Free Trade and Unrestricted Capital Flow: How Billionaires Get Rich and Destroy the Rest of Us

Excellent article at Naked Capitalism: Free Trade and Unrestricted Capital Flow: How Billionaires Get Rich and Destroy the Rest of Us
tho I wonder if some who could benefit from reading this would quit too early because of finance-specific language? Take heart! read at least as far as this part:

There’s a straight line between “free-trade” — a prime tenet of both right-wing Milton Friedman thinking and left-wing Bill Clinton–Robert Rubin neoliberalism — and wealth inequality in America. In fact, if the billionaires didn’t have the one (a global free-trade regime) they couldn’t have the other (your money in their pocket). And the whole global “all your money are belong to us” process has only three moving parts. Read on to see them. Once you “get it,” you’ll get it for a long time…

And this part:

In its simplest terms, “free trade” means one thing only — the ability of people with capital to move that capital freely, anywhere in the  world, seeking the highest profit. It’s been said of Bush II, for example, that “when Bush talks of ‘freedom’, he doesn’t mean human freedom, he means freedom  to move money.” (Sorry, can’t find a link.)

At its heart, free trade doesn’t mean the ability to trade freely per  se; that’s just a byproduct. It means the ability to invest freely  without governmental constraint. Free trade is why factories in China have  American investors and partners — because you can’t bring down manufacturing  wages in Michigan and Alabama if you can’t set up slave factories somewhere else and get your government to make that capital move cost-free, or even  tax-incentivized, out of your supposed home country and into a place ripe for  predation.

Welcome to the Brave New World of pump and dump.

related: Cyprus Has the Global Money Elite’s Fingerprints All Over It

and another: When Capitalism only works for the wealthy