Friday, November 11, 2005

Free Trade Liberals and Other Useless Inventions

Nathan Newman has a great takedown of the pitfalls (or pratfalls, if you prefer) of liberals who time and again sell out working people and the environment in favor of corporate managed trade agreements.

Even where protections for workers are worked into the deals, their implementation is often underfunded, undermined, and underutilized.

Case in point: Trade Adjustment Assistance. The short version is that this was supposed to be extra unemployment security for those who can show that their jobs were lost due to corporate controlled globalization. Sounds nice. The problem is that Bush has frozen its implementation.

And where are Democrats on this issue? Nowheresville, man. Nowheresville.

That's the responsible position to take. Anything else and you're firmly in left-wing lunacy territory.

One other point that these 'liberals' always seem to miss: if this kind of trade is so great and wonderful and shiny and tasty, and inevitable and unstoppable then why must union leaders be jailed, shot, and disappeared to make it work?

Why can't working people have their say without the threat of violence hanging over their heads?

Oh, then there's the kids.

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