Corporate Fascism Marches On
David Glenn Cox
The North American Free Trade Act has caused economic disruptions in all of the nations involved. American industrial workers are forced to compete against Mexican wage scales. Small Mexican farmers are forced to compete against giant American agribusiness. Industrial pollution in Mexico has poisoned water supplies, driving ever more small farmers off of their lands. In Tijuana, the water treatment facility is near collapse. The city's water treatment facility is antiquated and overwhelmed by industrial waste water that the facility was never designed to handle.
The toxic overflow is then released into the Pacific Ocean where it washes up on California's beaches. The situation in Tijuana is illustrative of Free Trade in general. The elimination of tariffs and low environmental standards makes Tijuana a better place for huge mega corporations to manufacture and produce goods. The Korean giant Samsung manufactures television sets there and dumps toxic cleaning solvents directly into the water. They pay their workers wages below the American minimum wage and when their product is complete, it is boxed up for shipment to the United States, tariff free.
(more at)
http://www.leftistreview.com/2011/04/30/corporate-fascism-marches-on/davidcox/
Author's Bio: I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really. Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am. We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life. http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=Corporate-Fascism-Marches-by-David-Glenn-Cox-110501-740.html&c=a
May 1, 2011