Economies based on making money on money instead of making things are burning out. The investment community divorced itself from the production sector of our society many years ago. The globalists used free trade as a tool to create new money products. They thought they could make debtor nations into exporting nations and have them at least pay interest on the loans whereby they could create perpetual revenues from these nations. But it didn't work because the new money products did not replace the loss value of workers and labor. Free trade deflates the value of labor, and this value is a real asset and perhaps a much better money standard than the value of paper money and all the funny money manipulations of transactions. Degrading the value of workers and labor affects all money values and creates a negative balance. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history including the Great Depression.
A must read is "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins. Mainstream media tries to make him look like a quirky character, but in reading the book, you can put aside this judgment for another time and study the process he portrays. He shows how the money powers of the world get nations hooked on loans and then penetrate into whatever they can in terms of capturing the total resources of these countries -- or at least find a way to control the flow of wealth in these nations. If we ignore these things while going after Wall Street directly, we miss the proper sequence of cause and effect.
Free trade is a take away project. It is not trade. It primarily about moving production from place to place for the sake of cheaper labor. The money products represented by equity loans, home loans and credit cards went bad because free trade came and smashed the middle class production workers. This affected other businesses and services as a new working poor class replaced the middle class workers. More than a decade ago, newspapers reported that 47 percent of all small business owners maxed out their credit cards to stay afloat. Many businesses were surprised by the onslaught of free trade and tried to find ways to survive. Many put their homes and other personal assets on the line trying to survive. The same applied to all the millions who lost their jobs due to free trade. They thought they could easily get a job of equal value but this was not case as many waited too long in joining the working poor class. We had record-breaking personal and business bankruptcies and record-breaking home foreclosures making headlines more than a decade ago.
Many thought that the "Battle in Seattle" in 1998 would wake America up to the savage assault of globalization and free trade. The protests made a big splash, but nothing really changed. The elite money powers found ways to control these protests and keep them out of the news, just like the Wall Street protest is now left out of big news channels.
We can say it is Wall Street who caused all this -- and perhaps they did. But they did it after we participated in the process. We participated in the deception by shopping our way out of our jobs. We have to keep history straight about the Clinton era. It was a Democrat President and a Democrat controlled Congress that passed both NAFTA and GATT trade agreements. Of course, the Republicans locked hands with the Democrats. Even people like Rush Limbaugh joined hands with President Clinton and pushed for the passage of both NAFTA and GATT.
We also should let everyone know that even though President Bush hid our economic mess behind his "shock and awe" wars, President Obama followed him and bailed out the financial community and big money interests and put them back in charge. We have only one major party in the U.S., and it should be called the Globalist Free Traders party which ignores those who have lost everything due to free trade. The first question to ask all political candidates is this - who said we had to compete in a global economy with one another for the same jobs? We do not need any conspiracy theories to know that free trade did not evolve in any natural fashion but has been driven by powerful elite forces outside the will of the people.
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