"Some Truth About Trade"

Editor,

"Trade" is good. International "investment" is bad.

Good for the reasons frequently touted by the NYT -- imports, export markets. Bad for reasons you never mention -- as in "Some Truth About Trade" (4/6/08), where once again you frame the debate about "trade" in terms of "help" for displaced American workers.

The American domestic economy, since Ronald Reagan launched his assault on workers and the middle class, has been steadily concentrating the wealth of this nation into fewer and fewer hands, primarily through deregulation, which "liberates" monopoly capital and "frees" speculators to liquidate the assets of communities and the nation as a whole for no one's benefit but their own.

In the international arena, indigenous competition, which one would naively think is synonymous with "trade", is crushed under the weight of the same skewed rules of the road as in our domestic economy -- corporate interests trump all others -- only orders of magnitude worse.

Child labor, slave labor, ruthless abuse of workers, crippling of organized labor, and privatizing resources into the hands of "investors" halfway across the globe are common in developing economies, and none of these qualify in any reasonable person's book as "competition". What these practices in particular and global capitalism in general amount to is "accumulation by dispossession" -- theft -- and to argue for better unemployment benefits in the U.S.A. to lull American workers into acquiescence to this scheme of organized plunder is hardly to argue for some "truth" about trade.