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blue bits. red rocks.
Saturday 3 March 2007

Why is it that in these globalization discussions among college educated professionals, it is always the integrity and motivation of those who challenge the corporate line that is suspect?…Have you asked free-traders if they want to see children in India go blind making rugs, union activists tortured and murdered in Columbia, women workers locked inside filthy factories in China? Or laid off manufacturing workers commit suicide in the US? Of course not. Then why ask me to prove to you that I don’t want to keep the Chinese poor?…It’s a measure of the pervasiveness of class in our culture that “liberals” begin a discussion about globalization with the assumption that political virtue lives on Wall Street and political vice at the AFL-CIO. If anything, the argument for NAFTA was the less serious. It was based on promises of jobs, reduced immigration and prosperity among the Mexican poor that promoters knew were false when they made them. It was a crappy deal for workers in all three countries. Why such contempt for people who turned out to be right? Jeff Faux

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