An index of American decline

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 23, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern

Sen. John Edwards did not win Wisconsin, but he closed a huge gap with John Kerry with astonishing speed in the final week.

The issue propelling Edwards was jobs, the lost jobs under George Bush, and Edwards' attribution of blame for the losses on NAFTA and the trade deals for which John Kerry voted in Congress.

Edwards has plugged into an issue that could cost Bush his presidency. Indeed, Kerry's sudden conversion into fiery critic of trade deals for which he himself voted suggests that he senses not only his vulnerability on Super Tuesday, but his opportunity in the fall.

For a precise measure of what this issue is about, one can do no better than to consult Charles McMillion of MGB Services here. Each February, McMillion methodically pulls together from the Bureau of Labor Statistics his grim annual index of the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen.

Since Bush's inauguration, 2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have simply vanished. By industry, the job losses are heaviest in computers, where 28 percent of all the manufacturing jobs that existed when Bush took office are gone, semiconductors where we have lost 37 percent, and communications equipment, where jobs losses have reached 39 percent in just three years.

One in three textile and apparel jobs has disappeared, and the losses continue to run at the rate of 100,000 jobs a year. This helps to explain Edwards' rout of Kerry in South Carolina.

With the markets soaring, the Bush recovery is being called a jobless recovery. Not so. We are creating millions of jobs overseas – even as we are destroying manufacturing jobs at a rate of 77,000 per month in the United States.

Consider. Last year, we bought $958 billion worth of foreign manufactures and our trade deficit in manufactures alone was over $400 billion, more than $1 billion a day. Millions of foreign workers now labor in plants that manufacture for America, doing jobs that used to be done by American workers.

Not so long ago, Detroit was the auto capital of the world and the United States was the first nation in the production of televisions.

Now we don't make televisions any more. And our trade deficits in cars, trucks, televisions, video cassette recorders, automatic data-processing equipment and office machines added up last year to $218 billion. We retain a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts, but, because of the competition from Airbus, that is shrinking.

After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is ... soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony.

Our largest trade deficit with any country is with China. It has rocketed from $22 billion in Clinton's first year to $124 billion last year. "The World's Most Unequal Trade Relationship" is how McMillion describes it.

What were our best-selling items to China, where we ran a $2.8 billion surplus? Oil seeds and soybeans. What was China's biggest selling items to us? Computers and electrical machinery and equipment, where Beijing ran surpluses at our expense of $50 billion.

There are bright spots, however, in the bleak jobs picture painted by McMillion. State and local governments added 600,000 workers in three years. Some 21.5 million of us now work for state, local and federal governments – one in six Americans, 7 million more workers than we have employed in all of manufacturing.

Perhaps this is what the Weekly Standard is bragging about when it celebrates Bush's "Big Government Conservatism."

To read these numbers is to understand the breach that has opened up in a conservative movement last united when Ronald Reagan went home to California.

To neoconservatives of the Wall Street Journal school, these trade numbers are yardsticks of their success at creating a Global Economy and measures of their triumph in championing NAFTA, the WTO and MFN for Beijing. To the Old Right, however, manufacturing was a critical component of American power, indispensable to our sovereignty and independence, and the access road for working Americans into the middle class.

Seeing the devastation of NAFTA and its progeny, sensing rising opportunity in the industrial Midwest, Democrats are jumping ship on free trade. Bush, if he does not temper his enthusiasm for these one-sided trade deals, may just go down with it. If he does, one prays he will at least ensure the neoconservatives have first been locked securely in the cargo hold.

I spent years puzzling over the seeming paradoxes of scriptures. "Love thy enemy, pray for them that spitefully use you", yet, "don't even eat with someone that says they believe and don't live like it", and, scriptures like, "Go and preach the good news to all the world", yet, "make of yourselves a people set apart a peculiar people".

I have come to understand how they fit together, at least I think I have. The kingdom of God is not made up of just Americans, or just Frenchmen, or just caucasions or just blacks, the kingdom of God is made up of every race, language, nation, and tongue, but they are ALL believers. These are our brothers and sisters, will we always get along on this earth? Nope. Christians argue, they fight, they have different ideas, and can get just as nasty as anyone else in a business deal gone bad and sue each other instead of taking it to a religious leader to settle such disputes. Canada and the US are composed of mostly Christians, Cananda sues the USofA over additives to gasoline, they may win in an international court that wants to take a slap at the USofA, but God may have a differnt take on it and Canada may pay the price somewhere else economically or in some other manner, perhaps spiritually.

God has told us to go and preach the gospel to the whole world, how they receive it determines their blessings or non-blessings. We are to be charitable, to a point, but if the word is rejected we shake the dust off and move on leaving them for God to deal with. When all of mankind comes under the same laws and the same authority that is not of God, does not respect the rights of the individual then nothing but tragedy can be the outcome. Pure unrestrained Democracy is a form of government that can strip the individuals liberty and self determination far more than any other form of government. The individual is stripped of his freedom by both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority. Our founders understood this and developed the Electoral College to prevent just such tyranny by heavily populated areas over less populated states.

Our government uses which ever one is handy to direct us the way they want us to go. The minority doesn't want smoking in public, the majority wants you to use your private property, or not use it, however the government directs you to.

We know that God does not approve of globalism, that should be enough of a reason to resist it. We resist it not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of all of mankind, believer and non-believer, that will find themselves suffering under the same dictator as we. In Daniel, God lays out all the, ever going to exist world empires, under the rule of one man . Each one less powerful than the one before, encompassing less and less with less riches, till it comes to the final global dictator, the one that is the result of one world globalism.

His kingdom is made up of ten nations of the old roman empire, remember though that the old roman empire had two legs, just like the statue in Daniel had two legs. One leg was made up of the European nations, and one was made up of middle eastern nations. This rulers power over the lives of individuals will be so all encompassing that the individual cannot even buy or sell a toothpick without permission, the mark of the beast. Yet his power over the governments of the skittish nations will not be all that strong.

Each nation fearful of not getting it's slice of the pie, or fear of not being the most favored, the fear by politicians of losing their power, will all contribute to this empires weakness even though the entire world joins it.

So while each nation is perfectly willing to sacrifice the freedom of the individual to this dictator, it's a whole nother matter when it comes to the rights, power, and expectations of the big dogs.

That is exactly what we are seeing going on in the E.U. right now. It is exactly the kind of infighting we are seeing in OPEC. And it is exactly the kind of trouble this last global dictator will face. It takes him three and a half years to set up, he rules for three and a half killing off Christians and other desenters, then it all blows up in his face, along with the entire world as it decends into WW3.

This is why I am against artificially manipulated Free Trade and globalism. It's going to look real good and profitable for some, and for some time, until the entire world is under international law as it creeps in as the last defining word, not the Constitution and it's Bill of Rights. The USofA is the leader of a world, even though hated, we should not be leading the world into globalism.

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