Salivating Free Traders Praise Malaysia, Ignore Awful Record

On the heels of the Bush administration's push for a free trade deal with Communist Vietnam, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Bush administration "and Malaysia announced they will begin negotiations for a bilateral free-trade agreement." The piece quotes a salivating Bush trade representative Rob Portman, the former congressman from Ohio - the state that has lost thousands of jobs thanks to free trade deals with low wage countries. Portman doesn't seem to care about his home state, instead moving to whitewash Malaysia's atrocious record. "Malaysia has been at the forefront of the economic dynamism transforming Asia in recent years," he said, calling the country a supposedly "moderate leader." Apparently, he either didn't see or didn't care about Malalysia's extremist policies when it comes to treatment of workers.

That's right, according to Agence France Press, Malaysia does "not have a minimum wage." The country's official government policy is open hostility to proposals to create an minimum wage whatsoever. Check out this excerpt from Malaysia General News in 2004:

"The government will not adopt the minimum wage policy but instead allow market forces determine the salary level, Human Resources Minister Datuk Wira Dr Fong Chan Onn said today. Malaysia's free-market economy did not believe in minimum wage policy and the wage structure should be established by supply and demand, he added. 'That is the government's basic philosophy. The economy is much more flexible without minimum wage,' he told reporters."

Sounds like talking points from one of America's many extremist right-wing think tanks - and certainly not "moderate." But then, that makes it an ideal free trade partner to the corrupt Bush administration and its corporate backers - it is the perfect pool of oppressed workers to exploit for profit, the perfect low-wage force to exert more downward pressure on American wages, and the perfect place to ship more good-paying U.S. jobs to.

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