> So, the only significant voice against free trade remains
> Buchanan.
Speaking of free trade and presidential candidacy, Warren Beatty was on the radio the other night, speaking at the ADA's Eleanor Roosevelt Awards Dinner or somesuch and relayed on the local NPR station.
There's a transcript at http://adaction.org/beatty1999.html - here's a small excerpt on trade:
"...But our government is susceptible to a corporate economic globalization that is not free trade but corporate managed trade. And the global economy is not working yet for most people. But Pat Buchanan is wrong. We can't build a wall or turn our back on it. We have to work with it.
The problem in this new economy is the undue influence these institutions and corporations have over government actions. They set the rules. Others aren't invited to the table. What we are in danger of experiencing is a slow motion coup d'etat of big money's interests over the public interest. So the global rules, written into trade agreements like NAFTA and enforced by institutions like the World Trade Organization, protect things like patents and intellectual property rights but not labor rights, profits but not people, investments but not the environment. We know the results -- growth, increasing trade, some development, some people making lots of money.
But 475 billionaires have as much wealth as half the people on earth. We have the sweatshop again. Child labor. Slave labor. Destruction of forests, fish, water and air. And so far we haven't heard a word of requirements on labor and environment and product safety in the agreement being negotiated over Chinese admission to the World Trade Organization.
Of course our stocks have gone up. But we're making the world safe for globalization rather than making globalization safe for the world.
If we don't act to do something about this and make the world economy work for everybody, we're going to see a reaction that will make Pat Buchanan look like a choir boy. Which I'm told he once was.
Why aren't the Democratic candidates addressing this? They offer their devotion to globalization as if these markets were made by God rather than investors.
Why? Could it possibly be the leading candidates in both parties are, by definition, those who have raised the most money from these same sources? We don't need a third party. We need a second party.
And what has happened to the labor movement? What would Walter Reuther say today? Is there no protest anymore?"
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/ dave /