When does Ignorance become Stupidity?
Ron Ault, President
Metal Trades Department, AFL-CIO
Many people are ignorant of facts and statistics…but when politicians are fully aware of the facts and statistics and still keep uttering the phrase…”I am a free trader,” that is stupid, because they know better. Free trade doesn’t exist….it is a lie. Not only is it a lie, but it is a damn lie.
For at least the past eight years our government policy makers have been aware that sovereign governments have been operating under the guise of globalization to exploit America’s stubborn adherence to the elusive concept of free trade. Yet our political leaders remain in denial and hang on because they have nowhere else to go. They have staked their careers on globalization and free trade.
Articles by respected authors as far back as early 2004 assert that Nationalism has replaced Globalism (The Collapse of Globalism: and the Rebirth of Nationalism by John R. Saul- Harper’s Magazine, March 2004); and recently Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis penned an article entitled, Global Ties Under Stress as Nations Grab Power (April 28, 2008). In his piece, Davis makes the point that barriers are rising. Call it the new nationalism. ``The era of easy globalization is certainly over,'' says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, whose 1998 book, ``The Commanding Heights,'' detailed the triumph of markets over nations, starting with British deregulation under Margaret Thatcher. His thesis is now: `The power of the state is reasserting itself.''
It’s flattering that all this powerful documentation by noted authors validates what some of us in the Labor community have been saying and writing about for years, but it really changes nothing. We continue to see the real everyday effects of our failed federal government’s economic policies and the costs in human suffering.
We now see America’s falling standard of living as other nations use their sovereign funds to pillage the U.S.— • Buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of our best and most fertile farmlands; • Acquiring strategic defense related industries; • Taking possession of our prime industrial raw materials for shipment to their home industries to turn out finished, value-added products that we once made—raw logs for foreign plywood factories and furniture factories to produce foreign made finished products from our raw materials… These are not responses to “market forces”; they are the extension of official policies by sovereign governments to advance their national interests at the expense of ours.
In just two decades America has gone from the greatest industrial nation in the world to the world’s greatest debtor nation. Will America become the newest entrant to the third world? Is this just a cruel twist of fate or something else? I’m from Arkansas, just next door to Missouri, the “show me” state. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, has feathers and quacks- I call that a duck! Our enemies, who hate everything we stand for, figured it out. They could never defeat us militarily…we had the best military and our nuclear arsenal was more advanced and technically superior…they knew this. Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev predicted in 1962 that America would be conquered and they would never fire a shot. “The capitalist will sell us the rope we hang them with.”
Ironically, the White House—which consistently touts its commitment to “protecting” America and its citizens—has no official policy directed at safeguarding our infrastructure against economic attack. No one in the Pentagon has the job of determining what strategic industries cannot be sold to foreign nations. That job was contracted out to private contractors years ago. This would be a comedy if it wasn’t so tragic.
And I know nothing is going to change until all Americans are personally and dramatically affected in a way that cannot be ignored. Necessity will once again become the mother of invention. Unless these threats are acknowledged and dealt with, there will one day be a footnote in history describing the death of the world’s greatest superpower as a suicide.
In Solidarity
Ron Ault
Metal Trades Department, AFL-CiO • 815 16th Street, NW •Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202-508-3705 • Fax: 202-508-3706 • email: metaltradesweb@aol.com
