Equity of Trade Versus Free Trade

live Link:  N.O.R.M.

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by Thayne Cozart
Director of Communications, National Organization for Raw Materials

The U.S. has a huge trade imbalance with most trading nations. The imbalance is not in agriculture, although many food products — both raw and processed — enter the U.S. at prices below those for comparable U.S.-grown foodstuffs.

To a large degree the imbalance is in manufactured goods. One reason is that many nations have lower costs of production — based upon a lower standard of living, cheap labor, inexpensive raw materials, protective government policy, etc. Multinationals who have moved their plants to foreign locations enjoy the best of both worlds — inexpensive manufacturing costs and unlimited access to the world’s biggest consumer market, the USA.

Our laissez-faire trade stance, when coupled with many nations’ protective trade stances and the inherent disparity of living standards around the world, is proving to be a recipe for ever-increasing trade deficits. Exacerbating the situation, GATT and NAFTA are proving difficult to implement when other nations improvise phony trade issues and drag their feet at every opportunity. Bottom line, the U.S. is having problems with free trade.

There is an alternative to free trade. It’s called EQUITY OF TRADE. It would work like this:

Too stupid to be allowed to vote?

 

 Marti Oakley (c)copyright 2010 All Rights Reserved 

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“Sometimes it is mind numbing to consider just how gullible and easily duped we can be.   Are we really just going to change the center stage actors and  believe that by doing so we will affect change? Or, that anything will actually change? Are we that stupid?  Is there really anyone out there who honestly believes that electing Republicans will change anything at all?_____________________________________

 

The last ten years have seen the most overt assaults on the constitution, our civil liberties and our right to be left alone by government.  In 2000, with a new president enthroned by the Supreme Court rather than by election, the faction of congress which calls itself [Republican] began the dismantling of our sovereignty and our constitution, in earnest.  By 2006, compassionate conservatism, a true oxymoron, had done as much damage as it could and over the next few years, the torch was passed to the other faction, the [Democrats]. Either way we got the same thing, the establishment of multi-national corporations as government, with congress simply acting as the facilitator for corporate takeover.    

2008 saw Democrats take control of both houses of congress and election of a new president.  And didn’t we all give a sigh of relief?  Didn’t most of us who had been waiting to exhale after eight years of near dictatorial rule by the Bush Administration, the absolute corruption of power and the open hostility of government towards the people, suddenly feel as if some burden had been lifted from us?  That somehow all the egregious assaults on America, perpetrated by its own government, would somehow be righted?  That our instinctive fear of this grossly expanding government that was intruding steadily into our lives, that viewed us as the enemy, would be subdued by voting into office anyone but more Republicans?  Didn’t we believe the Democrats would save the day?