Sent to The Sacramento Bee on 4/20/08, by Murray Cohen, and not published:
Daniel Weintraub says (Bee: April 20, 2008) that “the best argument for free trade is a moral one… It’s a matter of free will.” He’s angry at Pelosi for opposing a free trade agreement with Colombia, whose government routinely hires mercenaries to murder union activists. Weintraub doesn’t like unions either… Free trade agreements, however, are negotiated by representatives of global corporations to enhance the wealth and power of their chief investors, and are increasingly opposed to the interests of the majority of American workers, whose salaries, health care, pensions, and very way of life have been subverted by these very corporations. Americans have been pitted in a freefall competition with the victims of an older, cruder imperialism, now dubbed “neo-liberalism/free trade/globalism”. Corporations are not individuals democratically exercising their “free will.” They are instutionalized tyrannies of the rich. As workers, we are not citizens but subjects of the owners of these institutions.
Weintraub should know these self-evident truths, but maybe he’s even better informed about which side of his journalistic bread the butter’s on. …Or, perhaps, like the rest us, he’s been politically and morally dumbed down by the vast, decades old, corporate and billionaire-funded think tank campaigns to make us think like our worst enemies.
