they really advocating for? The well-being of the world's poor... or their own entitlement to the lowest-price clothes and consumer electronics?

13 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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AnotherMcIntosh

(11,064 posts)
1. "Avoid discussing" is right. And anti-democratic. There is another upcoming "free-trade" agreement
Mon May 21, 2012, 08:04 AM
May 2012

But where are the public hearings?

annabanana

(52,791 posts)
2. When they say "Free Trade", what they mean is "free capital".. For there to be
Mon May 21, 2012, 08:09 AM
May 2012

real TRADE, then labor has to figure into the equation.

When money can freely slosh across borders and around the globe, and LABOR is stuck at home.. there is NO "FREE TRADE"

safeinOhio

(32,744 posts)
3. I like pointing out that
Mon May 21, 2012, 08:31 AM
May 2012

our forefathers, for the first 100 years of our country, paid no income tax and our industries grew, due to the 5% to 15% duty charged to every item imported into the U.S..

KurtNYC

(14,549 posts)
4. "poor nations of the world rely on taking American jobs and exporting goods to us, for their prosper
Mon May 21, 2012, 09:18 AM
May 2012

ity"

Self-contradicting statement and totally wrong. How about:

'Americans rely on expanding credit, cheap goods and cheap food to stay in denial about our declining standard of living.' ?

 

Zalatix

(8,994 posts)
6. Yup, just as I expected, you evaded all 3 points listed.
Mon May 21, 2012, 10:44 AM
May 2012

Even though none of them were wrong in any way.

KurtNYC

(14,549 posts)
8. I made it only as far as that line and I have no idea what it means honestly
Mon May 21, 2012, 10:58 AM
May 2012

Haiti is a poor nation and they make clothing there but it gets sold all over the world not just in the US. And none of the "job stealers" are getting rich sewing undershirts. How does that fit into your theory?

Here's another: Why are patent medicines 10x higher priced in the US? (Answer: because pricing is adjusted to whatever the local market will or can pay). If Americans had the same access to foreign goods that multi-national corporations do then prescription meds would be 8 to 10x less expensive here. Labor has little to do with it. Prices are set as high as they can be and production is done as cheaply as possible. Give Americans more credit and prices go up. Cut off the credit and you get a slump.

starroute

(12,977 posts)
5. You can't universalize both first world wages and first world environmental protection standards
Mon May 21, 2012, 10:37 AM
May 2012

The more people earn, the more energy use and the more useless trinkets they buy. If everybody could live like Americans, the world would be on the skids even worse than it is.

Instead, the first thing to do is to unwind the market-driven economy. Over the past century, colonial and neo-colonial powers have over and over again gone into subsistence economies and pushed them into raising export crops instead of food to feed themselves. This typically ends with poor farmers being forced off their land and into the urban slums and factories.

The world's farmland is rapidly falling into the hands of whoever can pay top dollar (mostly the Chinese, last I heard), while the world's people are being dispossessed and immiserated.

What we need instead is a world economy based on (1) giving priority to food and other necessities rather than expensive luxuries and (2) empowering people to provide for themselves and their neighbors. Only after that is accomplished can we see how much surplus we have to plow into long-distance exchanges of specialized local goods and the fruits of creativity.

This may be the real message of the 99% and the 1%. As long as the 1% are set up as the standard of how we should all live, we will only be killing ourselves and our planet. But if we put the needs of the 99% of humanity first, we might have a shot at turning things around.

starroute

(12,977 posts)
10. Is that comment in the wrong place? It doesn't seem to have much to do with what I said
Tue May 22, 2012, 10:32 AM
May 2012

The point I was trying to make is that you can't say that everyone on the planet should be able to enjoy a first-world living standard and that this won't be a problem if other countries are "forced" to clean up their environmental messes. The math just isn't there.

If you think that's an incorrect argument, you need to explain why. If you think I'm evading your three points -- which I recognize as valid but insufficient -- you also have to say why.

But if, as I suspect, your comment was simply attached in the wrong place, never mind.

raouldukelives

(5,178 posts)
11. Won't someone consider the poor investors?
Tue May 22, 2012, 11:31 AM
May 2012

They are only looking out for their own best interests ahead of everyone else.

 

Zalatix

(8,994 posts)
12. Just as I predicted.
Sat May 26, 2012, 01:07 AM
May 2012

Free traders have rigorously and shamelessly dodged all 3 points. Unbelievable.

Populist_Prole

(5,364 posts)
13. If I could Rec this 15 times, I would.
Sat May 26, 2012, 01:29 AM
May 2012

But alas, there's just 1 of me.

We must ironically see it as a positive thing as the free trade/globalism is gutting the working classes. It has finally become a viable wedge issue because the empirical evidence against it has peeled back, layer by layer, all the feel-good theory of it in a way it cannot be explained by the supporters of it without them admitting they are unabashed 1-percenters, or the concubines thereof. The real power brokers are less troubled however, as those who have profited handsomely from wage arbitrage can now afford to be cocky. "Trust me" has turned into "Fuck You".

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