America Unmade

NewsMax ^ | May 22, 2003 | Diane Alden

[Phaedrus]

When "The Invisible Hand" and the politicians' "free trade" mantra allows short-sighted corporate greed to export manufacturing and technical jobs and proprietary technology to nations that do not permit the import of our goods, what we export is our standard of living. That is, we lose. It's happening, Folks. Your kids and mine will pay.

[Phaedrus]

ping ...

[F-117A]

Bump for later reading...

assuming the country is still here when I get back!

[PeterPrinciple]

"corporatism; that is where government and business corrupt the market in unison. "

Centralization of money and power is not a good thing.

[GingisK]

Excellent post. I've been beating this drum, but not as factually or eloquently. People seem to have forgotton their "Economics 101": You must produce a tangible product in order to survive.

I can't help but wonder how those corporations expect to sell their products in America when Americans are unemployed? Similar circumstances have led to two world wars, certainly numerous revolutions.

[Phaedrus]

... and the politicians' "free trade" mantra allow s ...

no excuse ...

[RLK]

Motorola, of course, has spent $1 billion in transferring its production to China. It is about to invest another $90 million in research and development in China.

---------------------

Wrong. So far Motorola has invested four billion and intends to spend $10,000,000,000 at Chines prices and land/labor values.

This is one of the things that happens when you elect a globalist love-in airhead as president.

[Dataman]

When "The Invisible Hand" and the politicians' "free trade" mantra allows short-sighted corporate greed to export manufacturing and technical jobs and proprietary technology to nations that do not permit the import of our goods, what we export is our standard of living. That is, we lose. It's happening, Folks. Your kids and mine will pay.

We are paying right now. A few of my clients were at that show. Usually a good show will yield 250 solid leads. The average this time was around 40 or 50. As far as government contracts go, they all have ropes (not strings) attached so that you not only have to transform your company into a socialist utopian model but have to do business with the same. The result is decreased efficiency which costs more of our tax dollars.

[steplock]

"I can't help but wonder how those corporations expect to sell their products in America when Americans are unemployed? Similar circumstances have led to two world wars, certainly numerous revolutions."

Thus the circle begins...

We, the people cheered when the cheaper (affordable) chinese/ japanese/ mexican garbage (now better than ours) flooded the markets (WalMart KMart etc) to the point where we, the people, did NOT buy the slightly higher priced (Union Wages) American prices.
To cut the prices, American companies were NOT allowed to lower expenses, in fact they were constatly FORCED by govt to raise their costs.
If the companies were to survive, they had to:
1. Get Americans to back themselves (WAKE UP!) YOU are the displaced workers! Buy American!
2. Find a way to lower production costs
...a. lower wages (NO WAY! say we, the people)
...b. Cut quality (We become the "made in Japan" junk)
...c. Move your production to a LESSER TAXED / LOWER EXPENSE area (which means NOT inside the USA)

The companies move overseas, you get laid off, you can't buy anything, the companies stay away. The USA turns into another South Africa slum country.

How many companies in the USA are gone now thanks to:
1. Unions who would rather see the company go broke than to lower wages a couple of percent (POWER !)
2, Lawyers! Does anyone realize that litigation is now the LARGEST industry in the US? How many BILLION$ are sucked out of our, the people's, wallets? The lawyers thank you.
3. Can't leave out the EPA!
4. to placate the complainers - yes, crooked CEO's etc can harm a company, but this only happened thanks to the encouragement of a slimmy x-prez who bribed the companies to hire people when they needed none and to make the economy look even better, lie like hell about profits.
---to hire all those extra people (at minimum wage +), the companies fired many professionals (higher wages), the schools quit training for higher level technical/business jobs, so know our tech comes from India and other countries.

Americans are now the Janitors of the world ???

[Modernman]

We're a service economy now. Which is all well and good, but you can't have a nation of 280 million people that only produces paper. Plus, the industry we do have requires less and less workers as we get more productive. Kind of a a downward spiral.

I can't complain, personally, the service economy has been very good to me. But, I can see the long-term problems for the country.

[Semi Civil Servant]

"Then the [tech] bubble burst, and we began to learn a very hard lesson and that is there's only a few ways to create wealth," he said. "You have to either farm something, mine something or manufacture something..."

Apart from their lack of morality and tendancies toward criminality, one of the things I find most disturbing about the current crop of CEO's is that many don't seem to want to build anything. They just want to "do deals" and manipulate stock prices. Unfortunately, this creates wealth for THEM in a way that is completely unrelated to the theoretical PURPOSE of the business.

In the past thirty years, there is an outrageous history of CEO's cleaning out the wealth of a company by wounding or destroying it. "Chainsaw Al" is the cover boy of this kind of parasitic management. The fact that this man is NOT in jail is a rather telling commentary on the government's attitude toward corporate crime.

A generation ago, CEO's tended to be outstanding citizens who were leaders within their companies and their communities. There are still many examples of that type of CEO, but I'm afraid the parasites have gained the upper hand. And the government has given these people both a "hand up" and a free ride. It's very sad.

P.S. Sorry to hear about Maytag. I used to know a couple members of the Maytag family 25+ years ago.

[BureaucratusMaximus]

There is a willful blindness on the part of some to the damage being done to American society, the nation-state republic, the citizens, workers, taxpayers and to our national cohesion.

Good article PING.

[betty boop]

...what we export is our standard of living. That is, we lose. It's happening, Folks. Your kids and mine will pay.

Phaedrus, you are so right: That is exactly what we're exporting -- the American standard of living. Short-sighted politicians and so-called "American" corporations (which are effectively transnationals) are selling the American worker/consumer down the river. The American worker/consumer, in order to make the rest of the world prosperous and "stable" and "more democratic," will wind up being a pauper himself, if present policies continue.

[Phaedrus]

A generation ago, CEO's tended to be outstanding citizens who were leaders within their companies and their communities.

As far as government contracts go, they all have ropes (not strings) attached so that you not only have to transform your company into a socialist utopian model but have to do business with the same.

These comments go to the culture, to the loss of Traditional American Values, to the lack of selflessness and to the high hypocrisy of the use of the term "service" by our corporate executives and politicians. This is precisely where I wanted to go with this article.

The link between (what I believe is) our coming economic decline and the degradation of our values is exceedingly real but almost wholly overlooked and misunderstood.

[toddst]

Good article PING.

I agree. So how do we change the trend and begin rebuilding our industrial base? How do we get govt. interference off the back of business, esp. medium to small businesses? Real answers is what I'm looking for.

I have no desire to face my grandkids when they ask me what I did in the economic war - and I have no substantive answer.

[unspun]

brief scan at first w/ big bump

[Phaedrus]

I have no desire to face my grandkids when they ask me what I did in the economic war - and I have no substantive answer.

You have raised a chillingly real question for those of us, which is most of us on FR, who care for more than ourselves. Here's my fantasy. On election day, we all go to the polls and answer the questions "What's best for America?" and "What's best for posterity?".

[scripter]

...assuming the country is still here when I get back!

I was going to say "LOL" but you're too close to the truth and it's not a laughing matter.

[vanmorrison]

I was responsible for designing, installing and managing a booth at the International Machine Tool Show in 1979 for a Connecticut company called Unimation, which was the first company in the world to market an industrial robotic system. The display included a small-batch manufacturing process incorporating machine tools made by DoAll, a Chicago company. At that time, I recall reading a voluminous amount of trade publications that decried the manner in which our industrial base was being undermined by off-shore production and foreign competition. These arguments made sense to me then.

However, it is now 25 years hence. I have followed these trade and labor issues through the years. At this juncture, I admit I must reconsider my position because the protectionist market bias and its arguments do not square with the facts. It must be that the premises upon which these kinds of protectionist arguments are made are fundamentally flawed.

We have just witnessed a monumental moment in the history of the planet. Since 911, the American response to our new security threat has revealed to the entire world that there is no greater power on earth than the United States. It is now recognized universally that the United States has managed to achieve truly global hegemony. The US dominates every sphere of activity; economic, political, scientific, military. This has not happened since the era of the Roman Empire. As a nation, we must be doing something right!

I now believe that we need to rethink our categorical antipathy to foreign trade, just as we are re-examining our foreign alliances in light of new developments revealed by 911 and the resultant Afghan and Iraqi Wars. Security concerns will alter our trade relationships to reflect the support or non-support of other countries to our current crisis. Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, the Netherlands, and others can now reap the benefits of their support. France, Germany, Russia, Turkey, China, and even Mexico and Canada can now suffer the consequences of their perfidy.

But the need for this realignment does not negate the benefits of implementing the principles of free trade and free markets. I believe that the US has achieved its overwhelmingly dominant position insofar as it has implemented and maintained these principles over time, and must continue to do so if we want to continue to prosper.

Our current dominant market position is the sum of gains and losses in individual sectors. But our achievements only validate Adam Smith's concept of "the Invisible Hand".

[balrog666]

Your kids and mine will pay.

Glad we can agree on something.