Word: globalizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...middle-class Americans find themselves competing with foreigners being paid practically nothing and living in squalor, how can this send Americans' standard of living up and not down? If another nation is willing to pollute its air and water in order to produce goods for sale in the global economy, how can America join that economy and still hope to keep its own air and water clean...
...contrast, budget-conscious clothes shoppers (maybe those same workers) who are able to save a few bucks on a new sweater are not likely to realize they are enjoying a bargain as a result of global trade or to take to the streets to defend their right to a cheap sweater. Or suppose the U.S. slaps a tariff on foreign sweaters and the foreign country retaliates by raising a tariff on something we're selling them--the people who would lose their jobs aren't even identifiable for sure, though for sure they exist. Likewise the people who lose jobs...
...indeed, as a gospel of our civic religion rather than out of anyone's buying the math. Alarm about imports tends to ebb and flow with the economy--less in good times, more in bad. So how, in the best times ever, did the World Trade Organization become the global bogeyman? No earnest college kid ever hitched across the country to carry a picket sign against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO's predecessor, although its function was similar. It took decades for the CIA, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations to achieve their...
Part of the explanation is the special nature of our current prosperity, which is widening the income gap rather than narrowing it, as in the past. Part is the growth of global economic forces that are actually impinging on national sovereignty, even though it's the paranoid hysterics who say so. But the WTO isn't responsible for either of these trends, both of which are probably inevitable and neither of which undermines the basic case for free trade or for an organization empowered to promote trade through binding arbitration of trade disputes...
...when the most immediate worry at the end of the 20th century is that computers won't know what time it is just after midnight, Dec. 31. Or that the threat of a genuine apocalypse has been downgraded from a swift nuclear winter to the palmy dangers of slow global warming...