"Trade" is not the problem.

Editor,

Per your editorial "Is Trade the Problem" (4/27/08): American Company A "move[s] its production of circuit boards to Asia," then American Company B, which is now "compet[ing] with cheap imports," finds it "difficult" to increase pay.

Since when is exporting jobs "trade"?

Besides,the NYT, which complains routinely about the growing disparity between the wealth of the top 10% of Americans and everybody else, seems to assume that American CEO's are more generously sharing the profits of offshored manufacturing plants with their 30-cent-an-hour workers there than they are those of their domestic enterprises with their 30-dollar-an-hour American employees. Why do you think this?

And why would a so-called American corporation more willingly submit to consumer, labor, and environmental regulations (assuming any even exist) in a 3rd World country than it does to regulation in the United States? Here the corporations buy politicians to get regulators off their back. Corruption by American corporations abroad extends as far as Chiquita paying off right-wing death squads to eliminate grass-roots organizers threatening to diminish the "freedom" with which it plunders.

In answer to your question whether "trade" is THE problem, no, trade is not THE problem. Unbridled predatory capitalism is the problem. What you call "trade" is merely one symptom of a corrupt and criminal system that the NYT is too ideologically blinded to oppose.