Counter-Cyclical Trade Policy -- An Essential Reform
"The ravages that globalization wreaked on our economy [Japan] have caused a sense of hopelessness about the future."
Tokyo Asahi Shimbun
Globalization is proving a disaster today, and for the First World in particular. The primary reason for this dismal result is that free trade policy only goes one way - into forcing more exports and imports whether we need or want them, and regardless of how much damage is done to domestic economies and the planet. What we have here is just another example of bad deregulation, on a global scale.
This forced interdependency means synchronized worldwide depressions and recessions -- itself an indication of our lack of domestic freedom. Thus, only those few countries free of WTO dictates retain the necessary domestic freedom from the current forced "free trade" regime to escape what has become a globalized carnage.
Clearly, when domestic economies are balloned by a lack of control over their own money and credit (all for the interest-seeking for-profit activities of private banks) economic activity reaches a predictable zenith and then a crash inevitably insues -- all, as history as shown, with big bank insiders profiting handsomely on the way up and down.
As a result of our lack of counter-cyclical trade freedoms and options, exports and imports now fall simultaneously around the world . Under the current trade regime (working to devastate higher standard countries and repeal the Twentieth Century) there is no ready-made domestic way to reverse course, to correct imbalances in economies by encouraging and protecting domestic production.
This is all due to the straight jacket imposed by a completely undemocratic WTO/GATT/NAFTA regime missing necessary counter-cyclical policy freedoms.
Trade wars you say? Well, they're now occuring under "free trade" due precisely to the lack of domestic freedom and inability to escape the WTO straightjacket.
As a result, we now have currency wars... and real wars due to domestic economies forcibly imbalanced and savaged.
In short, so-called free trade is now only forced trade -- all set to reward the greater slave, polluter, and human rights abuser -- and bring down First World wages and standards by polices of forced "harmonization." This is simply a corrupt, degrading, de-stabilizing, and undemocratic "efficiency" game defined by capital alone. Labor -- i.e., the great majority of wage-earning citizens - play no part in trade policy and so we remain trapped in dysfunctional economies and "managed" democracies.
Aggravating the ruin and friction produced by such synchronized "free trade" is the policy of free floating currencies which serve to sabotage stability and provide endless profit and "shock therapy" extortion opportunities for mega-financial interests. Bretton Woods is dead.
All such fascist trade policies leave no room for true trade freedom, for necessary protectionism, for necessary methods and tariff freedoms to balance exports and imports, for free choices of what to import and for how long given a lack of offsetting policy options.
What we really need today are countercyclical trade freedoms which restore tariff powers necessary to induce greater domestic balance and freedom, assure a stable currency value regime, and encourage a less polluted world.
"We" employ counter-cyclical monetary policy to smooth out business cycles, so why not counter-cyclical trade policy? Indeed. The reason is that the current trade policy regime is simply corporate, top-down, fascism set up to allow the biggest concerns to enter and control markets around the world. In practice, it is simply the lastest version of hoary British imperialism writ large... and we fell for it despite our history and the American Revolution which was fought for the very reason to escape the British system of private central banks and ruinous free trade.
Worse yet, the current "free" regime is completely undemocratic as the people do not elect their trade representative, nor do they have any recourse or right to appeal trade decision by those three guys in Belgium whom we do not know, do not see in capital's media, and do not elect.
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