End Of More Than Free Trade

The wool is coming off the eyes of a lot of commentators as the depradations of the cretin in chief amass. Today it's Lou Dobbs, pointing out that the legions of lobbyists fighting against the public's interest, and using public funds to do their dirty work, made huge inroads in the six years of GOP domination.

He especially hates to see the offshoring of jobs, and maintains that there can be no free trade under the conditions imposed by republics. With our own borders opened up to the incoming trade of other nations without reciprocity for our imports in other countries, we have no such thing as 'free' trade.

Thirty-one years of consecutive trade deficits and the loss -- in just the last six years -- of millions of manufacturing and good-paying middle-class jobs to outsourcing have been the result of what I consider this unconstitutional ceding of power to the executive branch in the form of fast-track authority.

Last week, I testified to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade that our failed "free trade" of the past three decades has been the most expensive policy the U.S. government has ever pursued.

I also told the committee: "The pursuit of so-called free trade has resulted in the opening of the world's richest consumer market to foreign competitors without negotiating a reciprocal opening of world markets for U.S. goods and services. That isn't free trade by any definition, whether that of classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo or that of current propaganda ministers who use the almost Orwellian term to promote continuation of the trade policies followed for the last three decades." Extending fast-track authority assures that continuation.

I'm not alone in the view that free-trade-at-all-costs has harmed American workers. Princeton University economist and former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman Alan S. Blinder has joined Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and Joseph Stiglitz and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers as skeptics of the benefits the faith-based economists in this administration love to tout.

Blinder is now stating loudly that a new industrial revolution will put as many as 40 million American jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two. Blinder has said, "Economists who insist that 'offshore outsourcing' is just a routine extension of international trade are overlooking how major a transformation it will likely bring -- and how significant the consequences could be. The governments and societies of the developed world must start preparing, and fast."

Our economy has suffered growing inequality in the distribution of wealth, and it is increasingly becoming obvious to all but the White House cabal that seeks to increase its own holding at any cost to the national interest. Speaking out now is good. I will not ask why there has been such resounding silence from so many who are now concerned.