: : (now expanded to Mexico and Chile, soon to be hemispheric). While we haven't (yet) gone as far as the Europeans in integration, what we do have has been a tremendous success, spreading economic prosperity to all participants. : SDF: SDF: Oh really? All participants? How so?
Aww, C'mon, SDF, NAFTA has led to lots of new jobs! I should know, I now have to have three of them to pay rent! (If I don't keep laughing, I'll start screaming.)
Sure free trade helps lots of people. Go to your local golf course, chamber of commerce, or country club and ask anyone there! (Well, except the "help" of course, they don't count as people anyway.)
Although there has been a net loss of jobs following NAFTA, there has been an equally great increase in the average salary of CEOs. As long as the major media is controlled by multinational corporations, we will continue to get pro-NAFTA, pro-GATT, pro-MAI (when they bother to tell us about that little deal at all!) and, for the most part, pro-war reporting (two of the major broadcast networks are owned by GE and westinghouse, both of which also have defense contracts with the US government, and therefore benefit from warfare). Wealth has, for the past 20 years, been increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and this trend is likely to continue. I don't want to get into a big debate over the relative merits of capitalism and socialism (basically because I don't really support either one and think both are mired in 19th century thought and neither was designed to handle the real economic needs of the 21st century) but I have to agree that this isn't working. The very rich have more power than ever, the ranks of the "middle" classes are shrinking (that's the US "middle-class," roughly petit bourgeoise, not the British version of "middle-class" which is "upper-class" in US terms) and the numbers of abject poor are growing at a phenomenal rate. I wish I could offer some sort of solution, but the whole thing makes me so depressed that I just want to go numb myself with some corporate-owned booze and meds.
None.
