[mainekitchen] Re: Wots next?
- From: "Jim Caron" <jcaron16@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <mainekitchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:48:08 -0500
I think america needs to protect 'some' of its trade , like most countries do.
most of all we need God's blessing!!!! God centered families. We need to
start teaching here in maine!!!!!!!! just one opinion.
----- Original Message -----
From: Josef Jurkiewicz
To: mainekitchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 8:01 AM
Subject: [mainekitchen] Wots next?
Dr. Pangloss, Free Trader
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday - January 24, 2014
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"We've outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it
is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us."
So says University of California scientist Steve Davis.
Smog from Chinese factories has already saturated cities like Beijing, where
residents go about in surgical masks, and crossed the East China Sea to foul
the air of Korea and Japan.
Now China's smog is coming to America's West.
Among the pollutants wafting their way over the Pacific, says the Guardian,
is black carbon, which is "linked to cancer, emphysema and heart and lung
diseases," and travels "huge distances on global winds known as 'westerlies.'"
Davis is one of a team of U.S. and Chinese researchers whose report has been
published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
As the Chinese factories fouling Asia's air arose to meet the demands of
Western consumers, says Beijing, the West should help pay the cost of cleaning
up their polluted and poisoned environment.
Seems that, despite the academic consensus that free trade is win-win for
all, free trade is not free.
Great nations that have risen to global power by protecting their
manufacturing, like Britain in the early 19th century, have begun their
relative decline when they embraced free trade. Between 1870 and 1914,
protectionist America and Germany both shoved Britain aside.
Since Y2K, China, which protects its industrial base by keeping its currency
artificially cheap, has surged past Italy, Britain, France, Germany and Japan
to become the world's second largest economy. And they are gaining steadily on
us. Free trade appears to be the policy of fading nations.
Perhaps it is time for a profit and loss statement of its costs and benefits.
Undeniably, free trade has been a bonanza for the top 1 percent and many
among our top 10 percent.
As U.S. manufacturers shut down scores of thousands of U.S. factories to
finance new plants in Asia, their production costs plummeted. Wages and
benefits for Asians were, and are still, but a fraction of those of American
workers.
Health, safety and environmental standards were in some cases almost
nonexistent.
The eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed in April,
killing 1,100 workers, mostly women, and injuring another 2,500, would never
have passed a U.S. building inspection.
After having shifted production overseas and dramatically lowered costs, U.S.
transnationals saw a surge in profits. These were used to push corporate
salaries into the stratosphere, increase dividends to shareholders, and keep
the Washington lobbyists working the Hill day and night for fast track and free
trade.
And the lifestyle of our corporate elites changed.
Where their fathers walked sooty factory floors in smokestack towns in World
War II, these masters of the universe fly Gulfstream Vs to Davos and Dubai to
dine with titled Europeans, Saudi princes and Chinese billionaires.
These are America's winners from free trade. The losers?
Middle Americans. The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages
in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of
all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of
America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I.
Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year
almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year.
Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four
decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a
trade deficit.
Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.
And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often
dies. And all the little satellite businesses -- bars, diners, food stores,
pharmacies -- that rose around the factory, they die, too.
The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by
Free Trade.
Tenured economists on college campuses call this "creative destruction."
The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain
the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers' wages fail to
rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes.
If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading
for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy.
And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a
living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and
free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting
factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and
subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a
tour in Leavenworth?
Whatever happens from free trade is what should happen, free traders say. As
Dr. Pangloss explained to Candide, whatever happens, happens for the best in
this best of all possible worlds.
Sure.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/dr-pangloss-free-trader-6203
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Get Pats Books...
...Signed by Pat Buchanan!
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-shop
Pat's latest NY Times Bestseller:
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
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