The High Priests of Economics tell us that "globalization cannot be stopped," much like the wrath of the Inca's Volcano God. We've been told that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization other than utter ruin.

Every time someone suggested renegotiating, or Gawd-forbid leaving NAFTA, then you better have a fainting couch nearby because you would think that someone just told the economists and politicians that Santa Claus died.

Don't anger the Great Volcano Gawd Of Free Trade!

This leaves one to assume that corporate executives would feel the same.

It turns out that CEO's don't.



In describing what life would be like without Nafta, some business groups have stopped just short of predicting a plague of locusts.

Listen to American CEOs, though, and the potential collapse of the continent’s trade framework doesn’t sound quite so scary.

As talks on reshaping the pact drag into a seventh month, executives are getting asked -- on earnings calls and at conferences -- how their businesses would fare in the event of a breakdown. Words like “well-positioned” and “manageable” keep cropping up in their answers.

Gosh, why would corporate executives not get excited over a FTA that we've been told for a generation is absolutely necessary? They don't even use it.



Still, some little-known data from the depths of the Nafta ledger helps explain why the CEOs sound sanguine. A growing number of exporters in Canada and Mexico don’t even bother to fill out the paperwork that would entitle them to use Nafta’s preferential tariffs.

Last year, only 43 percent of imports from Canada came into the U.S. under Nafta rules. The figure for Mexico was higher, at 58 percent, but still short of an overwhelming majority.



Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came out and said, “We will not be pushed into accepting any old deal, and no deal might very well be better for Canada than a bad deal.”

NAFTA isn't very popular south of the border either.



Lopez Obrador, 64, has been attacked by the business community and NAFTA supporters as a "threat to Mexico" because of his nationalist economic policies and his populist motto: "For the good of all, the poor come first."

The poor come first? Now there's a very un-American idea.

Both Mexico and Canada at least consider the welfare of their working class.

In the United States, the Democrats never even considered the idea of re-negotiating NAFTA for fear of offending their corporate donors. They ignored the threats and pleading of labor unions and the working class.

It required a meglomaniacal, anti-union Republican to renegotiate NAFTA.

How sad is that?

Corporate America doesn't care all that much about NAFTA anymore because it already got what it wanted most of all - the destruction of labor union in this country, and the submission of the working class.

The decline of the American middle class has finally reached the point that American workers can compete against Chinese peasants. Victory is in sight!

How much have things changed since the start of this Depression? A lot.

Whereas the gap in labor costs between the two countries was about $17 per hour in 2006, that could shrink to as little as $7 per hour by 2015,

With any luck our corporate masters will soon be installing suicide nets outside their American factories too.

All one needs to do is look at economic history to see that the free trade mantra has no basis in fact.



Ulysses Grant, the Civil war hero and US president between 1868 and 1876, remarked that "within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade". How prescient - except that his country did rather better than his prediction.

The fact is that rich countries did not develop on the basis of the policies and institutions they now recommend to developing countries. Virtually all of them used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. In the earlier stages of their development, they did not even have basic institutions such as democracy, a central bank and a professional civil service.

Once they became rich, these countries started demanding that the poorer countries practise free trade and introduce "advanced" institutions - if necessary through colonialism and unequal treaties. Friedrich List, the leading German economist of the mid-19th century, argued that in this way the more developed countries wanted to "kick away the ladder" with which they climbed to the top and so deny poorer countries the chance to develop.

The American System: The blueprint for prosperity

Most Americans aren't aware that America once had a national economic plan, and it existed from the days of President Lincoln to President Nixon in one form or another. During that 112 year period America grew from an agrarian, frontier nation, to the most mighty economic power the world had ever seen.

The roots of the American School of Economics go back to Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry Clay of the Whig Party.

The American School of Economics was far different from the dominant economic thought of today.

The key components of the American School directly confront, deny and refute the economic imperialism that the so-called "Free Trade" school championed then by England and imposed by means mostly foul upon Europe over the years. It rejects free trade by imposing a system of duties, tariffs and other measures designed to defend the nation against economic threats by foreign predators. It uses government-directed spending projects meant to provide the infrastructure necessary for individuals to develop into the highly-educated and highly-trained people capable of being the ambitious and enterprising productive people we are famous for being. It chartered a national bank, owned wholly by the government, that administered the lines of credit necessary to get all of this done and otherwise oversaw the monetary policy of the state- and thus remained utterly accountable to the people by way of Congress and the Presidency.

The American School of Economics also involved government support for the development of science and a public school system. Through this economic philosophy America set the standard in manufacturing, higher education, scientific research and development, finance, and general standard of living.

What will the corporate Democrats do if NAFTA collapses and an economic catastrophe doesn't happen, like they've assured us would happen for decades?

Will they just ignore the fact that they've been lying to the working class for a generation? Will they pretend that no one remembers their lies?

"[They say] if you had not had the Protective Tariff things would be a little cheaper. Well, whether a thing is cheap or dear depends upon what we can earn by our daily labor. Free trade cheapens the product by cheapening the producer. Protection cheapens the product by elevating the producer. Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of self-development, of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man."

- President William McKinley