Technology

I was there in the PNW protesting WTO and getting tear gassed as a college student. I believed that the WTO prioritized corporate profits over labor rights, and just allowed them to ship jobs overseas. I'm sad that I was right.

The WTO was always a modern form of merchantilism, predicated on the theory that Wall Street financiers would functionally control the global stock of capital in the end.

The China Problem is, at its root, that too much capital is owned by Chinese nationals. We had similar problems with Japan and Korea in the 80s and 90s, and solved this by forcing them to devalue their currencies and take on loads of foreign debt - both private and public - while hooking themselves up to the Saudi well-head for their energy needs.

But the Seattle protesters never really got a head of steam behind them, because Americans did benefit from all these cheap imports more than they suffered. Like, its hard to talk to a guy making high-six figures in the Bay Area or at Microsoft or Apple campus that they'd have been better off working the textiles or lumber industries or making low-margin electronics.

This was a real J. Sakai "Read Settlers" moment. Very hard to convince colonial settlers to vote/organize against what was their generation's own best interest. If anyone should have been protesting (and quite a few did but certainly not enough), it was folks in Bangladesh or Malaysia or the Philippines, since they were the ones who ended up eating most of the global industrial era shit sandwich.

Now we're faced with Chinese economy that gets to both make a bunch of high value high demand components and domestically consume it, though. And that's not nearly as good a deal as what the post-'08 US economy has to offer.