Not good.

Editor,

So now free trade has been renamed yet again, this time as "open trade." A rotten egg smells like a rotten egg no matter what you call it.

Trade is good. Customers for one's products is good. But the components of free trade, now apparently called open trade, that corporations like the most are still the root of the economic woes of everyman in every corner of this planet: unrestricted capital flows across international borders, privatization of essential goods and services, exporting factories to locales with abundant cheap labor to manufacture goods for consumers in the markets from which the factories were exported.

These practices are not "trade." They are ploys designed to concentrate wealth, which translates into political power (as money still buys politicians), in fewer and fewer hands while consigning more and more people to poverty or wage slavery.

Trade is good. Scamming the human race is not good.

re: "Global Economic Challenges" (9/25/2009)