GLOBAL TRADE PRESENTS OBSTACLES FOR U.S. WORKERS----From Cleveland Plain Dealer,
largest newspaper in Ohio USA, By Ray Tapajna __________________________________________________________
In your Nov 17 editorial titled "A China deal at last," the writer says it is time to end the dangerous farce of excluding
China from the World Trade Organization that exists to promote order and discipline in global trade.
The most dangerous farces is the blind acceptance of the WTO as the body to do it. It is like having the fox guard the chicken
coop. Where does the WTO get its power? Who controls it? It is certainly not based on the vote of the workers who have
little voice in the transactions.
Traditionally, trade was based on trading things that one nation did not have for thing another nation had. Today, the
global economy is based on a massive dislocation of workers, The main commodity becomes the workers who are put on a world
trading block to compete with 20-cent-an-hour and slave-labor workers.
Governments in a global economy become less sovereign and become like power brokers in a world of shiftign alliances. They
can no longer fulfill promises of entitlements because when speculative investments becom divorced from production and labor,
the financial world develops a logic of its own. Factory production can be moved from one locality to another without considering
the soicioeconomic costs of the burn-out society left behind.
We have evidence of this today. Public and private employers have continued unprecedented dispossesion aimed at the heart
of the typical American suburban Republican voter: middle-age, middle-class, college-educated men who are irrevlevant to the
new world economy. (In the 1980s, the blue collar workers took the big hit. In the 1990s, the white collar workers got
hit too.)
American workers cannot compete with people making only $10 to $45 a week. In the end, a burn-out society is the only thing
left.____________________________________________________
(The upper middle class remains untouched by all this but they should know that any job what so
ever can be outsourced in a global economic arena.)
