It's America's duty to export jobs to the third world to make their lives better.

[Zalatix]

So what happens to the third world's dreams of prosperity when we run out of jobs to export? What happens if our currency collapses and we can't afford their imports?

Free traders scream incessantly about how we owe it to the third world to lower our standard of living to help them. So what happens to their economies, which depend on sucking us dry, when there's nothing left to suck from us?

An economy that is based on draining other nations dry to fuel one's dreams of prosperity is an economy that is doomed to fail.

The third world may lose Europe as a lifeline sooner than America, though, especially if the Euro collapses.

[FarCenter]

1. Workers of the world, unite!

International solidarity used to be a big deal on the left.

[TBF]

2. Capital has globalized - and so must workers

I am in solidarity with workers worldwide. Everyone should have a dwelling, nourishment, health care, education and a job. These are basics and should not be dependent upon how wealthy your parents are. No one - at all - should be a billionaire while others are homeless.

If we start with basic principles and stick to them, we can figure out how to make it work. I think we will be able to do it with socialism as an economic system, although not sure we'll get there in my lifetime. I know we won't do it with capitalism because it is an inherently unequal system by design that makes this world suck.

[jwirr]

3. The only way I see out of this is to localize. Work toward each region in the world becoming as self

sustaining as possible. Not just for the rich but for the poor as well. This would end the dependence on foreign assistance that becomes nothing more than slavery in the end.

[Zalatix]

13. That's the best approach to localization that I've seen yet.

Well said!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. The model that is presented to developing countries is that they should let Western

capitalists use them as slave labor and cheap sources of resources while slashing domestic spending and diverting local production, especially of food, to cash crops.

In fact, the countries that HAVE pulled out of poverty, chiefly the East Asian ones, have done so by demanding conditions for the use of their people: technology transfers and training of host country nationals for technological and management positions. Meanwhile, they have spent heavily on education, health care, and infrastructure. Japan did it first--it imported foreign experts in the nineteenth to help it acquire technology and scientific knowledge. Foreign companies tried to persuade the Japanese government to let them stay and run the railroads, manufacturing plants, and universities, but the Japanese said, "No, you teach us how to do these things and then go home. Thanks for the help." Japan also instituted compulsory public education in 1870, which was before many European countries (and U.S. states) had it.

After World War II, South Korea and Taiwan followed suit. In the early 1960s, South Korea and the Philippines were both dirt-poor countries. Both received Peace Corps volunteers who worked in impoverished villages and slum-filled cities. Fast forward 50 years: South Korea is a major industrial power, and Peace Corps workers are still going to the Philippines. Which one invested in education and infrastructure? Which one let itself become a plantation for multinational food companies?

[BOG PERSON]

9. good points. moreover, which countries were

supposed to be bulwarks against communist expansion? which ones underwent complete + uncompromsing land reform, in order to liquidate the landlord classes that refuse to exit the historical stage? which countries had a guaranteed export market? and so on.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. Right, during the 1980s the Reaganites blasted Nicaragua for its land reform efforts (as the

Republicans and "moderate" Democrats are now doing in regard to Venezuela), but the U.S. Occupation of Japan insisted on land reform there, and also in South Korea and Taiwan.

[Puzzledtraveller]

5. NAFTA anyone?

[NNN0LHI]

6. Nice try but my job and millions of others were off shored 10 years before NAFTA

[brentspeak]

7. Does that mean that no one else's job was offshored due to NAFTA?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/12/nafta-job-loss-trade-deficit-epi_n_859983.html

[NNN0LHI]

8. No, it means more people should have thought about this 10 years before NAFTA

[CleanLucre]

10. the Giant Sucking Sound!!

some did

[kenny blankenship]

11. It's a real hoot watching a party that claims we have the right to kill children

on the other side of the world in order to kill possibly unknown, unnamed terrorists, who may at some future time harbor other terrorists, who may attack the United States, because such is the zealous loyalty which patriotic Americans owe to each other, and such is the duty of the President to guard our welfare...

...then turn around and claim we have no right to "hoard jobs" for our fellow citizens.

Yep, it's been a real hoot.

[hughee99]

14. I believe the new term for unknown, unnamed terrorists is

"suspected militants".

[Populist_Prole]

15. Of course the healthy fattening of corporate bottom lines is just a nice side-effect, right?

Yes yes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

You nailed it here:

Free traders scream incessantly about how we owe it to the third world to lower our standard of living to help them

But then, when free traders say we they mean that in the broadest of senses, since I've not seen or heard free traders themselves give up their livelihoods in a martyr-like fashion to lead by example.