Slay The "Free Trade" Monster
Left Hook Archives 2018 4-7
Yesterday President Trump threatened to triple the value of Chinese goods subject to tariffs to $100 billion in response to Chinese retaliation to his earlier moves. The DOW dropped another 572 points. In January I called a market top and laid the coming crash at the feet of Trump’s refreshing new trade policy.
Read this related article: https://open.substack.com/pub/deanhenderson/p/stock-market-begins-nose-dive?r=1v4ztf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The corporate media continues to fearmonger the tariffs. Grain megalith Cargill whined yesterday in a rare public statement that, “We are deeply concerned about the trade tensions and are urging both countries to get to the negotiating table. There are no winners in a trade dispute.”
The truth is that the winners will be the workers of the world, while the losers and actual target of these tariffs is not China, but the very corporations who crafted the modern concept of “free trade”, moved their operations to countries with the lowest possible wages and laughed all the way to the bank.
The post-WWII era has been marked by economic globalization. On October 30, 1947 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade) was signed by 23 nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Tucked into the emerging Bretton Woods financial architecture constructed by the winners of that war, GATT’s stated mission was to promote a “substantial reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers and the elimination of preferences, on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis."
On April 14, 1994 in Marrakesh, Morocco 100 more nations signed onto the Uruguay Round Agreements, which brought about the launch on January 1, 1995 of the 123-member World Trade Organization (WTO). Cargill executives were instrumental in the writing of those initial WTO rules, which have effectively usurped the sovereignty of every nation in the world.
When the US gained independence from the British Crown, it funded its coffers almost exclusively on tariffs levied on the likes of the Crown’s East India Company. Many of these tariffs were 100%. Even in 1947 the average tariff levied by GATT members on trading partners was 22%. By 1999, the average tariff of WTO nations was 5%. They have dropped ever since.
WTO allowed for the passage by the US Congress of a flurry of multilateral trade agreements, most notably NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). Successive US Presidents were given “fast track authority” on trade. A host of bilateral trade deals followed with Israel, Australia, South Korea, Jordan, Singapore, Oman, Chile, Peru, Panama, Morocco & Colombia.
As Wall Street soared, unions in Western nations were decimated. Deregulated, global capital flows surged, while less intrepid labor was left in place to be exploited. The passage of David Rockefeller’s Caribbean Basin Initiative established Haiti as a low-wage platform for the western hemisphere, while China quickly became the cheap labor camp of the east.
Currency manipulations by City of London bankers kept the game lucrative for their multinational corporate tentacles. This led to a new bunch of billionaires, a vanishing middle class and a large pool of desperate cheap labor to exploit in every corner of the globe.
Unprotected by tariffs, African farmers lost their land as fast as US family farms did, giving way to a toxic GMO corn and soybean-based agribusiness model dominated by Cargill, Monsanto, ADM, Bunge, Syngenta & Bayer. Wages stagnated in the deindustrialized US Rust Belt as corporations moved their production facilities to China and Mexico.
Not content with their ill-gotten riches, the new Robber Barons proposed yet more free trade agreements including Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA), U.S.–Middle East Free Trade Area (US-MEFTA) & Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
At a 1999 WTO meeting, the Battle in Seattle broke the deafening silence on opposition to “free trade”. Black bloc anarchists stalked the financial elite for the next decade, showing up at places like Toronto and Davos to disrupt and draw attention to various banker schemes.
In the fall of 2011, Occupy Wall Street was launched. Though short-lived, it too drew attention to the free trade scam. Slowly but surely, the world was getting wise to the injustices being perpetrated by the WTO and all it stood for.
There has been a direct correlation between the meteoric rise of stock markets since the early 1980’s and “free trade”. There has been an inverse correlation between both the stock boom and free trade, and an increase in global poverty, starvation, concentration of wealth and environmental ruin.
If we are to regain control of our world and our lives from the Illuminati bankers and their corporate appendages, the music on “free trade” must stop. Their media stooges will continue to decry these tariffs and the stock market will continue its descent. Never believe pathological liars and ditch your 401K.
Bubbles will be necessarily pricked, financial parasites will lose their grip, prices will remain stable, wages will increase, family farms will become viable again, and workers of the world will finally be protected from the race-to-the-bottom "free trade" monster.
Dean Henderson is the author of seven books, including, Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf, Illuminati Agenda 21, Nephilim Crown 5G Apocalypse and Royal Bloodline Wetiko & The Great Remembering. Subscribe free to his Left Hook column at deanhenderson.substack.com