This interview was done in 1994, when Bill Clinton was promoting free trade and multinationalism, but had not yet made a deal with China to allow them to devalue their currency and then receive favored nation status.
You can decide for yourself, with the benefit of retrospect, the value of the arguments presented.
The goal of multinationalism is to destroy local government, choice, and sovereignty, through financial and military means. The will to power cuts across diverse forms of government, because of its attitude of the power of the few and the worth of the many. It defines what is 'human' to suit its needs of the moment.
The primary problem with unregulated trade, not considered within the context of overall social and public policy, is that it becomes a natural weapon for oligarchies and multinationals to use against local and regional government and public policy decisions, taxation, environmental laws, human rights. It is a major stepping stone to world government. There is a recurring movement among the powerful to bring the world under their control. It is the natural extension of their greed for power. There is never 'enough.' Sociopathic greed is a disease, and it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Always.
And this is why idealistic models of unregulated free market economics fall apart in practice, always.
Trade *could* be used to uplift the developing world, if it was accompanied by local reforms and progressive public policy, but in practice is most often used to create a huge social divide in the developed countries, and promote a return to a feudalistic political structure. Rather than uplift, it reduces the world to the least common denominator of quality of life and freedom.
One of the most significant problems is mercantilism, employed by oligarchic countries and multinational corporations, within the context of a fiat currency system wherein they are relatively free to short circuit all the market mechanisms that would prevent a few countries from creating enormous trade imbalances in a partnership with powerful elites and the privileged around the world.
Macro-economics has never been a pure science, but is often represented as such by those who are promoting theories that are purely political, cloaking them in false objectivity. Macro-economics is a social science, more like sociology than physics. In reality it is a subset of public policy discussions, highly slanted to ends and assumptions, attitudes and points of view about what is 'good' and valuable rather than what is a hard and replicable principles of nature, objectively true based on some endurable physical law.
So for example, if someone were to come out and say, "I think we should adopt the social structure of a nation and form of government your father spent much of their lives fighting and dying, where you give up most of your wealth and freedom to serve the powerful few who run the state," there would be a general uprising. But if the proposition is structured as the logical consequence of 'hard economic choices,' and a serious of crises, people can be led off the cliff, a few steps at a time.
"The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men."If this trend continues, I would imagine the next step is civil unrest, and political crises that will be used to tighten the control over the public in the 'free countries,' and repress them for their own safety. We are seeing this now in the Anglo-American client states and unpopular dictatorships overseas.
Samuel Adams
Most men are easily fooled, entrapped by their emotions, easily herded by clever arguments and the dialectic of false enemies. It is only when they step back, and look at what is happening, who benefits and who is above the law, that they begin to realize the truth. But they will not do this for quite some time, because to do so is to admit that they have been fools.
How sad that the heirs to the 'greatest generation,' almost surely the most privileged generation in history, have in their excess become selfish, petty, and cruel.
The corollary of a few "Too Big To Fail" is that there are many individuals and small businesses who become "Too Small To Care" and then "Too Weak To Survive."
And so the weak and the undesirable are eliminated, first slowly and then with growing efficiency, for the good of the chosen few, the ubermensch, however a society chooses to define it.
Does this sound *conspiratorial* and outlandish? Check back in another ten years, and let me know how you and your children are doing. There was a budget surplus in the 1990's. And now the nation is throwing the middle class and the weak under the bus for the sake of the financial sector and the wealthy.
Once a single global currency is achieved, it is the end game for freedom for all but a few. Those who imagine that they are part of the few are all for this, although they are sadly mistaken. The few view them as useful idiots, disposable, and prey.
What the few themselves may not yet realize is that tyrants and empires tend, almost inevitably, to fall in disgrace, blinded and betrayed by the will to power, overcome by the love of freedom and the tide of history. So there is hope. But sometimes hope can become a distant memory, and freedom regained only by significant pain and loss of life, once you have released it from your grasp.
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it--always.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
