Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Trade is not good for America?

It ranks up there with Alan Greenspan's discovery of a flaw in his ideology - he thought that financial institutions would be adequately self-regulating out of self-interest. Now, after a financial collapse unlike any seen in the last six decades and the US economy on the verge of a great depression, he goes "oops!".

The "it" that I began with is here:
A few months ago, Robert Cassidy found himself pondering whether trade actually benefited the American economy. "I couldn't prove it," he says. "Did it benefit U.S. multinational corporations? Yes. But I cannot prove that it benefits the economy."......

....More elementally, he {Cassidy} argues, U.S. trade policy should be based on America's economic self-interest. It speaks volumes about the last couple of decades of U.S. trade policy that the man who negotiated many key points of that policy now thinks that they were calculated not to enhance our national interest but, rather, those of U.S. financial and corporate interests.


How many of these "Oops! I was wrong" can we endure?