Here
is another published article from the 1990s which could be published today verbatim.
GLOBAL TRADE PRESENTS OBSTACLES FOR U.S. WORKER
(
by Ray Tapajna from Cleveland Plain Dealer about ten years ago) In your Nov 17 editorial titled "A China deal at last,"
the writer says it is time to end the dangerous farce of excluding China from the World Trade Organization that exists to
promote order and discipline in global trade.
The most dangerous farces is the blind acceptance
of the WTO as the body to do it. It is like putting the fox to guard the chicken coop. Where does the WTO get its power?
Who controls it? It is certainly not based on the vote of workers who have little voice in the transactions.
Traditionally, trade was based on trading things that one nation did
not have for things another nation had. Today, the global economy is based on a massive dislocation of workers. The main commodity
becomes the workers who are put on a world trading block to compete with 20-cent-an-hour and slave-labor workers. Governments
in the global economy become less sovereigh and become power brokers (based on a economy that makes money on money and not
things.) in a world of shifting alliances. They can not longer fulfill promises of entitlements because when speculative investments become divorced from production and labor, the financial world develops a logic of
its won. Factory production can be moved from one locality to another without considering the socioeconomic costs of the burn-out
society left behind. ( This is why the Bail out
of big money in 2008 will not work - the real equity of our economy is work and workers and not paper money that has no real
value of its own. We have evidence of this today - Talking about the 1990s which now is evident all around us in 2008 -
We have public and private employers who have continued unprecedented dispossession aimed at
the heart of the typical American suburban Republic voter: middle age, middle class, college educated men who are irrevlevant
to the new world economy . ( in the 1980s, the blue collar workers took the big hit. In the 1990s, the white collar workers
got hit too. ) American workers cannot compete with people making only $10 to $45 a week. In the end, a burn-out society is
the only thing left. ( And it is now more evident in 2008- no stimulus package will help because the money spent at retail
goes to where the products are made and stimulates that economy and not the U.S. economy. )
____________________________________________________
(The upper middle class remained untouched for years but they should know that any job what
so ever can be outsourced in a global economic arena including those in the financial markets as they are finding out
now in 2008 )
