"Coming down strongly against protectionism (at the Google Zeitgeist Conference) he argued once more for free trade:
"The two great protected industries of the moment are the two industries that are causing us the greatest problems today: the oil industry, with a cartel run by Opec; and the food industry, with high levels of subsidy.
"It is well known that one of Brown’s personal concerns is poverty. He is absolutely correct in highlighting the iniquity of protectionism, and that it is holding back the economic development of the world."
2 comments:
Gday GFN... Free Trade, actually, rather than make the world fairer, actually just makes it alot easier for powerful corporations to raid and pillage anything and everything, and instead of spreading wealth more equally, concentrates it in the hands of a very few, while a vast majority go with out...Have you heard of Naomi Kleins recent book, the shock doctrine?
Hi urbanmonk!
Can't see how powerful corporations are much worse or better than powerful governments.
I haven't read Naomi Klein's book but one review of it I have come across says that she "combines her critical analyses of the corporate economy with a naive celebration of ‘joyous’ populism, democracy and mass movements. The cynical abuse of democratic slogans by the Bush administration gives her no pause."
"Wasn’t there majority white support for the dispossession of New Orleans’ black community after Katrina? And wasn’t there majority Russian support for Putin’s wars in Chechnya? Isn’t the ordinary citizen’s fear and hatred of otherness as malicious a force as the corporate profiteer’s insatiable greed?"
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