Part Five. The Wisdom Of Protectionism. The Madness Of Free Trade

Part Five.  The Wisdom of Protectionism.  The Madness of Free Trade.

“Protectionism” is a curse word among Free Market, Free Trade believers.  They make up the majority of “professional” economists and an overwhelming number among press and media spokespeople in Canada.

Can they be wrong?  I would say they are wrong, often criminally wrong.  They parrot the hypnotizing mumbo-jumbo of the kinds of people across (especially) the Western world who have gambled away the well-being and security of millions upon millions of people in order to concentrate (in fact) criminally acquired wealth into a few hands – through bank, financial, credit, and investment fraud.

No wonder average Canadians are confused about the subject – being asked daily to believe lies and half-truths.

The role of the fraudsters must be seen clearly.  They knew what they were doing.  They got away with it – and they are being built back into positions from which they can do almost the same things again.  They got away with it because U.S. power (U.S. control of much of the world) depends upon the U.S. financial/brokerage/credit/bank operation.  It depends, in short, upon the U.S. dollar being used, almost totally arbitrarily, as the world’s “reserve currency”.

The U.S. gained that position by manipulating international trade and finance power into its own hands at the (famous) Bretton Woods meetings in 1944 and 1945 (when much of the rest of the world was in a state of collapse).  After that, the U.S. consolidated its position when U.S. president Richard Nixon dumped gold in the 1980s as the reserve standard upon which to fix the value of currencies.

What would fix the value of commodities traded across the world and the value of currencies used once gold could no longer fix value?  For better or worse, the world decided that the currency of the most wealthy and most productive country would be the standard.  And so, as they used to have reserves of gold, countries stock-piled U.S. dollars in various forms.

The fall of the Soviet Union (1991) as physical competitor of the U.S.A. released U.S. operatives almost completely to gather nations into U.S. control by use of the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and other (U.S.-controlled) parallel institutions. The present “Crash” has done nothing significant to change that fact. Claiming to reconstruct its procedures, the International Monetary Fund has not. It still demands that debtor countries impoverish themselves, raise interest rates, cut public expenditures, freeze wages, and place themselves in a weakened position ripe for the picking off of their public corporations and major wealth resources by foreign corporations.

Since the U.S. could (and can) print U.S. dollars that other nations use in world trade and “hold in reserve” (as they used to hold gold in reserve) nothing has prevented the U.S. from “producing” U.S. dollars to keep it in paramount position. You might say that “U.S. dollar mining” has gone on as “gold mining” used to do. 

But what has been produced is a kind of “fool’s currency” in the way we used to speak of “fool’s gold” when people produced fake gold to pass off as the real thing. The U.S. production of growing deficits and its huge pump-priming attempt to save its economy and world position may, finally, worsen its condition, bringing disaster upon itself and others.

The gigantic financial fraud which caused the collapse or near-collapse of major U.S. (as well as British and continental and other) financial institutions was caused, simply, by the baseless production of (mostly) U.S. credit instruments (promises to pay in U.S. dollars) or, said another way – the production of “fool’s dollars”.

Instead of clapping the chief architects of the fraud into jails, the Obama government has appointed them to banking and regulatory positions!  It has done so because the U.S. financial system is key to U.S. power (U.S. control of much of the world).

Countries that will (in some measure) survive the “Free Market” rape of the planet will be those who invest in and build upon the “Wisdom of Protectionism” and get as free as possible from U.S. (or other powerful country) control.  “Protectionism” is NOT, remember, anti-international trade.  It is a demand for “fair trade” and for the end to trade used as a way of taking over, dominating, and looting countries. 

Protectionism is the policy followed by a country to produce long-term economic well-being and stability through the fullest and most prudent use of national wealth.  “National wealth” is stored in a nation as farmland, people, and raw materials (including water, air, and sunlight) used efficiently.

Canadians must realize that the argument for “Free Markets” and “Free Trade” are made ALWAYS by two interests only: powerful countries which want to loot weaker ones, and influential, wealthy, media-controlling investors who want to profit from the looting of weaker (even their own) countries.

Remember.  The recent instigation of “fair trade” coffee (and other) commodity sales has come about by people who reacted against the (mostly U.S.) slave-economy operations in Central and South America. Trade in coffee hasn’t ended.  But coffee growers now get something closer to a fair price for their product because “fair” traders have partially replaced the former looters who were practicing slave economy methods in coffee growing and selling.

When forest operations, for instance, involved in looting have been located in Canada, they have frequently been foreign-owned.  Not only have the nearly-raw products frequently been exported to be “finished” – and profitted from – outside Canada.  But when (as with the production of paper), the raw product has been finished in Canada, the major profit has often been taken away by foreign owners of Canadian mills. 

Canada has lost – for at least a hundred years – revenue from forests that should have been used to build education, health, security, and long-range stability for Canadians.  If Canada was to insist upon serious conservation of forests and all finishing of forest products in Canada, automatically jobs would increase. There would be demand for a more educated work force, and a wide range of research, administrative initiatives, and technological invention would result.

A policy of protectionism wouldn’t, of course, insist, for instance, that all finishing (to the point of retail sale) of forest products must occur in Canada by Canadian-owned operations.  But such a policy would produce a thorough review that would doubtless result in the opening of “fair trade” and also the return to Canadians of jobs, educational opportunities, and increased revenue.

Free Trade is an economic system in which more powerful countries impose trading relations upon weaker countries.  The weaker countries always benefit least or are looted outright by the more powerful countries.

“Protectionism” is the only safeguard against the ravages of Free Trade, except for certain kinds of regional arrangements of the kind in South America.  Though the U.S. has worked for decades to harness all Central and South American countries to U.S.-controlled trade areas, it has not succeeded.  Presently, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas – based upon the well-being of populations rather than “free trade” profit-making – is gaining ground in South America in direct response to U.S. activity.

Trading arrangements can be widespread, multi-national, and fair.  But “Free Trade” as we know it is not fair trade.

A darker hue is added to the Free Trade/Protedctionism picture by global over-population and planetary exhaustion. 

Pakistan offers a painful example.  Complex, tangled, contradictory, it is discussed as a political problem between ruthless fundamentalists and better – but confused – liberal democrats, many sunk in corruption.  It is those things.  But it is also a “nuclear” nation, a client state of the U.S.A., and, therefore, a pawn in U.S. Free Trade and oil ambitions.

Probably more importantly, it is presently a country which cannot support its growing population – and so U.S. “aid” pours in, but mostly to militarize the country.  The Indus River is shrinking daily.  Expanding cities up-stream are drinking it away.  Farmland is becoming barren.  Catastrophe is present and predicted. The population grows….

Pakistan needs a water reclamation policy.  It needs a population control policy.  It needs a land-use policy.  It needs “Protectionist” concentration on long-term potential for economic stability and population stability.  It will not get those things as a client state of the U.S.A., as a “partner in global Free Trade and a partner in ‘the War on Terror’”.

All over the globe countries are – and the planet is – being ruthlessly looted and destroyed for the benefit of a blind, greedy, power-hungry few.  The looting is aided by the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and parallel (mostly U.S. controlled) organizations. 

As China moves quietly to unpick itself from its deep entanglement in U.S. debt and to seek resources around the world, there is no indication it wishes to develop “fair trade” or to emancipate the oppressed peoples of the world.  China is not developing the best of “Protectionism”, but the worst of big power “imperial” exploitation.  If China is moving to replace the U.S. as the world’s dominant power, it is, presently, continuing on the road which will guarantee the death of billions on the planet as (in Pakistan’s case) countries are unable to support their populations.  That way lies immense disaster and (in fact) the death of the planet as we know it.