Posted on 03/10/2004 7:16:16 AM PST by Theodore R.
The jobs crisis and the GOP
Posted: March 10, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
President Bush and his advisers are puzzled and worried.
Economic liftoff took place right on schedule in July when the tax cuts took effect. In the last six months of 2003, the economy blazed along on a growth path of 6 percent. But where are the jobs?
Last week's jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on?
They're calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They're just not being created here in the United States.
The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Numbers do not lie. In 2003, America exported $1 trillion in goods and services. Almost 10 percent of GDP. Excellent. By the Clinton-Bush I rule – $1 billion in exports creates 20,000 jobs – that $1 trillion worth of exports created 20 million jobs. Exports are good for America.
The problem? We imported $1.5 trillion in goods and services. That created or supported 30 million jobs abroad. But even this understates the case. For foreign workers can be hired at a fraction of the cost of a U.S. worker. Our $1.5 trillion in imports is probably supporting 150,000,000 jobs abroad.
The U.S. trade deficit is the greatest foreign aid and wealth transfer program in history, and our workers are paying for it by the loss to their families of the American Dream.
Consider China. With some $150 billion in imports from China last year, we supported 3 million jobs there. But as China's wages are a tenth of U.S. wages, or less, we are probably talking about 30 million or 40 million jobs in China that are tied to exports to the United States.
For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost.
As Robert Novak reports, North Carolina welcomed Sen. John Edwards home after his unsuccessful campaign as a hero. Why? At the end, Edwards was a fiery adversary of the Bush-Clinton trade deals, a denunciator of NAFTA, a champion of workers. Indeed, just as almost all the Democrats ended up the campaign sounding like Howard Dean on Iraq, on trade they had all begun to sound like Dennis Kucinich.
North Carolina may now be in play in November, says Novak. If so, and Bush loses the Tarheel State, he loses the presidency.
At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans.
The crisis of the Bush dynasty is that, like the Bourbons of France, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They do not understand that we have entered a new world where the old ways no longer work. They yet recite the old litanies that lost their relevance in the Reagan decade.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and India abandoned state socialism, and China threw open its doors, a billion workers were thrown onto a global job market to compete against Americans who earn 10 and 20 times their wages.
The trade deals the U.S. government then negotiated, at the behest of U.S. corporations, were not really trade deals at all, but enabling acts. U.S. corporations were told: You can now shut your U.S. factories, shed your U.S. workers, build your new plants in Mexico, China and India, and bring your finished goods back to the United States, free of charge. Go for it!
As Paul Craig Roberts writes, what is happening is not "free trade" in the Adam Smith sense where Portugal makes wine and Britain makes textiles and ships. What is happening is the mass transfer of the "factors of production" from First World countries to Third World countries.
What is happening in the world is what happened in America after World War II, when factories moved to the Sun Belt in search of non-union labor that would work as hard for half of what the high-paid workers in the industrial heartland demanded and got.
Asia is the new Sun Belt, and America is fated to be the "Rust Belt" of the world, as China becomes the factory floor of the global economy and India, through outsourcing, its back office.
Republican free-trade dogma inhibits action to protect U.S. jobs. The GOP is hogtied and hamstrung by its ideology in dealing with the crisis. Its only response is to mutter with Dr. Pangloss that it is all for the best.
The GOP is fortunate its opponent in 2004 is John F. Kerry, who is as clueless as they are on the new world economy that has been designed, and is operating, to loot America of her patrimony.
What they wouldn't do is come out like corporate lap dog idiots and tell you that losing your jobs to foreigners is good for you and America.
Can you prove that all the jobs lost were engineering jobs? (And don't call those bubble computer jobs "engineering" jobs)
Obstacle in what issue?...Employment?
This is why the practice needs to be illegal: Once there are no longer any engineering jobs in the US, the technological leaders will be those to whom the jobs are outsourced. Once that becomes the "status quo", the United States will get all of its technological products from overseas, including the weapon systems used by the Armed Forces. Those to whom we outsource will not be providing the US with "top of the line" hardware, as that will be reserved for their own use.
Catch the drift? The end of the United States as the world's technological leader is rapidly approaching. So is its status as the ultimate world power. So is you standard of living. This may take a few years, but there is no other ending possible. By the way, this is the plan your leaders have for you.
My brother was laid off a year ago. He has gone into business for himself and is doing well. He has to drive long distances, but he now has TWO Birkenstock shoe stores and is doing very well. Ironically, I can't afford Birkenstock shoes (they start at around $100/pair for the crummy ones), but my brother is selling them hand-over-fist to yuppies and X-gens. If the economy is so bad, where are these buyers of premium shoes coming from?
I watched the local access channel here, and the local school system was touting its vocational-ed program. One of the students was talking about auto mechanics, and how a mechanic is no longer a mechanic, but a technician who must be computer-savvy as well as mechanically inclined. In other words, more education is needed to earn a living today.
There are opportunities out there...but the contract limited, job-definition union days likely are gone forever. The jobs reports lack stats from those who are making their way on their own just fine. DemocRats will exploit the appearance that things are perishing, that's their strategy. But when the truth outs, and I think it will, that DemocRat liberals couldn't care less about prosperity unless it benefits the millionaire limousine liberals like Kerry, Kennedy, Heinz, Castro, et. al., pause for thought will allow the race to tilt to the side favoring less government, generally, and national defense. And that side is with the President.
I lean the other way. But if you are right and this is what the president is trying to say he's not doing a very good job of it.
Also if family income is down meaning people are working but not making anywhere near what they once were that doesn't help President Bush.
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