The Framed 1’s Life

…so, when you hear another Free Trade Agreement (FTA) shit hovering around the news, please do have the initiative to ask:
1. Who shall benefit from it?
2. Who the fuck are the political dogs working for?

The world isn’t as static as the news portrays it to be; there’s a lot more movements underneath. Heard of conspiracy theories? Think they’re far out? Think of Operation Northwoods, an operational plan that was recently declassified about America staging a fake terrorist attack to justify a war on Cuba. It didn’t push through; but just think of the others that did.

Think the Philippines was the first one to have “People Power?” Research Kermit Roosevelt 1951 and Operation Ajax. Something to wake up from from the political propaganda propagated by the Victors of War. ^_^

Here’s some interesting read. A quick snapshot, really:

Britain’s technological lead, which enabled this shift to a free trade regime, had been achieved “behind high and long-lasting tariff barriers”, as the economic historian Paul Bairoch put it. For this reason Friedrich List, the 19th-century German economist who is (mistakenly) known as the father of the modern “infant industry” argument - the view that underdeveloped countries cannot develop new industries without state intervention, especially tariff protection - argued that the British appeal for free trade was selfish. He wrote:

“It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him . . . Any nation which by protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth”.

**

Ulysses S Grant, the war hero who was president of the US from 1869 to 1877, said: “For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade”

**
…but if free trade is so good, we would expect economic growth to have accelerated over the past two decades, given that there has been so much liberalisation. Yet during the bad old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when there was more protection, the world economy was in fact growing much faster than now - world per capita income was growing at about 3% a year, while during the past 20 years it has grown at only about 2%. Per capita income growth in the developed countries slowed from 3.2% to 2.2% between 1960 and 1980 and 1980 and 1999, while in the developing countries it went from 3% to 1.5%. Without the strong growth during the past two decades in China and India, neither of which has followed the neoliberal recipe, the rate would have been even lower.

This average growth rate does not fully convey the magnitude of crisis that many developing countries have experienced since 1982. Economic growth evaporated in Latin America, with the annual growth rate of per capita income crashing from 3.1% during 1960-80 to 0.6% during 1980-99. The crisis has been even deeper in other regions. Per capita income has shrunk in the Middle East and North Africa (at an annual rate of -0.2%) and in sub-Saharan Africa (-0.7%) during the past 20 years, whereas it grew at 2.5% and 2% during 1960-80. Since the start of their transition to capitalism, most former communist countries have experienced the fastest falls in living standards in modern history, and many have not yet recovered even half the per capita income level under communism.

**
Want more? Visit: http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2003/08freetradehistory.htm

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