What can we do?

A difficult question. So many people have been brainwashed for so long that convincing them of their folly will be difficult. They have become “true believers” often with all the fanatical zeal and intolerance of a convert. Arguments contrary to their cherished beliefs are usually derisively dismissed out of hand. It’s hard to reason with a closed mind. The old saying, “Don’t confuse me with facts my mind is made up!” comes to mind.

So ubiquitous has this attitude become that it has infected congress to the point where they have abdicated there responsibility on this issue. It’s not just that congress has granted the executive bureaucracy authority to grant most favored nation (MFN) status. The problem extends to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) whereby the U.S. has ceded our internal authority to regulate our health and safety to the World Trade Authority (WTO). Hence we have the ludicrous situation where we can import lead contaminated toys or food contaminated with industrial waste and have no legal recourse to correct the situation. For developing nations the situation is even worse as WTO courts consistently rule against nations with tough healthy, safety, environmental or labor laws declaring these laws to be in violation of free trade agreements.

Because of the prevalence of this attitude changing the free trade culture will not be easy. The usual methods of trying to pressure your congress people demanding charge seldom works with this issue. Most members of congress think they know better. As “true believers” they tend to assume you’re ignorant instead of actually investigating the facts. Often they secretly dismiss your concerns with carefully veiled contempt or even indifference. Many will attempt to placate you while carefully preserving the status quo.

In addition, the free trade lobby is very powerful and it is nigh on impossible to buck them. The entrenched free trade interests consisting of foreign governments and firms bleeding the U.S. economy dry in order to line their own pockets, short sighted, greedy U.S. and multinational corporations, and a host of “true believers” spend enormous sums to lobby, cajole, flatter or even sometimes bribe congressional members and executive bureaucrats in order influence legislation and rulings conducive to their narrow interests (FYI: more is spent on lobbying congress on this issue alone than was spent by all parties recently running for the presidency. These vast monetary sums aren’t spent altruistically. The free trade lobby expects and generally gets significant benefits from these efforts). Regrettably while these lobbying efforts enrich the free trade advocates the rest of us suffer from the exploitation.

If a congress person is up for re-election you can try to force a pledge to eliminate laissez-faire free trade while implementing competitive protectionism (you need both in order fix the economy – unfortunately we currently the worst of both worlds; i.e., monopolistic free trade). This too probably will not work. Members of congress have become very adept at seemingly voting for bills that never pass because they swap votes on so many version of an issue that they can always claim support for any issue while at the same time actually ignoring the will of their constituents.

Pages:
«« previous page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 next page »»

Tags: Economics, free trade, politics

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

this article with others.