Conservatives and Liberals Both Handing Power Over To Global Corporations

Washington's Blog

Preface: Liberals might assume that it is Republicans who are cheerleaders for global corporations at the expense of government.  But, as shown below, liberal politicians have been just as bad … or worse.

Matt Stoller – who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters – knows his way around Washington.

Stoller – a prominent liberal – has scoured the Congressional Record to unearth hidden historical facts.  For example, Stoller has previously shown that the U.S. government push for a “New World Order” is no wacky conspiracy theory, but extensively documented in the Congressional Record.

Now, Stoller uses the Congressional Record to show that “free trade” pacts were always aboutweakening nation-states to promote rule by multinationals:

Political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing.

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Liberal internationalists, including people like Chase CEO David Rockefeller and former Undersecretary of State and an architect of 1960s American trade policies George Ball, began pressing for reductions in non-tariff barriers, which they perceived as the next set of trade impediments to pull down. But the idea behind getting rid of these barriers wasn’t about free trade, it was about reorganizing the world so that corporations could manage resources for “the benefit of mankind”. It was a weird utopian vision that you can hear today in the current United States Trade Representative Michael Froman’s speeches. I’ve spoken with Froman about this history, and Froman himself does not seem to know much about it. But he is captive of these ideas, nonetheless, as is much of the elite class. They do not know the original ideology behind what is now just bureaucratic true believer-ism, they just know that free trade is good and right and true.

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