Posted on 01/24/2014 6:36:50 AM PST by 1rudeboy
“We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us.”
So says University of California scientist Steve Davis. Smog from Chinese factories has already saturated cities like Beijing, where residents go about in surgical masks, and crossed the East China Sea to foul the air of Korea and Japan. Now China’s smog is coming to America’s West.
Among the pollutants wafting their way over the Pacific, says the Guardian, is black carbon, which is “linked to cancer, emphysema and heart and lung diseases,” and travels “huge distances on global winds known as ‘westerlies.’” Davis is one of a team of U.S. and Chinese researchers whose report has been published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. As the Chinese factories fouling Asia’s air arose to meet the demands of Western consumers, says Beijing, the West should help pay the cost of cleaning up their polluted and poisoned environment.
Seems that, despite the academic consensus that free trade is win-win for all, free trade is not free.
Great nations that have risen to global power by protecting their manufacturing, like Britain in the early 19th century, have begun their relative decline when they embraced free trade. Between 1870 and 1914, protectionist America and Germany both shoved Britain aside.
Since Y2K, China, which protects its industrial base by keeping its currency artificially cheap, has surged past Italy, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. And they are gaining steadily on us. Free trade appears to be the policy of fading nations.
Perhaps it is time for a profit and loss statement of its costs and benefits. Undeniably, free trade has been a bonanza for the top 1 percent and many among our top 10 percent. As U.S. manufacturers shut down scores of thousands of U.S. factories to finance new plants in Asia, their production costs plummeted. Wages and benefits for Asians were, and are still, but a fraction of those of American workers.
Health, safety, and environmental standards were in some cases almost nonexistent. The eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed in April, killing 1,100 workers, mostly women, and injuring another 2,500, would never have passed a U.S. building inspection.
After having shifted production overseas and dramatically lowered costs, U.S. transnationals saw a surge in profits. These were used to push corporate salaries into the stratosphere, increase dividends to shareholders, and keep the Washington lobbyists working the Hill day and night for fast track and free trade. And the lifestyle of our corporate elites changed. Where their fathers walked sooty factory floors in smokestack towns in World War II, these masters of the universe fly Gulfstream Vs to Davos and Dubai to dine with titled Europeans, Saudi princes and Chinese billionaires.
These are America’s winners from free trade. The losers? Middle Americans. The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.
And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”
The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?
Whatever happens from free trade is what should happen, free traders say. As Dr. Pangloss explained to Candide, whatever happens, happens for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Sure.
You forgot coolie wages and pollution.
Do you know the percentage of MANUFACTURING workers are in a union? DO I need to tell you? (Your fighting the last war, try to speed up)
See this is your problem. You claim that the low number of manufacturing jobs that are union backs up your theory. When it actually disproves it.
Unionistas want to tax and regulate the market to try and force companies to create jobs in the USA when that is exactly why they are disappearing.
Try and learn its not working AND MORE OF THE SAME WILL MAKE IT EVEN MORESO!
The government fixes everything it breaks. And while there is such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing as the Law of Unintended Consequences. I know because Marx told me.
Bull crap the number of Right - Work - States is growing. Union presence in manufacturing is dead and nothing will bring that back. Get real. So what is the percentage? DO YOU KNOW THE ANSWER?
What a crock.
That will be good for THOSE people. Where I live, there are a lot of white young men whose dads used to grow stuff or make stuff. The ones who CAN'T "understand and use information" are about 75%, and if they have no work, they do meth and heroin and commit petty crimes.
If we keep growing THAT population, it won't matter how cheap sh*t is at WalMart.
And if your answer is "education", save it. The average working guy is what he is. For the smart ones (25%), there's more education than they know what to do with. For the rest, there's nothing past 10th grade that's worth doing.
Other reasons are now coming into play as our education system continues to dumb down the work force and make it even less competitive to foreign companies. This is egregious as it damages and erodes our future dominance or presence in global research.
Well stated.
When it gets to zero then I will know my work is done! (But now I am focusing on right to work in every state and destroying the public employee unions!)
So what? That's their function.
And if the result is my American brothers and sisters having work instead of cooking meth and doing break-ins, you know what?
I'm fine with it.
“That is ABSOLUTLRY NOT TRUE. Labor is just one component in manufacturing, one of the smallest too.”
Exchange the word “labor” for ‘all expenses related to employing a worker’ and it is correct.
The term labor covers all the cost of employing a human worker.
Machines require no workmans comp insurance, no osha to protect their health, no wages or benefits, no SS or FICA matching funds, the list is endless for the cost of employing workers.
cenntral va told me...
I was merely expounding on Pietro’s “new economy based on information” idea; how it might come about.
Education would be good... if it really were education and not indoctrination/conformance-manipulation — but it’s not, so it’s really a moot point.
So you don't know, yet you go on public forums a decry unions are ruining manufacturing. You are useful idiot. I have the answers and the links but I will not post them. Laziness does not become you.
About 6% of public sector workers are union, the public sector unions are the problem today.
We need national RTW!
yes and the function of criminals is to commit crime...
same difference.
And if you want jobs created then start a business and show us how its done.
I've done it for 35 years and I am done fighting the unionistas and the Gub'ment. I have shrugged and my family who has been in business (both sides) for over 100 years will do so no more.
None of the descendants on either side of the family is continuing their businesses. None! Why because its now a losing prospect. You spend all your time trying to satisfy Gub'ment B.S. ...
You should feel proud because your Unionista/Big Gub'ment philosophy is solely responsible for it!
About 6% of PRIVATE sector are union.
Two problems with your assumption.
1. You are full of shit. 2. Unionistas aren't necessarily Union members. They are the useful idiots who believe in and promote Union/Big Gub'ment propaganda. If you want to know how to spot one look in the mirror...
Agree, but this thread is about manufacturing.
So you don’t know the answer yet you’re an expert. So who is full of it again?
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