posted March 09, 2003 at 7:35 p.m. MDTWhile the American oligarchs are spending millions of dollars to project military might to the other side of the planet, a more mundane form of oppression is being applied close to home: the level playing field that has been established for those who already have wealth is crushing those who have always had little, and leaving them with less.
I just discovered this online paper today and in it found this article, The Mexican Farmers' Movement: Exposing the Myths of Free Trade which reads in part:
"Since the "lost decade" of the eighties and the polarization of wealth in the nineties, the "trickle-down" theory has fallen into disrepute. Even so, today's neoliberals still insist that the poor will eventually benefit from the model, and all that's needed is for the laggards to catch up, convert, modernize, integrate, etc. As NAFTA enters its 10th year and after nearly two decades of trade liberalization under GATT, Mexican agriculture has steadily lost ground: statistics show 1,750,000 people displaced, as well as increases in poverty, malnutrition, and school desertion. While President Fox and his cabinet boast of six billion pesos in agro-export earnings, farmers point out that that money went into the pockets of fewer than 7% of Mexico's farmers."
