Why you guys are so narcissistic and with so narrow vision? The only thing you are capable to see is your own individual stuff.
Here is you have a caricature of a narcissistic person:
Posted on 02/15/2006 10:42:45 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Our hollow prosperity
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Posted: February 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
PATRICK BUCHANAN
© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Now that the U.S. trade deficit for 2005 has come in at $726 billion, the fourth straight all-time record, a question arises.
What constitutes failure for a free-trade policy? Or is there no such thing? Is free trade simply right no matter the results?
Last year, the United States ran a $202 billion trade deficit with China, the largest ever between two nations. We ran all-time record trade deficits with OPEC, the European Union, Japan, Canada and Latin America. The $50 billion deficit with Mexico was the largest since NAFTA passed and also the largest in history.
When NAFTA was up for a vote in 1993, the Clintonites and their GOP fellow-travelers said it would grow our trade surplus, raise Mexico's standard of living and reduce illegal immigration.
None of this happened. Indeed, the opposite occurred. Mexico's standard of living is lower than it was in 1993, the U.S. trade surplus has vanished, and America is being invaded. Mexico is now the primary source of narcotics entering the United States.
Again, when can we say a free-trade policy has failed?
The Bushites point proudly to 4.6 million jobs created since May 2003, a 4.7 percent unemployment rate and low inflation.
Unfortunately, conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts and analysts Charles McMillion and Ed Rubenstein have taken a close look at the figures and discovered that the foundation of the Bush prosperity rests on rotten timber.
The entire job increase since 2001 has been in the service sector – credit intermediation, health care, social assistance, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, etc. – and state and local government.
But, from January 2001 to January 2006, the United States lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, 17 percent of all we had. Over the past five years, we have suffered a net loss in goods-producing jobs.
"The decline in some manufacturing sectors has more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing than with a super-economy that is 'the envy of the world,'" writes Roberts.
Communications equipment lost 43 percent of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 percent ... The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30 percent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 percent of its workforce.
How did this happen? Imports. The U.S. trade deficit in advanced technology jobs in 2005 hit an all-time high.
As for the "knowledge industry" jobs that were going to replace blue-collar jobs, it's not happening. The information sector lost 17 percent of all its jobs over the last five years.
In the same half-decade, the U.S. economy created only 70,000 net new jobs in architecture and engineering, while hundreds of thousands of American engineers remain unemployed.
If we go back to when Clinton left office, one finds that, in five years, the United States has created a net of only 1,054,000 private-sector jobs, while government added 1.1 million. But as many new private sector jobs are not full-time, McMillion reports, "the country ended 2005 with fewer private sector hours worked than it had in January 2001."
This is an economic triumph?
Had the United States not created the 1.4 million new jobs it did in health care since January 2001, we would have nearly half a million fewer private-sector jobs than when Bush first took the oath.
Ed Rubenstein of ESR Research Economic Consultants looks at the wage and employment figures and discovers why, though the Bushites were touting historic progress, 55 percent of the American people in a January poll rated the Bush economy only "fair" or "poor."
Not only was 2005's growth of 2 million jobs a gain of only 1.5 percent, anemic compared to the average 3.5 percent at this stage of other recoveries, the big jobs gains are going to immigrants.
Non-Hispanic whites, over 70 percent of the labor force, saw only a 1 percent employment increase in 2005. Hispanics, half of whom are foreign born, saw a 4.7 percent increase. As Hispanics will work for less in hospitals and hospices, and as waiters and waitresses, they are getting the new jobs.
But are not wages rising? Nope. When inflation is factored in, the Economic Policy Institute reports, "real wages fell by 0.5 percent over the last 12 months after falling 0.7 percent the previous 12 months."
If one looks at labor force participation – what share of the 227 million potential workers in America have jobs – it has fallen since 2002 for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike. Non-Hispanic whites are down to 63.4 percent, but black Americans have fallen to 57.7 percent.
What is going on? Hispanic immigrants are crowding out black Americans in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled job market. And millions of our better jobs are being lost to imports and outsourcing.
The affluent free-traders, whose wealth resides in stocks in global companies, are enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens and sacrificing the American worker on the altar of the Global Economy.
None dare call it economic treason.
Aw, c'mon, don't be so hard on Pat...don't you know he lost an uncle in the Holocaust?
...He fell out of a guardtower!
Does this bring back memories or what. As that other article today says...conservatives tend to be a happy lot. The others...well, these people are a classic example of what life's like for them.
Why you guys are so narcissistic and with so narrow vision? The only thing you are capable to see is your own individual stuff.
Here is you have a caricature of a narcissistic person:
You tell 'em! :-)
LOL! I'm capable of seeing that everyone has the same rights and opportunites that I do. But I understand...that's a living hell for you.
And you believed him.
Sadly, FR has attracted lots of new Patsies. Perhaps some of the more nasty ones are retreads, from the 2000 purge. It's time to have another one...ASAP!
I do not understand you.
Paleos, like Pat, are for fighting for the interests of the USA such as taking out bin Laden, al-Qaeda and anyone else that attacks our land. They are not for being the world's policeman and dying to advance the interests of England, Formosa, Ireland, Israel, Kosovo, Kuwait, Korea, et al who are engaged in ancient conflicts. As Paleo Washington put it - no entangling alliances. Pat is right for America.
The second premise I interpret from your post is that the government should not interfere with any corporation's economic trade as it pertains to imports or exports. Okay, I disagree with these premises as posted, recognizing I may not understand the point of your posts. Here's why:
I operate from the premise that there are some things that are morally wrong, and that even if they are profitable, and return a dividend to the stockholders, should be prohibited by law. As an extreme example: Human organs for transplant are valuable. Nike receives an offer from the company that is currently providing their shoes to also provide, on one week notice, any specified organ for transplant. Nike agrees and commences operations. The venture is hugely successful, resulting in higher dividends and increased profitability. Behind the scenes, the foreign company is purchasing slaves through the Russian and Vietnamese mafia, working them in the sneaker factory during the day, renting them out as prostitutes at night, chaining them to a bed. They get one meal a day. When an order for an organ comes in, they take the slave, murder him or her, harvest the desired organs, and use the remainder of the body to feed to the other slaves, and the skin to create the leather uppers of the shoes.
Are you saying that there is no point at which the United States government has not only the right, but responsibility to say, "This is wrong. Business dealings with this corporation are illegal."?
Keep in mind, there are reports out that Hamas and other such organizations are moving onto the web...pat is one of their biggest defenders. Maybe they're returning the favor.
I am afraid you do not. I might be quite comfortable, but I do not project my own private life into general questions like you do.
And how is defending the terrorists at war with this country in the interests of the USA?
I know...it's not fair.
Individual workers have far more say-so and redress now, than at any other point in this nation's history.
You're just saying that because Walmart is holding your grandmother hostage.
Tax revenue, dividends and nifty shoes.
subsidized their move off shore, and protect Nike's foreign interests with their lives in the military get?
I must have missed sending our troops in to protect a Nike factory. You have a link?
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