So, former president Bill Clinton has apologized for advocating and fighting for policies in world trade that brought Haiti�s farming sector to its knees and made it nearly totally dependent on outside help in the wake of this year�s most devastating earthquake.

�It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked,� he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during testimony on March 10. �It was a mistake. I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop to feed those people because of what I did. Nobody else.�

It�s nice to know that some public officials, even a former president, can express some remorse for past actions, but it would have been preferable for some thought first to have been given to the effects of such far-reaching actions.

Not much would have been required. Clinton and others only talked to people just like themselves, Republicans and Democrats, in planning the new wave of global trade. They called it �free trade.�

Rank-and-file workers were talking about the effects of this free trade and they were predicting two or three decades ago what the effects would be. They witnessed their shop machinery and their jobs being shipped out to low-wage countries. They knew instinctively what was going to happen. It was a clear case of cause and effect: you take our jobs and our plant and we�re going to be a poorer nation and our children will suffer.

But nobody asked them.

Clinton had taken the Republican lust for �free enterprise� and translated that into �free trade,� and envisioned the profits that would be made for the corporations and he turned it into a Democratic initiative.

As it took a Nixon to go to China, it took a Clinton to bring about �global free trade� and there are many more consequences than Haitian rice farmers to consider. In any case, both Democrats and Republicans were happy about the trade deals that continue to be negotiated today.

The free trade that the two parties gave the American people was presented as if there never had been trade and it had to be sold to the people. Any cursory study of world history shows that there always has been trade - as long as someone could fashion a canoe or put a load on a horse or camel. The only thing that they didn�t teach was that he who has the biggest guns sets the terms of trade.

Our modern version of trade didn�t need too many guns to set favorable conditions for the transnational corporations. This time, there were global institutions that had been in operation for a long time that could be used to get foreign heads of state to agree to the terms set by the world�s most powerful countries and their surrogates, the corporations.

Through the free trade agreements of the past 30 or so years, we have come to our current financial state: nearly broke, with two or more wars that we are conducting on credit.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was only a year old, Canada had lost some 500,000 jobs to the lower-wage country to its south. If the U.S. had suffered a similar loss in relation to its population, it would have lost about 5 million jobs.

Within the past dozen years, many Mexican small-scale chicken farmers were wiped out when U.S. chicken factories dumped tons of chickens produced by industrial methods in subsidized operations because the sell-by date was a few days off. They had a �right� to do that under NAFTA.

Then, the right wing and the Republicans and some Democrats complained because Mexicans and others were entering the country without documentation to find work. Who wouldn�t, if your livelihood was wiped out by commercial fiat?

The seemingly minor chicken incident was just the tip of the iceberg in the kinds of effects NAFTA had on the working people of the three countries. Other trade agreements of the past 30 years have done similar things to the people in various sectors of the economies of developing countries.

Bill Clinton during his presidency also opened Japan for the sale of American rice (much of which would come from Arkansas). In Japan�s case, the rice market was not protected just because it was an international commodity, but because it was a sacred food. In America, there is no sacred food. In fact, there is little that is truly sacred. In many countries there are reasons, other than profit, for some protection of markets. Japan was said to have eaten a major portion of its normal diet during World War II, because it always had recognized the importance of its farmers and the food they produced.

When American workers looked out and saw their livelihoods being shipped out, they knew they weren�t coming back. When you (and these are current averages) are earning $29.98 an hour as a factory worker and see products in American stores made by Chinese factory workers who earn an average of 87 cents an hour, you know American industry will never be able to compete with that kind of disparity in production costs.

This is what �free trade� agreements have brought and the U.S. has made them with many countries and regions of the world. This is the dilemma of the politicians who jumped into support of crazy economic theories, without thought of the consequences for the people. They were thinking only of profits for Corporate America. And the profits rolled in.

It makes little difference whether a country is developed or �developing,� like Haiti. The effects of so-called free trade agreements are that markets are opened up to heavily-subsidized foodstuffs and commodities, to the detriment of indigenous farmers, peasant farmers, and other farmers. For workers, there is a lot of development, but the wages are barely subsistence wages. Usually, they were better off in the countryside, where they at least had the possibility of growing their own food.

Japan, Canada, the European Union, and other developed economies are more able to handle their share of the negative effects of free trade, but Haiti and countries like it can not. And this doesn�t take into account the overpowering influence or outright control by the U.S. of nations in the Western Hemisphere through two centuries of history.

Now that Clinton has come to realize what his actions nearly 20 years ago did to Haiti, what can he or anyone do about it? The answer has to come from the richest and most powerful nation in the world and whether it will resolve to deal differently with those with little power.

Often, Corporate America and its politicians deal with American workers in the same manner they deal with workers of other countries - low wages, no benefits, retire in penury. And, don�t get sick or injured.

There are at least a few �developed� countries that protect their citizens from a low standard of living. American politicians call that �protectionism.� The other countries call it common sense, and, because of that, there is not the disparity in wealth that the U.S. is experiencing now and they don�t have the pain of millions of workers without jobs who are always worrying about what happens when the unemployment benefits run out.

Left to their own devices, members of Congress and the state legislatures are not going to change direction. Rather, they have to be guided by a people�s movement, and it is possible for the people to lead. The structure for it is in the U.S. Constitution.

During the recent year-long debate (nasty argument, really) on health care reform, it was noted that, without universal care, some 45,000 Americans die prematurely every year. Think of the millions dying every year, slowly, of hunger and the disease of poverty around the world because of the policies of transnational corporations and the governments that give them permission to carry out those policies.

It�s good that Clinton has had his moment of insight, but there are hundreds, if not thousands more, in Congress and elsewhere who have yet to recognize the catastrophic effects of their policies and philosophies on the people. As soon as they are made to see the error of their ways, they need to do something about it. They won�t do it on their own.

When A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the greatest and most courageous union leaders in American labor history, sought relief from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, from rampant discrimination against black workers in the defense industries before World War II, the president reportedly said, �I agree with you�now make me do it.�

Politicians and Corporate America will not convert this plutocracy to democracy on their own. Only the people, by organizing massively across the country, can make them change to benefit all.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.