http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3345
by John Marshall
The United States doesn’t really build things anymore. One of the last things it still builds, but which no one will buy, is automobiles. And for this reason the heads of America’s automakers are http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5683” peddlers. Consider, less than 10% of all jobs in the US are in manufacturing, and we are importing at a record rate, with a record imbalance of trade. When the manufacturing base of the US was collapsing, as trade, tax, and import policies enshrined in NAFTA/GATT made it more feasible to dismantle US production, move it to the 3rd world and export to consumers in the US, free traders told us “No problem, we’ll make software.” And then off-shoring took huge swaths of software engineering services to the 3rd World. “No problem,” the free traders again exhorted us. “We’re the banking center of the world. We’ll finance the world.”But as foreign governments buy larger and larger shares of US debt, and our Wild West banking system bets the house (and your 401K) on mortgage debt that massively defaulted due to risky loans to “lower income” (meaning minority) home buyers, US banks and investment houses were left in shambles. Now government owns large amounts of the eight largest US Banks, in the form of securities, in order to prop them up. We used to call that socialism, but now we call it “laissez faire,” which means “broke and on the government dole” in French, being the language of those who invented that condition in the 1700’s.
On goes the mantra. Whenever a section of the US economy is shifted overseas to the benefit of plutocrats, the free traders convince us that “emergent industries” will provide Americans with something other than dwindling pocketbooks that the buyers of the world want. But the industries either don’t emerge, or they offshore at an ever-increasing pace, leaving US employees riding atop an ever rising Jenga tower, wondering when the fatal block will be removed and off-shored, and the Tower of Babel comes crashing down. With either McCain or Obama, the procession toward North American Union would have proceeded, as extra-political forces are involved, and set the tone for lawmakers.
Moving the US manufacturing base overseas makes sense for everyone except Americans. The free traders presume that economic warfare will not, and cannot result because everyone will play by the rules. Everyone will always sell to the highest bidder. Well, as we’ve seen in the case of that valuable commodity oil, that’s not always the case, as more and more of the supply is earmarked for oil hungry “emerging markets,” who pay less then Americans due to the engineered weakness of the dollar.
To enforce the rules, they build ever more unaccountable international trade regulation bodies, empowered, they chide, to levy fines for evil (that is, “inefficient”) things like tariffs, or below cost product “dumping.” The problem is, sometimes it’s more lucrative to flout the rules, which have only the power of words and nominal “fines” behind them. The result is that in order for free trade to work, domestic (and so called nativist) interests must be increasingly sacrificed to international interests and international bureaucracies. Free trade is thus seen to be the enemy of nationalism.
The US economy cannot survive by its employees “taking in each others’ washing.” And even if it could, the corresponding general impoverishment would have been the largest illicit transfer of wealth in history -theft, that is. Moreover, not everyone can be equipped to be a “micro-entrepreneur,” which is the latest free trade fairy tale to bedazzle the morons who swallow their pabulum, while it make them compete with cell phone toting pimps (er, “entrepreneurs”) in Bangladesh. When the well-paying jobs are gone, so will be the U.S.’s economic prestige and security. Not a problem if you’ve shifted your interests to Mumbai, but a big problem if your highly specialized career of 30 years vanishes to a slum of Shanghai overnight.
http://www.kinism.net/index.php/weblog/more/the_pilfering_of_america_by_plutocracy/