Freefall Nation

Students in the University of California system have begun a cycle of escalating protests against fee and tuition hikes and class cuts. Staff at the San Francisco City Hall have engaged in strikes against staff cuts. More labor and worker actions are surely on the way as the realization sinks in that the country really is broke and the problem is not "out there," but in the everyday lives of all Americans.

These conditions are intolerable and should be protested, but perspective is critically important. These problems did not come out of nowhere. The whole country is economically crippled, and that includes city and state governments and the institutions, like public universities, that cities and states operate. Why is this? There are a lot of reasons, but one stands out as most important. In the sweep of history it will be recorded that over the last thirty years, the United States freely decided, as a matter of policy, to relinquish and liquidate its economic engines and let all the hard-won historical miracles of the affluent American Century -- the broad-based middle class, the expanding tax base, the huge manufacturing capacity, the availability of higher education, the massive and cutting-edge infrastructure, the increasingly progressive social safety net, and many other attributes -- evaporate or find greener pastures in other lands. The escalating catastrophe in the economy and in public finances is merely the dropping of the other shoe of the globalist/free trade/neocon travesty that came to power with Ronald Reagan and Proposition 13. Protest specific budget cuts as long and as loud as you like, but as long as those policies hold sway, we are headed for the poorhouse.

The export of American jobs, wealth, income, and factories has hollowed out our capacity to take care of ourselves, much less pose as some kind of global role model. `In the glory days of the American Miracle, the University of California was lavishly funded by the State, awash in revenue from the expanding tax base and increasing revenues from taxes on steeply appreciating property. Now, the reverse gives us a double whammy, and there is no option for budgetmakers: everyone has to do with less, and less again every year. That kind of society is not what we are accustomed to. Therefore, these kinds of arguments and rancor are going to increase in number and intensity.

This is what Free Trade looks like from the inside, and it is exactly what the corporate elites want for us. They have paid well for the privilege of taking American wealth far out of reach of ordinary Americans, to places where things like union shops, environmental protection, civil liability and firm tax structures have little or no meaning. As America withers, their bottom lines set new records.

The students are finding out the hard way that when you let big companies sell the geese that lay the golden eggs, the golden eggs go with them.

The best political action they can engage is is to oppose and end free trade.