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Exposé: Free Trade and the Price of Fruit
It’s the rich who are the weak. They give in to envy and desire for the produce of others. When they’ve misled the community and have hoarded our common wealth, they claim it was produced by their authority and hard work. We all know how many poor fools believe that sorry propaganda. We shall overcome the resistance. We shall vanquish this evil.
February 15, 2007
Free trade brings US fresh fruit and produce summer and winter, and a premium price all year round. Like everything else, it works for the rich everywhere. Milton Friedman was given the opportunity to try out his theories by Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s. The freedom of American Giga copper corps to profit from the cheap labor was provided at the expense of Chile’s newly re-enslaved peasants. Likewise the farmers land was taken from them and given to Chile’s elites. The winter time fresh plums and grapes in our stores are grown on the land the peasants used to own and work to support themselves. Now they just work and cannot afford the fruit they grow. In both Chile and the USA, the workers (copper miners who lost their good paying jobs to Chilean mines here and farmers working for low wages on the land that was taken from them in Chile) are struggling to survive while the elites in both countries profit mightily from the free trade/free market miracle worked by the prophet of the Chicago School.
By 1970, thirty five years of Keynes and Galbraith had brought America the greatest and most widespread prosperity the world has ever known. Enhanced by progressive taxation, the New Deal brought progress for all of US based on the expansion of productive capacity, increased wages [consumer power] and building an infrastructure of manufacturing plants and support services/facilities. But that didn’t satisfy the conservatives. They resent anything that the majority have because that means they don’t have it all. So Friedman came along to pander to the puerile greed of the rich. His rationalized and fraudulent free market theory ushered in thirty five years of decline, accompanied by concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite few, whose favor Milton sought. The followup of a one two punch, Gary Becker developed economic models for behavior that reinforce the thought conditioning that has been the object of advertising and capitalist propaganda for one hundred years.
Friedman and Becker didn’t mind the prosperity that Keynes and Galbraith created but they knew they could curry favor with the rich masters by challenging its widespread distribution, with the abstract tools to undo it. (Perhaps they and some of their rich patrons had some notion that a rising tide only raises all the boats that are closest to the Moon. But that’s another story. For now I’ll say that, like a few having more than average, if the ocean bulges upward in one place it must fall in another. Understanding requires a truly global perspective.) In thirty five years the sellouts have managed to reign in the affluence of 80% of Americans. They’ve sold off our manufacturing capacity [looted our productive infrastructure] and stashed the cash in the Cayman Islands. They’ve converted our economy to 80% service and made US dependent on a hostile power, China, for the goods we need to live. Free trade and free market are code for the freedom of an elite few parasites to dress up old con games, the pyramid schemes of money changers [banking and finance] and loan sharks. They call their frauds conservative economy.
The theory is that the market provides the “best of all possible worlds” at the lowest cost. That’s extended to free trade agreements. The reality that comes forth is never closely inspected. The lowest cost is to the investor, who maximizes profit at our expense, as we pay the out of season prices for fruit [or whatever] all year round. The shorter supply, which their market manipulations create, demands it. And we’re paid as little as possible, which helps to increase their margin yet again. The question on everyone’s mind is: which of the priests and acolytes of the money god are true believers and which are insincere, greedy and malicious fools? But the question isn’t very important. Both are greedy parasites, who pose threats to our survival. Both are stupidly unaware that they’re self destructive, because their blind desire for wealth causes them to dissipate the economy that provides all of our sustenance, even their own.
The free market theories of Friedman helped conservatives to regain control of the economy, after the New Deal had succeeded in creating prosperity for all. The well being of the community, which conservatives see as their private plantation for the cultivation of personal wealth, is seen as improper or immoral by many of the elite class. Then came Becker, the next Nobel prize for the Chicago School, to reinforce notions of the moral uprightness of their greed with his economic models for social behavior. That dynamic duo brought on the latest outbreak of the traditional plutocracy, the neo-aristocracy, which has become pandemic. The past 35 years of decline is the most obvious symptom. Greed for the produce of the community by an elite few is the disease that threatens our survival. Think in terms of the equilibrium that must be maintained in order to have a stable economy. If one has more than average another must have less. If money is taken from the system but no goods are input to it, the economy will dissipate. The Chicago School is much too myopic to see so far ahead. Becker’s Nobel Prize noted the predictability afforded by his models. Isn’t that ironic?
The free market frenzy and free trade agreements are mostly Friedman’s contribution to the eclectic theory of capitalism. Becker is more notable for the rationalization of greed and the righteousness of the concentration of wealth. The theories have it that we all have a share. But the elite few have profited, while the rest of US have been the source of their wealth, like live stock that fattens a pestilence of worms and leeches. For one to have more . . . The rich investor’s profits increase, when the prices their market bears increase, or if our wages decrease. Reducing package size or cutting quality are indirect price increases. If free trade doesn’t cause higher profits/prices, it gives US lower quality goods or greater dependence on foreigners for what we need to support our lives. In the meantime greater profits are to be made by outsourcing manufacturing to cheap labor countries. When all of our manufacturers do this, two things must happen.
One: our economy generates money but produces no goods. We move people and things about in the service economy and generate profits on paper, but we must spend that money overseas to get the goods we need to live. In traditional foreign trade, the money we spend on foreign products is returned to US, when the trading partner buys our products. Thus the trade equilibrium is maintained. There are all kinds of equilibriums that must be maintained to sustain a real economy of goods.
Two: the investors, to whom access to foreign markets was given, as per their demand, by trade agreements, get more money by cutting wages of the service workers at home or outsourcing high end engineering, software and accounting jobs. More debt, generating more interest/inflation, is the result of the fraudulent free market activity. And the debt kite flies ever higher on the economist’s wind. While we borrow just to pay the mortgage/rent and to feed the kids.
But we no longer make many goods in our almost all [80%] service economy. We just make money. We inflate the money supply with all manner of usuries and unnecessary services. We then exacerbate the dissipation, caused by the inflation for the enrichment of economic parasites, by the acquisition of money to buy more of the goods we need from China, when we borrow it from the Chinese. So we print it and borrow it from ourselves, the FED, or we borrow it from the Chinese. The hot air of economists, like Friedman, Becker, and their students, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke is the economic wind. Their gaseous emissions are all that we have to keep our debt kite flying. A dull child should be able to see why this fraud must fail. But not the Chicago School.
Becker, the spiritual heir of Friedman, won his Nobel Prize in 1992. In a recent essay he talked about privatization of social security. Privatization is always desirable in his opinion, no matter what the object. He noted that SS is pay as you go. Without mentioning Ponzi, he made the national pension system’s pyramid scheme nature evident anyway. He also didn’t mention that it was the looting of what he described as the “so called” trust fund, which had turned the retirement insurance into an outright burden on tomorrow’s workers. He also didn’t mention that the stock market, insurance, banking, in short all of finance, are also pyramid scams. I think I can show that even trade is a con game at the level of brokers and other middlemen. In any case, all the argument against Social Security in government hands is due to faults created by the detractors and those who profit from the looting of the treasury and trust funds that they’re condemning. Like the fraudulent airline and manufacturer’s bankruptcies that loot the pensions and push the deprecated benefits burden onto the tax payer, its all fraud. And Becker is the free trade/free market scam apologist and strategist, like Friedman was before him.
Milton died last fall so its too late for him. But Gary and Alan are still knocking around and filling heads with hot air. Ben’s still in the thick of things. Let me spell it out for them. The value of our currency is falling because we make nothing that anyone cares to buy with our money. No matter how fast or how far one moves goods, there will be no more real things at the end of the day. The increase in the prices of our homes only increases the money supply. Such does not increase the value of anything. On the contrary! The inflation of prices coupled with the increase of investor’s and financial profits decrease the value of our money faster than the trade deficit, which is basically a debt anyway. Wake up! When the Chinese get tired of playing the three ring debt circus you clowns call an economy, we will have no livelihoods. You morons are disgusting! Why do I waste my breath? As long as the elite parasites got theirs today they don’t care about US and have no thought for tomorrow. They’re too caught up in the moment of their empire fantasy game to see around the play to the real dead end world they’ve created.
But wait! I’m all wrong. The World Bank, IMF and other Giga Corporate enterprises and the few rich investors that own them are doing great. Tony Snow just said for the fiftieth time that the economy is booming. It must be so. What’s good for the global corporate empire’s hegemony is good for the profit of rich investors. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll obey your national suzerain! Your low wages, no pension and lack of adequate health care contribute to the profit of the neo-aristocrats, who are the majority stockholders of all the Giga corporations. If you value your job and livelihood, such as it is, keep your mouth shut.
Do and think as you’re told by the royal peers of the global empire. They’ll instruct the president, congress and courts, who will pass on to you what you need to know. Alternatively you’ll be directly instructed using electronic or print media, in schools or other advertising. Do not try to think on your own! It will be done for you. You will be informed with what you need to know to perform your assigned task. All tasks will be coordinated for the enrichment of the principal investors, by their wholly owned representatives.
Remember, centrally planned economies only work when in the control of Wall Street Plutocrats. Central control will cause a socialistic model, which benefits the common well being, to fail. And everyone knows, cooperatively owned farms, mines and manufacturing, which emulate free markets by choosing the products to produce and other strategic decisions, through democratic action by the workers, cannot succeed. While remaining autonomous, free, egalitarian and distributed, they lack the kind of central planning and/or control that’s provided by investors. Most importantly, the centrally [Wall Street plutocratic oligarchy] planned capitalist empire has the power to stop any such construct that could benefit the community that is dominated for the enrichment of a few elite neo-aristocrats. “Resistance is futile!”
You don’t want to end up in prison or worse. Rebels to the World Bank/IMF backed global corporate empire’s hegemony and suzerains are labeled terrorists and criminals, like the English have done to the Irish. The Mexican and Columbian aristocrats are doing this right now to rebels against economic tyranny. They tell US, like the English have done for hundreds of years, that the insurgents are wantonly violent killers, drug dealers and criminals. The same thing happens to rebels around the world, who are deliberately mislabeled terrorists. There are real terrorist criminals. Many of those so labeled are, none the less, victims of propaganda campaigns in the support of the rule of the rich. They subvert our minds to the point that people don’t know reality. All has been displaced by lies.
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