Volunteered Slavery

Free trade, what does it really mean? Not to be a protectionist, but NAFTA and the equally dubious Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) pact with China and the like really are about reincorporating slavery back into the American economy.

These deals are now being felt as the economy "recovers" but jobs in the U.S. don't increase. That's what happens when you have a cheaper elastic labor pool abroad. But that's not the big thing about these sorts of deal. And you can blame Clinton for this one, although Bush is doing a fine job to push the problem to a crisis.

These trade deals undermined not just American workers, but freedom here, as cogently put by Margaret C. Levenstein at Yale in 1999 :
“The shift from indentured servitude to race-based slavery was the result of the choices made by individual, profit-seeking tobacco growers. Faced with increasing labor costs for European indentured servants, they turned to slave labor made cheap by depression in the sugar islands. Does that mean that slavery, and the 300 years of racial strife and suffering that continues to eat away at this country’s heart and gut are the inevitable results of market forces? Hardly. As Yale’s Edmund Morgan has shown, that was the market outcome because of rules, laws, and social norms that were adopted and that made slavery possible.[4] Cheap sugar may have reduced the price of slaves and made slavery in the Chesapeake profitable. But it was the Virginia legislature’s decisions to segregate blacks from white indentured servants and to establish distinct legal status for black slaves that made the price of slaves relevant to Chesapeake tobacco growers.
There was a clear alternative political choice that would have led us down a very different path. If slavery had been precluded by the rules governing market competition, tobacco farmers probably would have done what they did do a century or so later. As indentured servants became increasingly expensive, we would have seen the emergence of an agricultural system based on free family labor. This might have required that tobacco growers reduce the scale of their plantations and possibly even diversify their crop mix. This in turn might well have created the conditions for true economic development, leading to increased productivity growth in agriculture and the urbanization that the south so desperately lacked. Instead Chesapeake planters made political choices that allowed them to take advantage of the possibilities made profitable by the fall in slave prices. They made political choices that meant that free and slave labor competed in international labor markets. This country has been paying for it ever since.

This is perhaps an extreme example which I hope and presume is not directly relevant today. But when a panelist yesterday discussed the potential future impact of the integration of Chinese labor markets into the world market, I thought, we have to realize that we can make choices. Our choice is not simply whether to fully integrate the Chinese in the world trading system or to protect ourselves and leave the Chinese behind. We can also decide how to integrate markets.”

It should be no surprise, therefore, that it is so supported by today’s businessmen who are philosophical heirs of those who were happy with slavery to begin with.

What do I mean by saying something as outrageous as this? Let's get back to the Yuan. Today, we are begging China to float the Yuan. And they’ve got us, as predicted (by me) many years ago. Free traders let the “Go” trained Chinese first move our manufacturing base to their land. Now they don’t have to do anything to bolster our economy as they continue to suck out all our wealth (it’s the trade deficit, stupid). And when they have us, when they control the means of production (they are Marxists remember?), then they will jack up prices, extort international agreements and force us to change our foreign policy (and even our internal individual freedoms) to suit their totalitarian ambitions to return the Imperium to sinocentricity. Tribute, anyone?

That future, however, is still a decade or two off. For now, just consider that the center of global production is shifting to other third world countries with captive workforces to be victimized. They trade their freedom for bread. And someday, so will we.

The weakness of the Yuan is the inevitable outcome of such blindly unfettered free trade; it is no accident. Rather, it was the point of these policies from the beginning.

The global market is being manipulated in a way that mirrors the “deregulation” of the energy market. This “deregulation,” is code for a setting up restriction-free market that can be manipulated with no citizen (or stockpayer, for that matter) oversight. Simply put, there is conformance to the rule of prior laws or social contracts between citizens and workers and corporations and governments.

This manipulation of the last few years is to the benefit of the stockholders (but only the big guys smart enough to get out before the inevitable collapse) at the expense of free citizens, taxpayers and workers in the U.S. (and Western) market. Doubt me? Are you better off today than you were before NAFTA and the rise of the global free traders, Mr. and Mrs. American investor? Some of you will say yes. But check the net worth of all of us and clearly, the boom is busted and we are lucky to leave the casino with the shirts on our collective backs.

We are now in the process of enroning the rest of the global economy. The short of it: These trade “rules” let insiders use legalisms and accounting maneuvers to water the stock and suck the money out of any corporation, or in the case of NAFTA, the entire U.S. economy. What better way to depict the present Federal deficit than a stock-watering scam?

These enronic economies are sucking jobs away from free American workers. They are sucking jobs away from the geographical locations where they must pay for our more-expensive prior contracts concerning individual freedoms, protection in the workplace, job security, environmental protection (that means protecting your neighborhood’s air, water and soil folks from profiteers who make their money are your expense!). It even means the jobs leave places where citizens have a say in their government, are protected by the writ of habeas corpus (at least we were before the Patriot Act), and can’t be thrown in prison for debt, speaking freely and critically about their leaders and the rest of the Bill of Rights.

This globalization of the workplace, that giant sucking sound of the means of production leaving the control of citizens of America, isn’t just a money issue. It isn’t just about the destruction of the Middle Class and the real middle-class values of a right to self-determination and a decent living.

It’s about the biggest roll-back to freedom, to the democracy our founding fathers fought and died for, since these very same founders buckled to the pressure from rich Southern land owners (with Yankee slave-traders in the background) and allowed slavery to continue in the U.S.

Sure it’s unpopular to criticize the Founding Fathers. But that moment of economics-induced weakness led irrevocably to the slaughter of the Civil War. And the weakness of our toothless trade accords, which protects no man, woman, beast or nature itself in those countries where we do business, was equally a moral lapse into craven—and self-destructive—turpitude.

A legacy of political expediency, unfettered free trade has now created the whirlwind of global inequity that we reap as it turns into terrorism abroad and at home. And into the loss of freedom, a.k.a the Patriot Act, that has sprung up to bring to Americans the type of abridgement of individual liberty heretofore found only abroad (like holding people in jail without charging them).

If you don’t understand that dynamic behind today’s terrorisms, then you missed your history lecture about the French Revolution, just for starters.

And even if the revolution fails to overthrow the Empire, no good comes of it. A revolt of the slaves, Spartacus style, taking place against the Empire marks the entry of violence into politics. Guess what? Violence and politics together always, always means bad things for regular folk.

Today, we don’t have an American Empire any more that the Roman Empire was Italian. It is a multinational global empire that subjugates the pathetically indebted “haves” (by which I mean anyone who has to work for a living to pay the bills) to the profit of the actually rich (who do not).

These “haves” volunteer to be enslaved because they fear the violence anarchy of the “have-nots” (by which I mean those who have nothing left to lose). And this anarchy is fostered by the really rich, who create NAFTA to make their money, and create the conditions of violence that makes the rest of us let them get away with it, if only we are left in the quiet, desperate protection of our masters.

But don’t get me wrong. I do not condone or forgive the fanatic terrorists who have sunk to such immoral and unholy behaviors. That they would take life peremptorily is unforgivable, especially when it is not in self-defense, the only possible excuse for such actions. That they would lash out for financial security, national pride, ideology, conquest and their own betterment at the expense of others is a mockery of the very principles they claim as their religious birthright. Suffering is no excuse for the slaughter innocents or the use of force in the marketplace of ideas and goods.

But I don’t forgive or condone the Empire, either, for its behavior. Tell child warriors armed by the manufacturers of weaponry that they are wrong. But tell those manufacturers that they are wrong too. The masters of war, the captains of industry who claim that they cut the best deal they could, even while supporting terror and misery of the enslaved in NAFTA countries like China (as well as a number of countries now hotbeds for the current crop of terrorists) must bear the responsibility for their actions. Slave owners create the conditions for violence among slaves. They, or should I say America’s robber barons of industry, must accept their part in sowing the whirlwind of terror we now reap. ¶ 8:16 AM