Posted on 02/13/2007 7:53:20 AM PST by presidio9
Lest I appear obsessed with how (simultaneously) wrong and out-of-touch mainstream pundits were about Iraq, let's turn now to trade, where conventional conservative wisdom is, amazingly, even more dominant.
A demand for tougher trade policies was nearly as fundamental to the success of the 2006 Democratic electoral sweep as opposition to Bush's catastrophic war. "There has been an evolution among almost all Democrats that these trade agreements simply need to be constructed in a different way for fair trade, not for free trade," a victorious Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio explained. In Virginia, James Webb promised, "We are going to work very hard on issues of economic fairness in a country that has become too divided by class.... We must re-examine our tax and trade policies." And Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse beat Lincoln Chafee, despite the latter's anti-Bush stance, by proclaiming, "It's time to reject trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA that fail to protect American jobs."
Now, how many mainstream pundits share the fair-trade view endorsed by so many millions of voting Americans and demonstrated in decades of polls conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs? Virtually none. "Free trade," really just a nice name for a free investment policy that allows global corporations to move production and capital around the world with no thought to the human and environmental consequences and that offers countless exceptions when the powerful are threatened, is the religion of the American elite. The primary punditocracy outliers Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs oppose it from a right-wing nativist perspective. The columns by the Washington Post's invaluable Harold Meyerson which reflect a progressive, pro-labor, pro-environment, fair-trade perspective may make him the only mainstream pundit with mainstream values on the issue.
As with Iraq,
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Who has the larger automobile market, Japan or the U.S.?
So those Japanese auto (and truck plants) popping-up like mushrooms here are spontaneously generating themselves? Or is the "company that makes its profits selling in Japan" realizing that it can "make its profits selling the the U.S.?"
A precipitous 30% tariff is ill-advised and dangerous. Smoot-Hawley led to depression and war.
The dollar must be allowed to continue to drop. As it does, import prices will go up and our domestic industries will recover (to a degree).
China, Japan and Korea have no way of preventing it. They will be victims of their own success.
BUMP
And that's bad?
They built too many cars and trucks? Why?
Of course we don't have a nice cushy little protectionist scheme going like the Japanese so we can't offset our losses.
What scheme do they have? Does GM build the cars they like? What about quality? Maybe GM has the same bad (fair or not) reputation there as here?
Those who enact barriers to trade need to live by their own rules period.
I agree we should push others to open their markets like we do.
Why should the US open their markets when there is no reciprocation?
Because we get quality products at good prices. Because that competition causes our own companies to innovate or die.
Same here. But the Dems won anyway.
I am horrified by the one world crowd period.
Who's that? What do they want?
One of the worst pieces of legislation ever enacted. Having said that, it was only one of many factors in the depression and war. And not close to the most important.
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