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Thursday 31 July 2008

Today’s Republican Party is wholesale “free trade.” A cynic might note that’s because the party’s masters are now transnational corporations and wealthy citizens of the world, as opposed to home-based Carnegies and Rockefellers of the Gilded Age. But American trade policy has a less jaded pedigree. The giants that crafted world institutions and American foreign policy after World War II and the Great Depression were convinced that protectionism had played a large role in both cataclysms. Their goal was simple: the gradual lowering of barriers worldwide, every nation playing by the same rules. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. As markets have globalized, American manufacturing jobs have been decimated, moving to nations with lower wages and few, if any, environmental or worker protections. The “race to the bottom” is real, and it has moved into service jobs as well. In yet another historical irony, American farmers are the last heavily protected, heavily subsidized major U.S. industry. Meanwhile, everybody is not playing by the same rules. China still protects its industries, and manipulates its currency, in a way that would have made William McKinley envious. Leggy, blonde coed hooker wrecks world trade talks

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