Liar, Liar; Planet on Fire –
Skating On The Thin Ice
of Economic Chaos

YOWUSA.COM, 11-March-02
Marshall Masters

…Continued

Domestic Colonialism in the Industrial Age

One of the reasons why it is so easy for most Americans to ignore the WTO protestors is that we’ve been programmed to leave our compassion at the checkout stand.   

Once we swipe our beloved credit card through the reader we are magically absolved of all that happens behind it.  We’ve paid for our colorful blouse or durable work shoes. 

Who cares if some poor child laborer or honest Falun Gong practitioner has been working 12-hour days in a filthy hovel of a sweat shop for pittance wages, just to make that blouse or work shoes!  With a swipe of the credit card, we absolved.  God bless the modern miracles of modern capitalism. The problem is, once we learn to be indifferent to the exploitation of those in foreign nations, doing it to our own becomes that much easier.

The failure of family farms is progressing at an alarming rate and this is not a Republican issue.  The Clintons had eight years to help family farms and did little if anything according to Clinton appointee Dan Glickman, who was sworn in as the 26th Secretary of Agriculture on March 30, 1995.  

Center for Rural Affairs, May 1999
Policy bias leaves family farms behind

Linus Solberg may be the last of three generations to work the fertile black earth of the family hog and grain farm near Calendar, Iowa. He's does not like it; and neither should you. 

Family farms like Solberg's may seem unsuited to the demands of a dynamic global economy and his concerns as distant from most Americans' as his heartland farm is from their homes. But don't be so sure. 

Last year, the National Commission on Small Farms established by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman debunked widely cast aspersions on the efficiency and productivity of small family farms.  It concluded that family farm decline is driven not by necessities of the market, but rather federal policy biases favoring large-scale corporate enterprise. 

Federal farm income support programs illustrate the bias. The bigger and richer a farm grows, the more money it gets from these programs. The big are subsidized to devour the small.

All of this goes back to a point made at the outset of this article.  The rich and the poor play the same shell game, except the poor have to work with walnut shells that have been glued to the table.  This is called “free trade.”  So then what is the glue? 

Frictional Ignorance, The Glue of Disadvantage

Scholars use a term called “frictional ignorance” to describe one of the hallmarks of the industrial age, which is the interruption of direct communication between producers and consumers by middlemen.

This communication has been largely dominated middlemen because political institutions, which also get a healthy piece of the action, also benefit from the frictional ignorance between producers and consumers.  In essence, middlemen profit from each transaction even though they add real value or substance to the exchange. 

There was a time when middlemen did serve a very real and necessary purpose because in those days we could not pick up a phone, hop on a jet, call up a web page or send E-mail.

But today, the only substance the middlemen can hope to offer producers and consumers is their veracity as honest facilitators of trade.  A few do, but it seems that most trade on the public’s trust so they can steel whatever isn’t nailed to the floor.  This is the reality of  “free trade,” and its dictums are: 

• Caveat Emptor:  This often-quoted Latin phrase means “buyer beware.”  Or in other words, even if I’m advising you to buy Enron stock because my trading firm will profit from the transaction, the fact that you were swindled is your own stupid fault.  So, suck up and take it while I move on to the next trusting sucker.
• All The Market Can Bear: Men and women have always had a fascination for besting each other.  Some call it commerce.  Others call it gouging, price fixing, monopolies, and other such greed-based terms. Microsoft’s pitty-pat hand slap easy-out settlement has proved that greed is alive and well and still enjoys broad political support. 
  But will mankind suddenly change its ways sine 9-11 and begin singing Kumbaya on the trading floors?  Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.  Just hold your wallet – and firmly at that.
• In Compliance With The Law:  Since when do laws and fairness have any form of universal equity?  A banker can go to church on Sunday, pray in compliance with the laws of God, and on Monday foreclose a mortgage on a widow and her children with callous disregard, thanks to the laws of man. 
  In both cases the banker profits. First because he tithed at the church on Sunday in compliance with the laws of God; and second because he will be rewarded with income on the sale of the home he foreclosed on, from a now homeless widow and her children.  In this example, the appearance of legal compliance is absolute while the substance of fairness and compassion are pushed out of view.   Sure it sucks, but only from one point of view and nobody much listens to that one anyway.

Whether you are a widow, a family farm owner or an Andersen-gullible Enron stock investor who lost a disastrous portion of his or her retirement, the principal hallmark of “free trade” has always been vested in the ability of the middlemen to keep you in the dark. 

But like the World Trade Center towers, “free trade” has revealed an appearance of substance that cannot survive catastrophe because it has bled the substance of our real wealth into a myriad of unseen and unproductive pockets.  

So, out with the old and in with the new.  OK, so what is the new?  Fair trade!

Fair Trade in an Information Age Economy

The new information age economy is all about fair trade: Producers and consumers dealing direct without the cost and self-serving machinations of middlemen where the focus in on doing business with a fair-minded long-term outlook, as opposed to the short-term, exploitive outlook of industrial age free traders.  

This is not a new concept, so stop shaking your head.

Rather, imagine yourself buying apples at a farmer’s market.  Unlike the tasteless, waxy-looking display apples we buy in supermarket chain stores, these apples are sweet and you can smell their goodness. So much so, it makes your mouth water.  

As you hand your money to the farmer, you know you’re only paying as much or less than what you’d pay for the same gross weight of apples in a supermarket chain store.  However, the farmer and his family who gladly accept your money and then sack your apples for you will derive the direct and full benefit of your money and they will use it to improve their farms as well as their quality of life.  This is called “fair trade.”  

“Nonsense,” you scoff.  “You’re being simplistic because a farmer’s market is the whole world.”  Well then, take a bite out of this. 

Just after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the national media reported that a local Starbucks coffee shop was charging volunteer rescue workers the usual full retail price for bottled water.  (Remember the dictum, all the traffic will bear.)  This was a public relations fiasco of the first order for Starbucks and they immediately began a free water moonwalk out of their PR nightmare.   If leaves one wondering why Starbucks didn’t show initiative on the very first day instead of letting their greed sneak up on them so as to create a huge public embarrassment.  

In comparison with that, I offer you the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Co. (located approximately 100 miles south of California’s famed Marin County Hot Tubbers.)  This small batch roaster of specialty coffees in Santa Cruz, CA also happens to be the first “Certified Fair Trade Roaster” in Santa Cruz County.  So what does that mean? 

The Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company
Fair Trade 

Fair trade benefits many. From farmers in producer countries to students in a U.S. school studying the environment, the concept and practice of fair trade connects producers and consumers in new and powerful ways.

It is the nexus for: meeting both environmental and economic considerations of indigenous peoples; re-balancing the trading relationship between North and South; building a link between U.S. policy and publics to a larger world community that is knocking at the door.

What the owner of this company has done that is really terrific is that she flies to Columbia on a regular basis to meet directly with coffee farmers, and not the middlemen.  She pays the farms a fair market price, which is several times more than what they would get from the middlemen.  In turn, the farmers take special care in the cultivation and harvesting of her coffee beans and they no longer have a financial motivation to grow cocaine for the local drug lords. 

By cutting out the middlemen, the owner of this small Santa Cruz business is giving her producers a chance to make a fair and honest living and in return her customers enjoy the finest coffee in the world at a fair market price.  Best of all, she is doing for free what the billions we’ve spent on our War on Drugs has failed to do – she is single-handedly reducing the production of cocaine. 

She has also provided a significant reason why the War on Drugs is failing.  It is based on industrial age free trade economics.

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She has also proven why it is in our best interests as nation to hasten the adoption of fair trade practices. Not only for poor coffee farmers in Columbia, but for poor American pensioners as well. 

Information Age Fair Trade Works For Americans Too! 

When it comes to the cost of prescription drugs in America let’s be brutally frank. We’re being raped.  The international drug companies have managed to put the American Medical Association and the US Food and Drug Administration firmly in their pockets for decades.  Consequently, the drug companies are reaping the benefits of the most lucrative oligopoly in the history of mankind. 

By the way, the difference between a monopoly and the oligopoly can be explained this way. A monopoly is like Microsoft’s Bill Gates.  An oligopoly is like Bill Gates with a small handful of Mini-Me partners so to speak.

The difference between Canada and the US is that Canada negotiates drug prices with the drug companies.  Because of this, pharmaceutical consumers in Canada can fill their prescriptions in many cases for a small fraction of what it costs US customers for the very same drugs. 

This is because the US Food and Drug Administration has followed a free trade business model where drug companies are free to form oligopolies so they can charge Americans all that traffic can bear and with the protection of American laws that forbid Americans to have their prescriptions filled in foreign countries. 

However, this situation has become excruciatingly embarrassing for the US Food and Drug Administration, because while Americans do not want Canada’s form of socialized medicine we do want their less expensive prescription drugs. Rather than repeal the industrial age laws that have protected the predatory pricing tactics of the pharmaceutical oligopoly, the FDA is just looking the other way.  

Now that the FDA will not prosecute Americans for buying their drugs in Canada, poor pensioners have become part-time criminals and happily so with the help of the Internet.  

A Canadian firm called Canadameds, now makes is possible for drug-poor Americans to shop online for Over the Counter products, Diabetic products, to have their prescriptions dispensed by a CANADIAN licensed pharmacy, staffed by CANADIAN licensed pharmacists and their assistants.

Candadameds.com
FAQ

Q. Can you fill prescriptions from American doctors?

A. Yes we can once a Canadian doctor has reviewed your "chart" and approved the prescription under his/her Canadian license.

Q. Do I get charged a shipping charge for every prescription?

A. You get charged one shipping charge per delivery, not per prescription.

Q. Is the dispensing fee charged for each prescription?

A. Our Dispensing fees are included in our prices.

Q. Are all American drugs available?

A. Not all drugs available in the United States are available in Canada.

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