The fleeting charm of free trade

[bemildred]

The signs are scattered and tentative. But it's beginning to look as if American-style free trade is going out of style.

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America’s current trading partners are openly questioning the value of their agreements with Washington. Prospective partners are walking away from the table.

Early this year, a decade-long drive to reach a hemispheric trade deal (Free Trade Area of the Americas) ran aground. The initiative, launched with great fanfare by former president Bill Clinton in 1994, was designed to bring 850 million people in 34 countries into a single barrier-free market. The deadline was Jan. 1, 2005.

The talks broke down when it became clear that Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela weren’t about to accept Washington’s terms of trade.

GNN

[sui generis]

1. because it only benefits the U.S.

and they've figured it out.

We have gotten so used to setting terms unilaterally that other countries are now starting to figure out that it NEVER works out to their advantage in a meaningful way, or the strings we attach to it are preposterous.

Even in our humanitarian aid assistance now we want countries receiving money for AIDS to use that money to promote biblical abstinence and publicly decry prostitution, even where it is legitimate, heavily licensed and regulated.

We're being called on our economic hypocrisy - please manufacture these dangerous chemicals in your dirt poor country at five times the risk and one tenth the cost. Yeah, right.

People are tired of our bullying ways, and the cracks are starting to show.

[Robert Oak]

2. ah, wrong organization

the "US" is a nation-state...
it only benefits multinational corporations and the super rich...
the "new world order" supplanting the nation-state.

:)

Me thinks the multinational corporations are succeeding in mesmerizing the American people that multinational corporations are the nation-state "US"...not so...
long ago we were for the American people and corporations were entities
that resided inside the nation-state.

:)