Loudmouth, what you have written - and overlooked the moral implications as we all do until we think about it - is that mainly unemployed and underemployed people (the "precariat") in the civilised countries are exploiting slaves in the rubbish countries to buy goods priced below their real cost of production.

What they are paying for this "privilege" is a home and the ability to fund the staples of a decent life. These staples are next to be attacked by Mr Greed as "welfare" - a straw in the wind is the attempt to get an "omnibus" Bill through the Senate with NDIS threatened if the Senate baulks at other reductions in living standards. The greedies are hell bent on reducing the population to the levels of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Trade with Asian and Latin American slave hellholes is the key to making this possible.

It brings to mind the picture of Henry Ford gloating of his el cheapo robot factories and being asked many cars the robots would buy.

It's this scenario that prompted the workers in the Rust Belt to elect Donald Trump who promised a much needed trade war against the slave countries. They were much smarter than those who wasted their votes on the Clintonite neoliberals and luckier than us Australians who have nobody to vote for. Cross fingers that their luck will hold and the international slave trade will be banished from America.

Following a point made by Loudmouth:

The greedies plundering the civilised countries don't have to own foreign slave factories to have a vested interest in trade with slave countries. Imported slave-made goods provide pressure on Australian workers to accept debased wages and conditions to compete with slaves. Remember the “internationally competitive” mantra under which the Howard government attacked wages and conditions e.g. with “Work Choices”? The Australian unions were asleep at the wheel, campaigning against wage degradation while not having the wit to attack the free trade that opened the way for it.

Hi EJ,

" ..... mainly unemployed and underemployed people (the "precariat") in the civilised countries are exploiting slaves in the rubbish countries to buy goods priced below their real cost of production."

No, I didn't overlook it at all, I assumed that the connection, the moral compromise if you like, was so obvious. To re-state another obvious point, the workers whose jobs have been lost overseas which will never come back, will - if Trump has his delusional way - soon not only be out of work for life but paying much more for the goods that those Asian slave-labourers have been making for them.

They won't get their jobs back.

They will soon be paying more, much more, for their staple goods.

Gosh, thank you, Donald.

Joe