The notion of “free trade” is not so easy to be “for” or “against”. Depending on the circumstances in which it is implemented, it can be good or bad.

For instance, free trade among the free states of the U.S. yields mostly positive results. We surely would have not grown to be a powerhouse without it. But there is a downside – for years manufacturers (before they ran off to China, Mexico, Vietnam and other exotic locales) ran to the southern states to be free of unions. So free trade tended to keep wages lower than they otherwise would have been. The south is poorer today than the rest of the country, and surely that has something to do with it.

And for states like Montana, resource-rich but far away from population centers, we tend to suffer from a mild kind of colonialism where we sell cheap so that others can make a handsome profit on the natural resources that we have. Years ago we enacted a coal severance tax and put the money in a trust fund. That’s not quite the same thing as establishing a manufacturing base, but it is something – perhaps the only thing we ever done for ourselves to protect from exploitation by wealthy corporations.

Mostly, free trade among equals is a good thing – the U.S. and Canada and Western Europe are mostly equals, and if they eliminate trade barriers, we won’t get hurt.

But among unequals, it is disastrous. For poor countries, it opens the door for rich countries to buy their resources on the cheap and exploit their labor forces. “Third world” countries, as they were once known, have suffered from “free trade” for centuries. For that reason, I prefer to call free trade by its old and more proper name – imperialism. The reason why poor countries tend to stay poor is that they cannot close their borders, install tariffs, and avoid malicious interference by the likes of the United States, Europe and Japan. All of these wars we have fought over the years with Cuba and Latin American and Southeast Asia have been aimed at preventing development. We need, and cannot live without, cheap labor and cheap resources.

When they stand tall, resist, install tariffs, monopolize their control of resources (OPEC), use their own resources for internal development (Cuba and Venezuela), we attack and embargo them, and do whatever necessary to undermine them. It’s an old story – every citizen of every poor country knows about it, and Americans are clueless.

But it’s a two-edged sword, as we are finding out. There was a time when the United States was protectionist – our country imposed heavy tariffs well into the late 20th century even as we knocked them down elsewhere. But under Clinton, those tariffs were removed (except to protect “intellectual property”), and our labor force was thrown to the wolves. We are left to compete with dollar-a-day workers in Vietnam and China and Honduras, and flip burgers for one another.

It’s by design, I suspect, a decision within the upper echelons of our plutocracy who decided that Americans workers had prospered too much. We were, after all, just another work force.

So “free trade” came back to bite us. We can’t complain much – for two centuries we were the beneficiaries of tariffs and imperialism, our jobs and lifestyles protected. But American workers lived off the cheap resources of others while we enjoyed protection. So it makes sense now that we are spiraling downward. Who ever thought, for even a second, that the multinational corporations that control our government and foreign policy cared any more about us than the citizens of Iraq or Vietnam?

This quote, supposedly by Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, was translated into Spanish and then back into English, and was cited by Andre Gunder Frank in his book Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. It was repeated in the New York Times, September 30, 1981 by L.S. Stavrianos, professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University, who at that time taught at the University of California, San Diego. Even if Grant never said it, he should have.

”For centuries England relied on protection, carried it to extremes, and got good results from it . . . . England has found it desirable to adopt free trade because protection no longer offers advantages.

”Very well, gentlemen, the knowledge that I have of my own country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten all that she can from protection, she too will adopt free trade.”

It’s a sentiment is understood by all on the receiving end of free trade policies, and denied by all who profit therefrom.

P.S. I fell into the trap of using the language of the right, saying “free trade”. Better to say “unregulated” trade. “Free”, by definition, sounds like something desirable. People get paid for dreaming up names like that.

Wow – that election outcome surprised a lot of people. We had a moderate challenger to a hard right winger, and the challenger almost pulled it off, and now his supporters are screaming “Election fraud!” But prominent Democrats are saying to back off – that the outcome is legitimate. In the meantime, no one talks about how the real power in that country lies elsewhere – that it is not in the presidency.

I’m talking, of course, about the U.S. election in 2004. I hear they had one in Iran recently too.

P.S. It’s a big complicated world full of good and bud guys, and Iran, like our own country, has many bad actors. But the agitation before the election and riots and agitprop after has CIA destablization written all over it. We interfere freely in the elections of other countries, and the “fairness” of those elections depends only on if we like the outcome.

Later this summer, my wife and I are going to move from our beloved Montana down here to Colorado. We are renting our home in Bozeman, kind of an escape clause in case we want to go back, but the move is meant to be permanent.

We are down here on a visit right now, and several differences jumped out at me:

1) I had to pee, and we stopped at a gas station south of Estes Park. There was only one unisex bathroom with one pot, and four people ahead of me in line. The guy in the stall had apparently been in there quite a while, and when one person in line knocked on the door, he yelled “I’m in here!” I don’t recall ever having to wait for a bathroom in Montana. I finally left, and peeing behind a tree down here will get you in trouble. I endured.

2) Bozeman is going to have a 4th of July tax protester rally, bringing people down from Noxon, I assume. This coming Sunday there will be a nude bike ride rally in Boulder. I assume most of the participants will be men, sadly, so I won’t be watching. The local police have threatened to arrest participants, and if they are arrested, they will have to register as sex offenders. As far as I know, exhibitionists are not the same as pedophiles, but I yield to the better judgment of the local constable.

3) Denver has charter schools, and a controversy is brewing as it becomes apparent that the charter schools are subtly, cleverly avoiding kids with disabilities. One school openly asked applicants if they had ever had special ed, and said lying about it would be grounds for dismissal. Montana doesn’t have charter schools. Bozeman has very good schools, but most public schools in Montana reflect the parents – mediocre. I like the idea of charter schools, to allow bright kids to escape. But they should not be allowed to turn down kids who are more challenging. That’s the private health insurance model applied to education.

4) Driving down through Wyoming these past two days – we came down through Dubois and Laramie – it was very green, but those forests we saw were devastated by pine beetle, as are the forests of Montana. Colorado forests that I have seen are lush and green and largely unaffected. But I haven’t seen enough to know this is universally true – I doubt it is.

5) Bozeman’s Daily Chronicle, for all its faults, is a much better newspaper than the Boulder Daily Camera, which is awful. When given a choice at the coffee shop, I always choose the Onion. The Denver Post is a very good newspaper. My vote for the best newspaper in Montana: Billings Gazette, simply for the fact that it carries more news than the others.

6) Traffic traffic everywhere – we drove down from Boulder to Morrison yesterday around 4:30 – every light back traffic up for blocks. But travel on the freeways is fast. We are going to have to adapt to that fact of life.

Our objective is to move someplace in the foothills like Evergreen where we don’t have to travel much – a self-contained community. We are looking at houses for the next few days.

As a lifelong Montanan, I’ll be able to reflect on the good and the bad about that state, and I will be in the coming weeks. I still have a mother and two brothers and a daughter in Montana. I will be traveling back frequently, but come August 15 forward, I will be a nude bike rider.

There was an interesting Supreme Court ruling yesterday – Caperton vs Massey.

A West Virginia coal company, Massey Energy, suffered a $51 million damage award to a competitor, and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. Judges to that court are elected, and Massey, using various methods of skirting campaign contribution laws, poured $3 million into the campaign of Brent Benjamin, who won the election to the bench. The $3 million equaled 60% of his total campaign costs.

Benjamin then refused to recuse himself, and sat on the Massey case, casting the decisive vote in a 3-2 ruling overturning the $51 million award.

The Supremes ruled that the conflict of interest was so blatant that Judge Benjamin had to recuse himself. They did not, however, lay out any guidelines on what an appropriate threshold is for conflict of interest.

I have never understood the reasoning behind allowing private contributions to judicial campaigns. Doesn’t that invite corruption? Any significant amount of money (say $1,000 or more) can create an apparent conflict.

Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas all voted against the overturning of the verdict for various reasons. But the bottom line is that they do not believe that the apparent conflict had any bearing on the outcome.

That seems absurd, but I need a better word. My Roget’s suggests ridiculous, silly, strange, illogical, meaningless, bizarre, incongruous. I’ll go with the latter two.

P.S. As Ladybug reminds me below, these four judges are ACTIVISTS!!!

This is what we accountants do in our spare time – we put on a dark suit and tie and take our laptops up to a high perch and daydream.

It appears that Sen Max Baucus (D-MT) is failing in the bid to manage progressive opposition in the health care debate. I don’t know how others perceive him, but I cannot imagine that people find him credible or look to him for leadership. I doubt he could inspire a Jehovah’s Witness to ring a doorbell.

So President Obama is taking over the debate, or so says New York Times. This is troublesome – Obama is far more likely to being liberals and progressives into the fold, but just as likely, as we have seen in so many other areas, to sell them out.

Here’s a rough quote from Obama, as relayed by Sen Charles Grassley (R-IA) after meeting with him:

If I get 85 percent of what I want with a bipartisan vote, or 100 percent with 51 votes, all Democrat, I’d rather have it be bipartisan.

What’s wrong with this? There’s no need to compromise, as Democrats already have public support and congressional numbers and the presidency. This is no different from Baucus, who when given the ability to pass his program with 51 votes, still insisted he wanted to compromise with Republicans. In addition, politicians are known to exaggerate, so that 0% or 10% might look like “85%” to them. Finally, how can we really know what Obama wants?

Why compromise when it’s your ball and you can take it home anytime you want? It’s popular in the crowd I run in to brand the Democratic leadership as spineless and essentially different in temperament than their Republican counterparts. But I doubt it – national political office only becomes those with skill and will. There’s something else going on here, and that is that Democrats, most of them anyway, have already bought into the opposition policies, and are so anxious to compromise because they is where they want to lead the followship.

So it’s a game – managing the opposition. Baucus dropped the ball. Now the big boys are playing. It’s dangerous for American health care. We are in great peril.

PS: Senator Bernie Sanders (IN-VT) met with Baucus and urged him to drop charges against the thirteen single-payer advocates he had arrested during his “hearings” on “reform”. Baucus did agree to “fight for leniency”. I doubt that will happen, however, as Baucus is a petulant dick.