Free Trade and Poison Pills

Granted that the various free trade agreements as they've manifested are in general bad news for the US, this report from Digby sort of puts the cherry on top:

I'm not sure most people realized that these deals could actually adversely affect well ... us, in any other way than perhaps job loss (which we are told is a perfectly reasonable trade-offs for the privilege of buying cheap goods.) As bad as that is, it's not the whole story. These trade deals basically make it possible for global corporate interests to circumvent our laws right here in the good old USA in a number of different ways.

One wonders where people like Grover Norquist -- free trade and untrammeled national sovereignty -- are hiding.

And how does it feel to know that all your local environmental laws and product safety laws aren't worth the paper they're printed on?

The whole Word Bank/WTO/Free Trade cabal really needs to be cut down to size. They're nothing more than economic terrorists as far as I can see. We should just pull out.

As an indicator of just how blindly pernicious the IMF/World Bank/WTO cabal is, see this post by PhoenixWoman at FDL.

If you haven't picked up a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine yet, please do so. It not only explains what the Chicago-School-educated dictators and their US backers have been doing around the world to destroy government programs that actually help the poor and working classes -- it also shows how the people, especially in Latin America, have been fighting back and winning, blowing off the free-marketeers of the IMF and World Bank and other like-minded entities. To the growing list of nations that are fighting back and winning, we can add one more: Malawi.

As recently as 2005, Malawi's leaders had obediently followed the dictates of the free-market gospel spreaders. They cut back their government subsidies, especially for seeds and fertilizer, and watched as harvest after harvest failed. Yet the free marketeers kept giving Malawi prescriptions for more of the same: No government interference. Besides, why should your silly people bother with being able to feed themselves, when they could be growing cash crops for export!

One begins to wonder just what the agenda is here? Nothing rational, apparently. Fortunately, Malawi told the IMF to go blow itself. Result? Huge increases in harvests.

A thought: "imperialism" itself is value-neutral. Too much depends on who's running the empire. The IMF/World Bank/WTO kind is the worst -- purely exploitive, anti-humanitarian, and authoritarian.

Throw the bums out.