There is a big difference between "Fair Trade" and "Free Trade". Free Trade means that China and others pay substantially less in taxes to do business in the U.S. than American companies. It means they are free to use the strength of the dollar to close our manufacturing facilities and put millions of workers out of work. It means they are free to ignore patent and trademark laws and protections. Free trade means that China and others are free to ignore the environment and dump toxins into the water and air which soon will affect our air and weather and eventually our coasts. And free trade means foreign competitors are free to disregard trade agreements by closing their countries to U.S. products.

"Fair trade", on the other hand, would equalize the tax burdens of our domestic producers and competing imports. It would price the dollar at its fair trade value. It would enforce trademark, patent, and environmental laws and enforce trade agreements. Fair trade would reward those companies that innovate, cut costs and invest in productivity. Fair Trade would achieve all the goals that Free Trade advocates espouse.

But politics aside, is free trade really good economics? Free trade would be all that it was promised to be if we lived in a world in which not just jobs but also goods, people and capital freely flowed from one country to another. In such a never-never land, indeed, everyone would do what he was best at, and we all would be richer for it. Unfortunately, when one country lowers its trade barriers and other countries don’t lower theirs as much – making for freer, but not free, trade – who gets what becomes extremely murky. And that is the world in which we find ourselves today.

U.S. corporations love to move their plants and our jobs to other countries – countries that sometimes block our products and services from entering. Scores of countries block the import of what we are best at producing: low-cost food. Remaining competitive in a world in which billions of workers are paid about a dollar a day and have no benefits, and in which corporations need not worry about environmental costs, requires us to drastically lower our own standard of living.

Until we ensure Free Trade is also Fair Trade, we are putting our economic future in peril. Change is needed soon in order to protect our national sovereignty! Structural changes are happening to our economy that will be impossible to reverse unless something is done soon. Our manufacturing is fleeing this country and relocating overseas. In the last two years, 2 million manufacturing jobs were lost in this country leading to 6 million lost jobs in the service sector.

Most startling is how fast this erosion is accelerating. The world wide web, our open borders, and transportation advances around the world have made it very easy for U.S. manufacturers to outsource overseas. It is cheaper to cut costs by importing rather than investing in manufacturing improvements at home.

Economists cry "foul" at the word tariff. But without adequate tariffs, our tax system discriminates against our domestic producers. Is it good for America to have $30+ billion trade deficits every month? Can we continue to trade deficits with China without sacrificing our economic future? If we aren’t working and producing, we cannot remain the most powerful nation in the world. We need Fair Trade policies that make sense. Economists argue that eventually other countries will raise their living standards (as South Korea and Taiwan already are doing) and then we will all compete on equal footing. But there are two ways to get there: lower our standards until the rest of the world catches up, or insist that we compete freely only with those countries where companies give their workers a basic basket of benefits and elementary environmental protection. This is what is referred to as “fair trade.”

We can save the U.S. economy with the following Fair Trade steps:

- Stop domestic discrimination. Tax imports the same that our own manufacturers are taxed.

- Enforce the trade agreements now, not the 5 year moratorium that China has to comply with WTO provisions.

- Enforce copyright and trademark protections in violator's countries by restricting their exports.

- Use trade to make importers clean up their act- they are dumping toxins in the air and water without any regard to the environment.

As Fair Trade continues to be repressed and Free but Not Fair Trade is allowed to decimate our manufacturing, our wages will begin to equalize with the rest of the world by descending to the world’s standard of living.

This will affect every American, no matter if their job is in manufacturing, service or government. Americans should have the opportunity to vote in November of 2010 on which form of trade they prefer: the mismanaged variety (masquerading as free trade) or fair trade. They will have this opportunity only if one of the political parties has the civic courage to lift the fog in which economists, big business and naive liberals have shrouded this whole sordid business. Then fair trade will not only be sound economics for America but also good politics.