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Subject: another try at NAFTA
You claim progressives cannot give you a coherent
reason why the Clinton sell-out
over NAFTA so pisses them off. My guess
is that the real problem is that this subject
is too damn complicated for an Okie, but I'll
try to explain.
It's always a good move to insult the person you're
trying to win over.
The following is an essay I wrote in 1993 while
the fight over NAFTA was still raging. And guess what, Bart,
everything we predicted would happen--the destruction
of the middle class, the de-industrialization of USA,
the decline of organized labor, the absurd increases
in our balance of trade deficits, the decline of the
infrastructure--EVERYTHING happened just like
those of us who fought NAFTA predicted.
One could also make the point that all that bad
stuff happened because the Dallas Cowboys
won the Superbowl in 1993. You're not saying
anything unless you can connect the two.
You see, Bartman, there really ARE issues worth holding a big damn political grudge over,
Would a simple "Blow me" be out of order here?
Who are you to tell me some issues are worth
fighting for?
...are you a good friend of Keith's?
ha ha
(Not a compliment)
...and NAFTA is near the top of any list.
Then why can't somebody explain themselves?
I've said it beofre, I'll say it again - I might
be very much against NAFTA
but I don't know, because nobody can figure out
a way to explain themselves.
Give it up man.
Hilary lost this nomination and there were two
issues that did her in--Iraq and NAFTA.
I know these are both issues you deem trivial--
*I* said the Iraq war was trivial?
Are you some kind of moron?
I guess you are not poor enough yet, but some
day soon you will understand why voters
could not stomach the idea that anyone whose
judgement was so bad should return to office
AND bring back the cynical gang of political
prostitutes that would have moved back in with her.
You're doing a horrible job of explaining NAFTA.
If you can't explain it, why feel so strongly
about it?
If you want to save your site, it is time to throw
your insane infatuation with HRC overboard
and concentrate on those problems you want an
Obama administration to solve, and on suggestions
for HOW they can be solved. Otherwise you
will soon be remembered as just another running
joke on the Bush Administration. Not a
lot of future in that, huh?
I think you might need to go fuck yourself.
You've written about 250 words, mostly childish
insults,
and you haven't even started your "explantion"
yet.
What's wrong with people like you?
If you asked me a question, any fucking question
at all,
I could probably answer it completely in the
time you've wasted so far.
What next - a history lesson on of the Opium Wars
in China of 1839-42?
If you can't answer, why'd you wave your hand
and beg to be recognized?
The History
of "Free Trade"
by Jonathan
Larson (1993) http://elegant-technology.com/TVAfretr.html
Opposing "free trade" and its latest manifestation,
The North American Free Trade Agreement,
is a bit like trying to stop a runaway truck
loaded with mom's apple pies.
That makes sense...
Rarely has anything seemed so inevitable or respectable.
Nevertheless, an organized grass-roots political
movement has arisen to oppose NAFTA mostly
made up of the victims who have already had their
lives destroyed by the policies of "free trade."
Elite opinion scoffs at the opponents of "free
trade." The unstated premises are, that NAFTA's
opposition is made up of people who don't know
what's good for them; that trade matters should
be left to professionals; and that whatever pain
will result in a long-term gain.
So far, you haven't said anything. I'm a busy
man - I got shit to do.
If you have a point to make, why not start now?
Does it get better or is your long, long litany
this consistently crappy throughout?
Even though NAFTA was negotiated by Republicans,
support for the agreement is also shared
by notorious "leftists" such as Michael Kinsley
of CNN's Crossfire and The New Republic.
Support for NAFTA crosses political party lines.
Bipartisan elite opinion is combined with
economic clout to give the illusion of NAFTA
inevitability.
The battle lines over NAFTA are not drawn between
Democrats and Republicans but between
economic and academic elites and the populist
revolt. The motivations for population in revolt are
basicfolks are tired of seeing their living standards
decline. An explanation for elite support of
NAFTA is far more complex. The question must
be asked, "Why, in the face of so much economic
distress that a populist revolt has been triggered
over trade issues, does elite opinion still believe
that NAFTA is a good idea?"
No, I think the question is, "When are you going
to start answering the damn question?
The Happy Birth of Free Trade
With the coming of industrialization came that
new species of individual, the economist, whose job it was
to explain the rules governing the new world
order. In the pantheon of Free Trade Gods, none are more
important than Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Smith's great contribution to human progress was
that he recognized that the fewer impediments to trade
there were, the richer everyone would become.
He blasted them all royal charters, tariffs, cartels, monopolies.
His opposition to restraints on trade made Smith
free trade's progenitor.
Ricardo expanded on the free-trade idea by stating why international trade is essential. According to him, each nation has a competitive advantage. Portugal has fine wines because her growing season has sufficient sunshine. Britain has steel because she has coal. Everyone has something they do best and if they trade with each other, both parties will live better.
This is the apple pie version of free trade that everyone can agree upon. The reality is not so simple for the free trade argument has been used to justify massive crimes against humanity.
Still nothing - could somebody wake me if he ever
says anything?
The Perversion of Free Trade
The first time the arguments of free trade were used to sway public opinion occurred with the Opium Wars in China of 1839-42
ha ha
How'd I know that was coming?
and renewed in 1856-60. British drug dealers were importing approximately a ton of opium per day from India. The Chinese grew resentful at the damage this volume of addiction was causing their society and tried to close their borders. The Brits were ruthless in suppressing this tiny revolt of drug-hating nationalist Chinese. The Encyclopaedia Britannica estimates that as many as 20,000,000 of them died as a result of the Opium Wars.
When the word leaked out about the extent of this carnage over what was essentially a drug deal gone bad, polite society in Britain scrambled to find an intellectual cover for their actions in China. Free trade, the right of passage of goods between nations, could not be impeded. This war was not about drugs but to secure a greater prosperity for all. Because she lost the wars, China granted Britain a free portHong Kong. Hong Kong was a British demand because it "proved" the Opium Wars were not about drugs but about free trade. With their cultural consciousness soothed, polite Britain returned to the more mundane outrages of colonialism.
Lest one think that free trade as moral cover for drug dealing is the problem of our ancient past, a recent example should suffice. Thailand, citing ample health warnings, decided to ban the importation of tobaccoa dangerous drug more addicting than heroin according to the U.S. Surgeon General. Thailand was forced to repeal their health legislation in the late 1980s to satisfy the requirements of the international trade bureaucrats who ruled that such laws cannot be allowed because they restrain trade.
The appropriation by drug dealers of Smith's ideal of free trade was merely crass. The perversion of Ricardo's ideas, ironically, formed the basis for a real, but poorly executed, protectionism of Imperial Britain.
Industrial Britain had more than the competitive advantage of coalthey had the advantage of being first to industrialize. Industrialization has a iron law which states that it is always more expensive to learn how to mass produce steel, for example, than it is to make the steel itself. Inventiveness was prized in the earlier stages of industrialization because being first meant something.
In order to industrialize after Britain, a nation had to erect trade walls to protect infant industry in the process of catching up. All industrial nations grew up behind trade walls. Abraham Lincoln summed up the sentiment especially well when deciding to purchase railroad track. If we buy the steel from Britain, we have the steel but the money is gone. If we buy the steel in the United States, we have the steel and the money, too. Such an advantage far outweighs a lower price for imported steel.
If other nations industrialized, Britain would lose her competitive advantage. Britain could not do anything about the United States' program for industrialization, but she could keep barriers to British goods from being erected in her colonies. Owing to the longevity of the British Empire, it can be argued that the main historical use for the free trade argument has been to prevent the spread of industrialization. Free trade's historical legacy of preventing colonial development is beyond dispute.
Britain's imperial monopoly on industrialization was impossible to maintain. By the time her scholars and economic elites noticed the monopoly was gone, it was too late to save the empire. Free trade had not only prevented development in the colonies, it had weakened industrial development at home by making her fat and lazy. When Ricardo wrote, Britain was a colossus astride the earth. Today as country after country has raced past her, she is an irrelevant economy in Europe with living standards below Italy or Spain. Free trade's historical legacy of diminishing industrial development in the mother country is also beyond any dispute.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (That's me snoring...)
The Failure of Elite Opinion
With such a rotten track record, one wonders how anyone could stoop to associating with the ideas of free trade, yet to this day we see respectable folks openly defending them. The reasons are many:
1) In spite of the damage wrought to Britain's relative position in the family of nations, her absolute standard of living in 1993 is far higher than it was in 1815a fact free traders take credit for.
2) Free trade is ONLY about trade in products that already exist. The problems of industrial development are another subject. The result is that free traders have never con_sidered development and Anglo-American economics restricts itself to questions of the market. The possibility that questions of development should take precedence over questions of the market is never entertained.
Maybe you'd make some sense if you smoked a big,
fat doobie?
3) Respectable free traders reject the notion that the perversion of the free trade ideals are a problem of the ideals themselves.
4) The academic and economic elites only view the world as consumers--never as producers. Engaging in useful work is considered beneath contempt by British standards so the problems of production are certainly beyond scholarly consideration.
5) The ideals of free trade retain legitimacy because protectionism has been abused as well. The left end of political support for free trade is informed by this fact. When the United States government was mainly funded by tariffs, consumers and small producers were regularly gouged by native industry. If a person is only a consumer and not a producer, he is likely to support the notions of free trade no matter the rest of his political views.
The result is that respectable free traders tend to be highly educated folks who view themselves only as consumers. To them, production is irrelevant compared to merchandising. If they are technologically or scientifically illiterate, that helps, for then they are never troubled by the realities of production. Of course, the modern free trade perverts are simply the descendants of the piratesonly a million times more dangerous.
ha ha
This has to be a gag - is that you, Artie?
NAFTA is best understood as an agreement crafted by pirates and supported by technologically illiterate but often well-meaning sycophants. Representing only the interests of merchants and consumers, they merrily press on with their preindustrial agenda while informing the rest of us that WE don't get it! All the while, countries like Germany and Japan that understand that people who make and buy things live better than those countries that merely shop, keep passing us in every relevant standard-of-living category.
Not surprisingly, the Japanese think the ideas of free trade are primitive nonsense. While we preach to them about free trade, they organize their industry. Even the sacred cow of free traders, the stock exchange, is routinely manipulated in Japan for the benefit of their industry. Industrial development is about planning, the antithesis of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market.
Free trade is an historic failure of economic,
industrial, and above all, ethical proportions. If production is unimportant,
those who produce are irrelevant. Make someone irrelevant and invisible,
and it is easy to justify slave wages or dangerous working conditions.
Make it easy to exploit
fellow humans, and the decision to rape mother
nature is easy to make as well.
Free traders may think themselves respectable and their arguments beyond legitimate debate, but they are wrong. Industrialization has passed them by. Every day brings new examples of the failure of the free trade philosophy. There are many but one is most egregious. Jeffery Sachs, a Harvard professor has taken it upon himself to spread free trade's pernicious nonsense. First he went to Bolivia and supervised the destruction of the tin mines which forced thousands in coca production. Then he went to Poland where his economic prescriptions left an unemployment rate of 40% so the shops are full of goods with no one to buy them. Lately, he has been behind the "shock therapy" in Russia that threatens to topple Yeltsin and has already made folks yearn for the "good old days" of Leonid Brezhnev.
And why should not Sachs wreak havoc to the old Soviet Union? After all, the free trade crazies have just about destroyed the economies of the English-speaking world so why not drag down our former enemies with us? Free trade, like communism and the gold standard, has done far more damage than good, is thoroughly discredited, and should be buried in an unmarked grave with a giant stake through the heart. Far from being a benign philosophy of the respectable elites, free trade has been a disaster. Free trade is destroying what good is left in the USA making us a deindustrialized, third world country.
Free trade is a dimbulb British idea and those who believe it should be considered enemies of the countryTorys with an allegiance to a philosophy of a foreign power. From now on, we should spell "traders" as t-r-a-i-t-o-r-s so as not to confuse anyone. Free traitors are in the end, enemies of democracy. If they were not, they would welcome an open debate on the issuesnot try to pass their legislation on a "fast track" in the darkness of secrecy.
Jonathan Larson
http://www.elegant-technology.com
Let's vote:
How many people think I wasted my valuable time to read this entire
pile of crap?
Seriously, have you ever read such a long-ass, nonsensical pile of
crap in your life?
It was written before NAFTA was passed,
and the author makes the wild-ass claim
that "everything
we predicted would happen."
Tell me - did he ever connect the two?
No wonder nobody can explain NAFTA - if it takes
thousands of words and dozens
of childish insults to begin to start to make
an unsubstantiated point.
The only part I remember is "anyone who is
pro-NAFTA is also a rapist,"
Now if that's not proof that NAFTA is bad, what is?
Why are you anti-NAFTA people such mealy-mouthed no-nothings?
I asked a simple explanation and you're trying to straighten me out?
Remember how we started?
My guess is that the real problem is that this subject is too damn complicated for an Okie,
You could be right, but there's no subject on which I've expressed a
strong opinion
that I can't explain in 200 words or less. How come you're not
smart like Ol' Bart that way?
Maybe all that brain you claim to have isn't the tremendous asset you
think it is.
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