Truman's Air Force Secretary, Stuart Symington,
suggested avoiding the word "subsidy",
and refer instead to corporate welfare
as the need to bolster national "security".
He made sure military spending would "meet
the requirements of the aircraft industry"
and now civilian aircraft is one of
our leading exported commodities.
Aircraft-dependent travel and tourism
are a source of major corporate profits.
And this same subsidy game plays out
in most dynamic sectors of the market -
computers, biotechnology,
communications and electronics -
and if things go wrong the bailout
is financed by the general public.
* * * * * * * * *
But for over 150 years even the most ardent free traders
had recognized every sovereign state's right
to make laws to protect its farmers, workers,
small businesses and natural environment.
But by the early 1980s free trade had become
nothing more than massive economic invasion.
Countries were plundered under free trade agreements
written by and for transnational corporate raiders.
Touted as a mutually advantageous wedding
of "democracy and open markets",
both of these were actually under assault
from the aggressive Clinton economic doctrine.
And private corporate tyrannies
masquerading as instruments of democracy
were increasingly intertwined with and protected by
powerful United States government policy.
The principle barrier to the implementation
of this imperial "democratization"
was the resistance of trading partners' citizens
to control by multinational corporations,
since any local market opportunities
and all natural resources were reserved
for the dominant local power structure
and the investments of American predators.
NAFTA is actually an outsourcing,
not a free trade agreement,
designed to slow competition
from East Asians and the Europeans,
to bar independent development elsewhere,
lock in all the available local markets,
and protect private corporate power
from the competitive effects of democracy.
NAFTA penalizes governments
for protecting their own citizens,
by prohibiting measures "inconsistent"
with NAFTA's self-enriching position.
The tacit assumption is no country has the right
to ward off multinational economic assault.
Crimes against "free" trade include
"Buy American" legislation, recycling laws,
small business set asides, fuel efficiency standards
and any efforts to protect small family farms.
Inside NAFTA-appointed, secret tribunals
corporations can demand compensation
if a sovereign country's city, state or federal laws
interfere with corporate profit-making operations.
The corporations don't even argue
that money or property has been taken,
just that governments' actions are, more or less,
tantamount to expropriation,
causing harm by loss of future market
and estimated global profit share
even if the corporation's product
is a proven pre-cursor of cancer.
In 1995, the WTO was founded
to be the most powerful body on Earth
to govern international trade, make its laws,
and act as its court of last resort.
It's the institutionalization of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
and its stated policy encompasses global
deregulation and privatization,
giving private companies exclusive rights
to the basic, common services of countries -
water, education and healthcare
food production and distribution and electricity.
Though much of the world regards
these services as basic human rights,
these are the next public targets
in craven private profit makers' sights.
WTO has ruled most environmental regulations
are illegal barriers to international trade
which WTO members must eliminate
or face penalties if they refuse to make changes.
It also stands in opposition
to health and food safety laws
and a People's right to determine
minimum wages and maximum hours.
In 2/97 Fed Chair Alan Greenspan
said to the Senate Banking Committee
that lower wages as a "consequence
of greater worker insecurity"
made him highly optimistic
about "sustainable economic expansion"
which the Economic Report of the President
added to and subsequently expanded.
It would bolster the overall wealth
of the economy - for that read Wall Street -
but no mention of the devastation
these conditions were wreaking on Main Street.
Then in 2000, Al Gore,
one of the DLC founders, ran,
drafted by then DLC Chairman,
Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.
When Al Gore campaigned
along the Blue Collar Mississippi,
he made sure to make a show
of bashing all the corporate biggies -
oil, pharmaceuticals, HMOs,
polluters, tobacco companies -
tacitly admitting the DLC message
only played well inside the Beltway.
But Lieberman told the Wall Street Journal
these were mere "rhetorical flourishes",
that Gore/Lieberman was decidedly pro-business,
so corporations didn't have to worry.
And thanks to Clinton and Gore
the Democrats lost the presidency.
They lost both houses of Congress
and state legislature majorities.
The DLC is as different from the GOP
as the Crips are from the Bloods,
making our elections one big turf war
decided by money and electronic vote fraud.
The DLC should have remembered
the advice of President Harry Truman
before they tagged red-and-blue gang colors
on to all the States of the Union.
Between voting for a Republican
and a Democrat who acts just like one,
the American people will always
make it a point to choose the Republican.
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