US – The economic Elysium predicted by backers of free trade prior to its passage never developed

America’s current economic unwinding didn’t begin on Wall Street in 2008, as is often reiterated. Its genesis lies in the affluence-to-poverty trade regiments enacted by President Clinton, beginning in 1993.

Seduced by assurances that free trade would create millions of new high-paying jobs in the United States, Democrats, aided by Republican politicos like Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole and David Gergen, succumbed to K Street coercion and codified free trade into American law.

However, the economic Elysium predicted by backers of free trade prior to its passage never developed — principally because free trade, as a 21st century neocolonial economic compact, is no longer nation-based. Rather, this new version is a United Nation’s developed transnational colonialism. It is a system designed to benefit a new superclass of cosmopolitan stakeholders bereft of nationalistic sentimentality, itching to profit from the coming realignment in global prosperity.

Correspondingly, America’s most acute trade-related dilemma today is unemployment. However, it’s impossible for the United States to address the problem of trade-related dislocations, even modestly, when the entirety of our nation’s trade policy is premised upon the notion that surrendering America’s economy to foreign interests, while simultaneously relocating tens of millions of American jobs offshore, somehow benefits our nation’s competitiveness.

Remember, it isn’t actually competition when one party, America, supplies the other parties, its economic rivals, with the prerequisites required for their mercantile success. That includes providing them the education, technology, infrastructure, financing and jobs needed to dominate every sector of international commerce — all with public tax dollars.

Clearly, the American people have been sacrificed, duped into underwriting their own economic demise by our country’s elected public servants in Washington…

via Americans underwrite their own demise – phillyburbs.com: Opinion.