Free trade is root core of our economic crisis

There is no way back. We are in a whole new ball game.

Once President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama gave the financial communities trillions of dollars in bailout money while ignoring the suffering of workers, we got a whole new ball game as we wait for the next financial bubble to burst. Free trade remains the core of our economic crisis, because it is not really trade as historically practiced and defined. It is more about making production portable and ready to be moved again and again for the sake of cheaper labor. All of the supporting services are affected, too, with the trade deficit representing trillions of dollars lost in value forever.

As long as the value of workers and labor keeps being deflated and degraded, there is no hope. More than a billion people in the world are ready and willing to work for practically nothing to survive. With the value of workers and labor being a money standard, it affects the value of paper money, too. When the balance is out of whack, there is no way out of our debt crisis. In essence, Obama has taken tariffs off products and put them on workers for future generations to come. Corporations are held as persons while workers have been "commoditized." It is an endless race to the bottom.

And what will happen when China finds out that it is holding worthless paper as security for the money it loaned us?

What we are getting is double talk, with our leaders telling us to look over here at the "fiscal cliff" while they do their own thing in a Bewildered New World.

Ray Tapajna, Cleveland Plain Dealer Letters Jan 6 2013