I mean, guilty as charged, but charity begins at home. I am not convinced Foxconn employees (or, in the case of local students, forced workers) are "better off than they were four years ago." People with improving lives do not regularly take them, and I doubt parents of kidnapped and enslaved children are any happier without them.

Helping them is not my primary goal, no; I may be altruistic, but am no martyr. However, I see little evidence any Third World people benefit save high ranking government officials and owners of contractors (and people.) Just as American consumers do not benefit from paying $2 less on jeans they can no longer afford at any price, since their former employer sent their well paid job to Indonesia. Once again Big Business owners (NEVER small businesses, which are going under at an alarming rate in the US) benefits at the expense of consumers and labor, and after nearly 20 years those last two groups have yet to see any benefit "trickle down."

It was never about improving Third World living standards are lowering Western product costs; that was just clever marketing by people who invented and subsist on clever marketing. It was always about lowering production costs by extorting the repeal of Western consumer, worker and enviromental standards paid for in blood over a century. If we genuinely want to help the Third World we must make importing its products conditional on them being made under the same standards as products produced in the West. Letting Western (not Third World) multinationals exploit Third World populations as they once did ours helps no one but Western Big Business, at the expense of the Third World as well as Western consumers, workers and small business owners.

Free trade has done exactly what Ross Perot expected: Created a "giant sucking sound" of lost Western jobs with no benefit to anyone save multinational owners.