Brexit

Thursday's vote on whether or not the UK stays in the EU has a lot of people nervous, even though the vast majority of Americans couldn't tell you what it is much less what impact it may have.  The British, at least, know what it is.  I'm not about to explain it here.

I do think it's interesting, however, how the two sides in the Brexit debate parallel the sides November's US election.  On one side are establishment neoliberals, continuing to invest irrational faith in the "rational markets" fallacy; embracing globalization with enthusiasm that entirely ignores its negative impact on people who actually have to labor for their living; and paying lip service to the social disruption arising from income inequality while imposing austerity measures to exacerbate it.

On the "other side" are proxies for pretty much the same economic elite, but offering a different approach to keeping working people subjugated.  They are the political leaders who pander to xenophobic and racist nationalism to achieve the power to accumulate excessive wealth.  They understand that people with inadequate education (a large majority) will feel comfortable if they can have scapegoats (the "other") for their powerlessness and financial distress.

Is one side better than the other?  Possibly, but neither is a good choice.  It's "heads they win, tails we lose."  All we can do is forget the lose-lose economics and apply our personal value systems to where they each stand on whatever social issues we count most important.

Sigh.

Free Trade

A lot of people are bloviating about the evils of free trade.  Not me.  I'm not against free trade — just the agreements, with particular emphasis on those who negotiate the agreements.

The negotiators for the TPP and TTIP are overwhelmingly drawn from the corporate sector, and the regulations they negotiate overwhelmingly favor large corporations.  Usually there are a few pages about "labor standards" in the encyclopedic final documents, but benefits for workers are minimal and, even to the extent they exist, rarely enforced.

Workers guaranteed a living wage in Asia or Latin America or Africa do not offer the same degree of unfair competition to American workers as the quasi-slave labor forces that make out-migration of American jobs so lucrative for the world's plutocrats.  Opposition to the TTIP agreement comes primarily from European labor unions, who fear that the trade agreement could drag European labor standards down to the significantly inferior North American level.

Globalization has proceeded to a point where it cannot be undone, and moving away from greater world trade would have severe economic consequences across the globe.  What is lacking, though, is any genuine effort to use trade for the benefit of ordinary human beings, not just big business.