Web Letters: How to Fix Our Broken Economy

"Free foreign trade gives our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations to the injury of our labor, our tradespeople, and our farmers. Protection keeps money, markets and manufacture at home for the benefit of our own people."

This quote is part of a speech Congressman William McKinley made opposing the Wood tariff bill, which "reformed" tariffs by lowering them. We are familiar with the same kind of "reforms" by "modern" Republicans and now Democrats that take jobs and industries out of the US searching for cheap labor for the benefit of big business and the multinationals. Nineteenth-century Republicans had build their industries behind a wall of tariffs that allowed them to compete with cheaper goods that would have been dumped on the American Market.

McKinley's speech did not represent a Republican point of view but a national American viewpoint that reflected the ideas of Alexander Hamilton in his Report on Manufactures to Congress.

If you want America to be a great industrial nation, than look to our past and how we became an industrial juggernaut. The past can be the prologue to the future. "Free Traders" build nothing! They manipulate markets, industries, and people to squeeze unreasonable profits for Corporate fascist elites.

Pervis J. Casey

Riverside, CA