Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Is NAFTA thicker than Blood

By 2005, the views espoused in 1947 by the Mont Pelerin Society (Free Trade Globalists) were the mainstream stuff of economic textbooks. The victims of America’s de-industrialization would now have to face the theory in the classroom as they returned to school in an effort to prepare for a new career. A displaced single mom, Alison Murray from a Fostoria, Ohio sparkplug factory, faced this irony on her return to school. Alison noted in an interview with the editor of Harper’s Magazine: “So it was like getting slapped in the face… the very first class I took, the very first page of the textbook [i][justifies my layoff].” The destruction of a town or city or even a country is treated as progress or a shining example of freedom via world capitalism. Alison would argue with her professor that the theory sounds good to you unless you have to live its application. Economic theory puts no price on the cost of freedom.  Her fellow displaced workers were the sons and daughters of veterans who had fought for freedom, and their blood in theory has no economic value. American blood had brought peace and democracy to the world, not economics. That blood included that spilled in wage battles in our democracy over centuries. the next meeting of North American trade leaders should be held in Fosteria or downtown Detroit. 

SEE Full discussion in The Fall of Rome: Deindustrialization of America by Quentin Skrabec



[i] John MacArthur, “The Deindustrialization of America,” Counterpunch, August 5, 2011, p. 6

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