"Fair trade, not slave trade"!

[dmosh42]

Bush and his anti-USA corporation buddies have managed to get all this slave labor trade with third world countries categorized under the words "free trade". Now that we might have a chance to fight off some of these phony "free trade' agreements, the Repukes are cranking up their propaganda machine. We are being labelled as 'isolationists' if we oppose them. I think it would be a good idea to adopt our own slogan as "Fair trade, not slave trade" in answering these traitors.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. While I agree with your characterization of "free" trade, it is a sad fact

that many Democrats, especially those in the DLC, also favor it.

[1932]

2. "Fair Trade" alone is a good phrase.

And the point that people need to understand is that the short term US gains from exploiting the labor and natural resources of other countries is outweighed by the social harm and damage to democracy caused by the polarization of wealth and power between and within countries.

[nealmhughes]

3. True "Free Trade" works in countries where there is a shortage of a needed

commodity in one state and a surplus of it in another with the two balancing out one another's trade. That is to say, the UK after the repeal of the Corn Laws when foodstuffs could supply Britain from another state and the other state reciprocated by trading British manufactured goods with no/reduced tariffs.

Free trade makes perfect sense in a country like Romania or Bulgaria where the manufacturing base has been in constant decline due to Stalinesque archaic methods. They have a great ag base, however, and the EU countries are able to have fresh foodstuffs in exchange for EU manufacturing technology.

This is fair. It is free. What is neither fair nor truly free is when the soi-disant "Communist" states of East Asia are perfectly willing to lose all the theory of Marx in return for money for their state and a handful of people. It is not free or fair when the Mexican people are held hostage by US-based corporations even for their corn!

The US and Canadian worker are losers. Yes, our towels made in China are cheaper than those made in Alabama or North Carolina, but at what cost? The cost of wage slavery and tyrrany in China and a devastation of the environment there? And, a complete lose of the US manufacturing base and even the output of our livestock and farm produce being corporatized turning us into a nation of low wage, low expectation for the future and negative spiral into a state of haves and have nots. Only the corporations win in "free trade."

Corporations are not people. They exist because we suffer them to exist. They are not the end all and be all of Western culture. The backbone of the West is the people who get up and go to work for someone or something daily, not those whose slot in the birth lottery allow them to control our Congress, our airwaves and our lives.

Do we wish to be a nation of insane consumers of Chinese trinkets and "outsourced" technical jobs, while only serving as cannon fodder and groundskeepers? We the people owe no allegiance to any company nor any other foreign country. We the people are bankrupt by our consumer fetish, increasingly bamboozled by the bursting hosuing bubble, and lucky to get a $1.00 per hour wage every few years for being sheep.

Call me a barn-burner, a bomb-thrower, or a "sandal-wearing, lentil eating Guardian reader" if one will, I call myself a Democrat.