Free Trade? Fair Trade.

Editor,

The NYT claimed in an editorial today to "support free trade."

But the NYT does not support murdering union organizers in developing economies. Or running indigenous farmers out of business and into poverty by dumping heavily subsidized U.S. and European agribusiness products on developing economies. Or that 90% of a nation's wealth is controlled by 1% of its population. Or that spending is eliminated on health care, education, and other social services per "structural reforms."

The NYT supports mixed economies, cautiously endorsing Evo Morales's semi-nationalization of Bolivia's natural gas industry, for example.

It is true that the NYT supports monetarism and uncritically endorses prioritizing fighting inflation to guarantee international "investors' " profits -- at the expense of a "flexible" workforce, who hedge "investors' " bets with job insecurity and lost benefits. But the NYT simultaneously prefers Keynesian spending, to put purchasing power in the hands of unemployed workers, over trickle down Reaganomic neoliberal nonsense about tax cuts stimulating the economy.

The NYT understands that overproduction and the business cycle are inherent in capitalism, as is the corporate imperative to monopolize markets. The NYT supports some regulations aimed at corporations but opposes regulations aimed at controlling international capital flows (while, strangely, supporting regulating international labor flows via strict immigration laws, which again hedges international capitalists' bets at workers' expense).

NYT analysis is always couched in market terms, but the NYT does not espouse free-market fundamentalist dogma. Therefore, the NYT only thinks that it supports free trade. In fact the NYT supports fair trade.

It is true that the NYT is frequently swayed by neoliberal arguments based on cynical cooptations of embedded liberal themes and is fascinated by the lifestyle of the wealthy elite, but the NYT is torn by allegiance to the interests of that elite, because the NYT is also strongly committed to democracy and human rights, which have no currency in neoliberal theory or free trade.