Well, yeah, of course we're in decline. That's a consequence of free trade. It makes the poorer countries richer and us poorer. The global economic system actually spreads out wealth where trade is taking place. Kind of ironic that capitalism would spread the wealth around.
Well, no... and yes.
It is a consequence of free trade... and, you know, the lucky indian worker is a little better off than they were... but at the same time, ginormous corps like Monsanto are abusing them so badly that farmer suicide is up by 600% wherever the corp goes.
We CAN find examples where 'they get richer as we get poorer' is true, but these are exceptions. The people getting richer are the CEOs and Fund managers who run and exploit the declining wealth of America (and other developed nations) to buy half-asked products made by near-slave-labor workers in undeveloped nations. And no, that's not to blame those workers... Apple makes their stuff in China, too.. but they're still high quality. These poor people are making what they are being told to make, which means the crap that is on our shelves is not their fault, but the fault of the CEOs who are doing everything they can to cut every corner they can (including employing people at near-slave-labor wages) to line their own pockets.
Further, free trade has a habit of hurting BOTH sides of any given border. NAFTA, for example, has done incredible harm to both the USA and Mexico. It sounds like a nice idea but, because we here in the state have our tax money taken from us (in part) and given to corn producers (which now accounts, in one industrialized format or another, for 40% of everything we eat, be it corn, corn meal, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, etc, among other non-food products.) This absolutely MURDERED the lower subsistence classes of Mexico which relied on corn for any hope of income. They could not possibly compete with the pseudoprices set by taxpayer funded corn production.
The net result was a very large body of desperate laborers looking for work... and all they could do was look to the north where even the most crude jobs paid far better and the business owner were more than happy to fire their native-born laborers (who had been raised to expect higher wages and better benefits) in favor of masses of pliable worker who competed against each other and ensured they'd never have to be given a raise (being fireable at any time.) These people got incrementally richer than they were, but are still desperately poor... while all the people they replaced are suddenly left with mortgages, car payments, medical bills, school loans, etc, to pay and no means of paying it. The ripples spread across both sides of the border, destabilizing the security of workers in both regimes.
The only beneficiaries were the corporations, business owners, and CEOs who were willing to gouge the worker for even more profits than they were already making before NAFTA went into effect.
At the same time, this allowed factories in the states to abandon the communities they'd always been in in favor of exploiting cheap labor south of the border, too. Shoe makers, paper makers, dozens of varieties of manufacturing, etc. I lived in Maine which was particularly decimated by the sudden hemorrhaging of job positions. Old Town, for example, saw its property taxes, rents, etc, skyrocket when the local mill shut down since the mill had been a major player in the town's tax base. Without the jobs that were also there, however, the abandoned citizens couldn't afford the suddenly jacked up tax rates, and so were forced to move away, thus worsening the tax burden on those who couldn't afford to move, et cetera.
Oddly, the mill was not in any financial trouble at all ~until~ NAFTA. When their competitors operated on the same playing field they did, they were doing fine... but when free trade allowed the least honest of their competitors to exploit easily abusable workers, they either had to do it too or be put out of business.
The free trade agreement just makes it EASY to screw over their workers in the name of making a bigger buck than they already were. Worse, they got tax benefits TO DO IT. They got tax-payer paid assistance to shut down, move, and shack back up in Mexico. We paid them to abandoned us even as our tax costs went up as a result. And all the while, the newly employed workers south of the border are not being paid significantly more (if at all) than they were before this all happened... why? Because the vast droves of unemployed ensure there's always people they can suck up when they begin to fire the ones they did hire whose expectations got a little too high.
God, I harp on... sorry. It's just not as simple as the above statement made it sound. The part I don't get is how these corporations expect anyone to be able to afford to buy their products if they keep kicking the worker when he's down like this.
