01-09-2007, 04:43 PM
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#15 (permalink)
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by aceventura3
Assuming slavery is illegal every where, there is a minimum wage.
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Conservatives dont call it slavery anymore. The politically correct terminlology at the World Trade Organization is "full private stewardry of labor".
Quote:
At a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa, World Trade Organization representative Hanniford Schmidt announced the creation of a WTO initiative for "full private stewardry of labor" for the parts of Africa that have been hardest hit by the 500 years of Africa's free trade with the West.
The initiative will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa to own their workers outright. Schmidt recounted how private stewardship has been successfully applied to transport, power, water, traditional knowledge, and even the human genome. The WTO's "full private stewardry" program will extend these successes to (re)privatize humans themselves.
"Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.
The audience included Prof. Charles Soludo (Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria), Dr. Laurie Ann Agama (Director for African Affairs at the Office of the US Trade Representative), and other notables. Agama prefaced her remarks by thanking Scmidt for his macroscopic perspective, saying that the USTR view adds details to the WTO's general approach. Nigerian Central Bank Governor Soludo also acknowledged the WTO proposal, though he did not seem to appreciate it as much as did Agama.
-more-
http://www.gatt.org/wharton.html
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To be fair to the WTO, I should add their clarify *important note" that accompanies the press release: Important Note:
Many visitors from all over the political spectrum have read this release and believed it to mean that the WTO is officially in favor of slavery.
In actual fact, we at the WTO would never, ever wish to suggest that the modern version of the West's free trade with Africa is tantamount to its older form, slavery, or even worse than its other older form, colonialism. That would fly in the face of everything that we stand for.
The catastrophic failure of free-trade policies in Africa may be one partial source of this confusion. The actual, literal slavery that flourishes under the auspices of free trade (in Brazil, Jordan, and elsewhere) may be another. What will those compassionate conservatives think of next. 
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"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire
Last edited by dc_dux; 01-09-2007 at 04:54 PM..
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