Willis Hawley and Reed Smoot, you may recall, sponsored the Tariff Act of 1930 that raised tariffs to record levels on more than 20,000 imported goods. The duo said this would protect American jobs and revive the economy. It did the reverse, plunging the nation into an even deeper depression. Other nations retaliated. Global trade plummeted. Americans got poorer, as did millions of others around the world.
Why do I think we’re on the way back to Smoot-Hawley? Because with Republicans and blue-dog deficit hawks gaining ground after November 2, the chance of boosting the economy with an “infrastructure bank,” another big spending package, or even a big round of middle-class tax cuts is roughly nil. This means a lousy economy ”” possibly for years.
And that leaves trade as a sitting duck.
There’s so much to disagree with, it’s hard to begin.. but let’s start with Robert Reich’s record of duplicity on this and so many other subjects. Reich doesn’t like to address the facts, because they are inconvenient to this radical Marxist. Reich was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, and was part of the Clinton administration that illegally imposed NAFTA, and I say illegally, because as the constitution requires, for a treaty to pass, and be sign-able by the president, it must receive a 2/3 majority vote. The North American Free Trade Agreement, written by weasels like Rahm Emanuel, Robert Reich, Bill Clinton, lobbyists galore, the governments of Mexico and Canada, was intended to start us down the road to where we are now, bleeding our economy dry, compromise our sovereignty and make the US dependent and no longer independent and strong. When the treaty failed to achieve a majority vote approving it, Bill Clinton violated the law, by deciding on a whim to just call it a law, and sign it any way.. a violation of the US constitution. NAFTA, followed up by Clinton imposing Most Favored Nation trading status with China, opened the flood gates to the massive outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs, the bulwark that fed and maintained our previously strong middle class, lifted American citizens out of poverty.
Robert Reich supported this, and has supported the further outsourcing of not only jobs, but of our security and screening systems and agencies. Of our visa programs being exploited despite there being no real shortage of educated and skilled US citizens to fill jobs. If one back tracks through our recent past on the subject of US citizen worker displacement, you see Robert Reich’s fingerprints everywhere. Since leaving the government, Reich has hidden away in the ivory towers of academia, and has lined his pockets by promoting open borders, and increased displacing of US citizens. He’s signed on to various left wing candidates campaigns, while he worked for the Dean campaign, he pitted young workers against older workers, while stumping for Obama, he demonized US citizen workers for daring to speak up about their suffering when they were slipping into poverty. During house committee hearings on the stimulus, Robert Reich, testifying before the appropriations committee, leapt to Rep Charlie Rangel’s defense and between the two of them imposed preferences for “minorities” in any jobs created or contracts funded by the stimulus. This included encouraging stimulus funding to “create†jobs given to visa workers to push out US citizens who worked tech jobs in the federal government, in fact, all new tech hires for the federal government are restricted to H1B visa workers. It included 86 million dollars of stimulus funneled through USAID to subsidize Bill Gates expansion into Sri Lanka, and to train Sri Lankans to speak English and to receive training in IT and Java as well as to train others to become outsourcing agents (plus additional millions funneled to Armenia and Bosnia via USAID to subsidize Oracle and Sun’s expansions into those countries, it’s corporate welfare and reported on informationweek.com)..
Robert Reich lies about what has caused our long term unemployment problems, we’ve been seeing US citizens displaced, fired from their jobs, and replaced by foreign nationals, both legal and illegal. American citizens, whether in the meat packing industry, construction,, landscaping, the tech fields, engineering, nursing, banking, and so on. Of course the mortgage collapse has added to the unemployment problem, but that same mortgage collapse was brought about by policies implemented under Reich’s former boss, Bill Clinton, who imposed policies that forced banks to provide mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, as well as ensuring they didn’t have to document their income sources, and that lead to even more corrupt practices in the banking and investment industries. Reich just doesn’t want us connecting the dots, he’s assuming that most Americans won’t care about the less affluent American citizens whose jobs were shipped overseas with the help of corrupt democrats, including Robert Reich.
Reich doesn’t want the house of cards to topple now, for any attention to be focused on corrupt democrat policies that earn them huge kickbacks, for not doing anything about China’s currency manipulation, and other protectionist policies the Chinese put in place, Reich doesn’t even want us to consider how unfair it is when the Chinese and other foreign interest incorrectly label us protectionist, when it’s them and other foreign countries like India, Mexico, and other Latin American countries, Canada and European countries that have actual protectionist policies and subsidies. For the US to take a stand in it’s own defense might actually return the US to independence, strength and an ability to pay off it’s debt. I’m not advocating we become protectionist, but there’s nothing wrong with showing some spine, and actually playing hardball against corrupt foreign nations who abuse power, and multinationals who put profit before anything else, including the US.
Why do we give wealthy India, which now has a large and thriving middle class, and more billionaires than any other country, 18 billion in foreign aid per year? Why are we giving China foreign aid, when it’s wealthy and we have to borrow from them? Mexico is now the 12th wealthiest country in the world, the 4th largest oil producing nation in the world, has a large thriving middle class, and many million and billionaires, foreign aid? When Mexico co-wrote NAFTA, it promised that if given those millions of US jobs, it would have a large, thriving middle class, and more wealthy citizens, a tax base upon which to raise revenue to help it’s people. Because the US has refused to enforce it’s immigration laws, has been coddling illegal aliens, subsidizing them on welfare programs, allowing them to send billions in wages (and drug dealing profits) back to Mexico in remittances, it’s allowed Mexico to avoid having to enact needed reforms, to raise taxes and actually act like a responsible state towards it’s people, by offering them better education and opportunities, as well as squashing the corruption that exists in that country. By allowing Mexicans and other foreign nationals to leech off our system, it raises our tax rates, making the US even less competitive, and by extension, it allows countries like Mexico to keep their tax rates artificially lower, and more competitive.
Robert Reich, like so many ivory tower elites doesn’t believe we’re intelligent enough to see through their deceptions.
Mari, Reich is right. Killing free trade will kill all of our jobs and our economy, just like Smoot-Hawley did. I understand the emotional appeal of what you’re saying, but your conclusions are simply wrong.
The Democrats are in bed with the trade unions; they are the ones most likely to kill free trade in order to protect their cronies.
Mari, NAFTA was negotiated and written by the Bush administration starting in 1988 prior to Clinton’s election.
i was for NAFTA back in the day but to mari’s point it seems like it opened trade up for the US to import a lot of stuff but we’ve lost ground on exporting. Buying cheap plastic crap from China, while sometimes the best choice, should not be the only choice. You can hardly walk into a Wal Mart and find anything made anywhere else. The loss of our manufacturing base is having dramatic repercussions as people can’t afford to buy or even rent homes (so they move in with friends and family), they have no discretionary income, which is a huge drag on the economy. I’d like to see someone explain how we’re going to get out of our current economic situation by just buying more goods abroad – $8 an hour retail jobs selling that stuff are not going to be sufficient.
“I’d like to see someone explain how we’re going to get out of our current economic situation by just buying more goods abroad
I don’t think anyone can demonstrate that is the way to success. I recently told the story about Lanette, AL and how that formerly rural backwater place was transformed to a vibrant, economic powerhouse in Alabama by the recent placement of Kia’s North American manufacturing plant and allied manufacturing plants.
We have got to remember how basic manufacturing creates tremendous wealth. And we have got to relearn how adding value to basic manufactured products (often called “innovation”) keeps a given manufacturer ahead of the pack as commodity products lose pricing power and obtain lower profit margins.
If our Federal Govt really understood that (most Obama appointees have never had a real job so don’t hold your breath) and wanted to revive our economy in a sustainable way (do they?) they would do these things;
1. Cut the red tape of permitting processes. Time is money and windows of oppty go away quicker than we can permit basic manufacturing
2. Cut regulatory burden and get administrative agencies out manufacturing’s hair. When manufacturers hire regulatory officers, mulitple benefits managers, contracted accounting firms to nagivate byzantine finanical laws, that adds NO value to the product.
3. Cut corporate tax burden both financially and from a regulatory perspective. We are becoming non-competitive here.
4. Turn the Dept of State and Commerce into a marketing arm for private manufacturing to drive exports.
Basic manufacturing creates real wealth. The question is whether we will embrace that new way to lift all American living standards or will we just squabble about how to dole out new entitlements?
Tariffs are the absolute wrong way to go. They simply inflame trade wars and provide temporary protection to uncompetitive industries. The hangover is awful.
Just because 65% are against free trade does not mean it is on everybody’s mind all the time. 75% of people probably hate rainy days but nobody’s doing anything about it.
Just a few comments: (1) “Left-wing” has become an overly used and meaningless term to characterize economists and politicians who advocate more often for the interests of people who labor to produce and serve than for the interests of people wealthy enough to have capital to put at risk through investing. (2) The very word “manufacturing” – making with the use of hands – should explain why, as the USA (and Northern Hemisphere plus India) is increasingly high-tech and the 2nd and 3rd world countries become more skilled, manufacturing is done increasingly in the 2nd and 3rd world – where their own high growth-rate societies provide rapidly growing demand for many of the same products we import from them, and therefore much wealth is created for whoever is investing in the manufacturing sectors in those same 2nd and 3rd world countries. (3) Unregulated capitalism has no interest in religion, nationalism, or patriotism, only in the likelihood of a good return. (4) American workers who are taken in by currently much publicized “anti-Obama” and “culture war” inflammatory rhetoric are in danger of voting – irrationally – for politicians who will legislate for the interests of American capitalists investing across the border and overseas, rather than to create jobs for Americans.
#8, your contradictions are extraordinary!
“Unregulated capital has no interest in………nationalism”
Yet you then contend that American capitalists WILL [emphasis mine] invest overseas. Is that due to anti-Nationalism [which is a nationalism!] Why would they do that? Only for a better return of course!
You fear for American workers who will vote for “anti-Obama” politicians. Yet these are precisely the politicians who will be elected to undo the Obama-driven march to larger government control which leaves American industry less competitive on the world stage and American workers without any work.
Free capital will chase its best [risk adjusted] return. You will not find American businessmen craving the oppty to go set up shop in China in order to ship their jobs there. They do it in order to compete with the goods being imported into their domestic markets by China, India, and others.
So why don’t they keep the jobs here? Oh let’s see…..unions, EPA, OSHA, snail-like permitting processes, federal taxes, Payroll taxes, medicare taxes, state taxes, local taxes, real estate taxes, inventory taxes, business license taxes, red-tape financial rules [remember Sarbanes?], and on and on and on. How about that neat little ObamaCare critter? The 1099 report for every vendor you spend more than $600 on. Your CPA does not fill those out for free, unfortunately money spent on your CPA adds no value to your product or service.
Firstly, no, I’m not wrong. I am old enough to remember, I was in my 20s, when Bush senior was pushing NAFTA, and I was against it then, as I am now. I knew about the maquiladoras, and I knew that nothing we were told made any sense. There was nothing in the interest of free trade, or being altruistic involved in NAFTA, it was about nothing more than destroying the US economy. I was a democrat back then, I foolishly voted for Bill Clinton, I well remember his embracing NAFTA, and I also remember his claims that he and his administration were going to “add environmental and wage protections”, etc… to it, to “ensure it didn’t hurt American workers”. While I have NO doubt that what Bush senior had in mind was bad, Bill Clinton and his cronies Rahm Emanuel (why else do you think he’s labeled the “architect of NAFTA”?) and the like, made it much worse. There was nothing about the environment or wages in what Clinton presented, and they did more than add a few tweaks, they conducted what can be honestly called a rewriting of NAFTA, and it’s gutted the US dry. The Clinton administration were the ones who cooked up MFN status with China as well, and the dirty deals that included the Marianas Islands gimmicks, that allowed women to be lured to “work” in the factories, and then be trapped as prostitutes in brothels. As much as I loathe Bush senior, you can’t lay MFN w/China at his door, but at Clinton, Emanuel, Reich, and the lot.
If you’re familiar with Obama’s lies about our lacking an educated and skilled workforce, and our need to “educate” our way out of this unemployment crisis, and you happen to be old enough to remember the Clinton years, you should recall also his attempt at mollifying all those newly unemployed US citizens, with promises of education and retraining. Are you aware that the Clinton administration incentivized math and science degrees? Well, it did, and as a result, we have a glut of citizens with math and science degrees, including masters and doctorates in those fields, including in the technical and computer sciences.. there is no shortage of engineers, programmers, etc… yet we’ve been sold that lie now for more than a decade. NPR even got shamed into doing a report on the massive amount of math and science degrees who can not get a job, irregardless of excellent GPAs, experience, and those with exemplary work histories willingness to relocate, to take lower wages.
Citizens were forced to train their foreign replacements and fired. There is no competition in that. Now, perhaps you might think, well, it’s not me, it’s no skin off my nose, lots of people did when it was initially blue collar laborers, and then tech workers, but it’s happening to citizens in all job fields. Our economy is gutted, we’re subsidizing this cheap foreign labor, our independence is weakened, and the Obama administration is now targeting our farmers, and ranchers. Have you read about new regulations, taxes and fines Obama wants his EPA (without going through congress) to levy on “dust”? When a farmer tills his fields, or the soil is dry and the wind blows loose dirt in the air, or cattle, chickens, pigs, sheep, what have you, kick up soil. This will ultimately make farming and raising these animals for meat unprofitable, and they will go out of business. Forcing us to import vegetables, grain and meat, and subject to the whims of foreign suppliers. Don’t take my word for it, google for yourself.
Nor was I wrong about it being illegal for Clinton to have signed NAFTA, it’s a treaty, not a law.
Free trade is what we had prior to these horrendous trade deals. What we have now, ties our hands behind our backs, and allows for the gutting of our economy. Now, I’m no more a supporter of unions than any of you, but surely you don’t despise US citizen workers, do you? Free trade requires neither side to subsidize, manipulate currency, or to disadvantage or block reciprocal trade etc… but all our so called trading “partners” do this to us to one extent or another, and we, under Clinton, Bush jr. or Obama haven’t done a blessed thing about it. Mexico and other Latin American countries encourage their poor to come here, which lessens their tax burden and raises ours. And frankly, sending our jobs overseas is almost to the point that it’s the only thing we’re exporting, but perhaps you put your faith in the not so tender mercies of corrupt nations like Mexico, India, China, etc.. ? No other country in the world outsources it’s jobs.. there’s nothing canny or advantageous in doing so. I’m not talking about Smoot Hawley, I’m talking about instead of outsourcing jobs and displacing citizens, that we stop that. We force a renegotiation of all trade deals, before it’s so late that US and multinationals no longer care. I’m talking about real tax incentives to create US jobs, for US citizens only, not for visa or illegal workers. I’m talking about introducing right to work laws, and other such things to protect manufacturers from being subsumed by unions, and I know there are many other ideas for creating jobs in the US. I’ve read about US companies that want to return to manufacturing in the US as China’s bribes and fees, plus the disadvantages of the long turnaround time it takes to get goods from the factory floor, to the store shelves, but they are having trouble getting loans for some of their costs for reestablishing back in the States. This is do-able, what isn’t sustainable is the greedly delusion that we can survive without a manufacturing base, or that it’s acceptable to displace less fortunate US citizens with cheap foreign labor, that is what has lead us here to this point in time.
Capt. Deacon Warren:
Maybe my Bibles have all been printed omitting from the Pentateuch an 11th commandment that capital invested should be guaranteed a profit unlimited by anything except the good fortune of the marketplace. Or is that one of Jesus’ censored Beatitudes passed down through secret channels for two millenia to a select few international finance Gnostics?
Furthermore, I cannot find in Proverbs anything about government control leaving industry less competitive and workers without work. Just the opposite seems to have happened in the USA during the Second World War and into the 1950s. Furthermore, there are a lot more Chinese at profitable work these days, and fewer starving, than there were a generation ago.
Free-market capitalism and government-managed socialism both have strengths and weaknesses. If even Fidel Castro has come to realize this, might not you as well?
Henry, what a snide, offensive comment you make in #11. Totally uncalled for. Capt. Deacon Warren did not bring religion into the equation. Governmental systems are neither approved of or derided in the Scriptures (except for a monarchy, which was allowed by the Lord ONLY due to the people complaining about wanting to be like their neighbors, not His vision). IF I wanted to continue your allusions, I might point out that a move towards Big Government is this administration wanting to be like our neighbors, who are paradoxically abandoning the very model they wish to impose.
By the way, I notice you did not disparage the use of “Right-Wing” as you did “Left-Wing”, a definition you got wrong as well. The Left Wingers do not advocate for the people any more than the ‘right wing’ only advocates for the wealthy.
Jim
Well let’s look at this 11th Commandment that Henry speaks of. Here is a true story: I know a fellow in south Georgia who started a family business in the early 1960’s and put every dime he had into it and worked like a dog seven days a week. It puttered along until the early 1990’s when serendipity struck and a particular product he made really turned out to be important to the tire industry.
In the next 18 years or so he has made many millions of dollars on this. He has created about 100 steady, good paying jobs in a part of the country where picking peanuts is typical seasonal work. He has paid for education for workers who wanted to advance, he has donated to uncountable charities. And he has an airplane, a big house, and a yacht. And he has paid all the taxes that have been asked of him.
Henry, according to you, what is his crime against mankind or God?
Henry–Your #8–You and Mr. Reich would probably make good buddies. He said during the Clinton Administration that anybody who did well in the (Reagan) 80’s had it handed to them on a silver platter, unless, of course, they were Democrat elite. Well, I paid my way through my last two years of college while working as a waiter, joined the Marine Corps for four years and then went to law school while working two jobs. Nothing was handed to me by a grateful government. There are those of us who used to be Democrats but have renounced them, who will vote not out of knee jerk reaction or “irrationality”, but because we believe the constitution and the very Republic are being impairled by the far left (a word you apparently don’t like). Robert Reich, like most Democratic leaders and thinkers, is a product of an elitist Ivy League who think, as apparently you do, that if we don’t worship at the through of socialism that somehow we are stupid, and you know what is best for us, because we are nothing but cattle to you. And most of that elite has never even had a real job or had to work for anything. The notion that those who oppose the policies of the current administration are a monolithic mass of tea partiers is the height of elite prejudice which I personllay resent. And believe it or not we all know about Smoot Hawley making the deperssion worse. But don’t be so selective in your memory because Roosevelt raisng taxes and trying a stimulus package also made things worse. You can scream at us all you want but November 2 is 22 days away.
From reviewing this whole thread of comments, I realize that our reactiveness to other people’s political discussion vocabulary makes effective communication and movement towards problem-solving political consensus almost impossible. If, then, experience teaches us that God laughs at our plans, then surely our political beliefs and passions are causes for heavenly mirth.
#15, I think a fair portion of the country is no longer interested in political consensus or to use a more oft used word, bipartisanship. Just speaking for myself; I do not want to compromise with Mr. Obama and his friends. I want to defeat them. I want to defeat them because I very seriously disagree with their vision for America.
Like anyone on this thread of posts, I have not had a care free life, but this country has created the space, the opportunities, and the freedoms for me to apply myself and to work hard, and to fail, and to get up and try again and to taste success.
History shows over and over again that the push towards equal outcomes leaves everyone either equally miserable or dead.
The push for equal opportunity for ALL creates the dynamic environment which allows each person the greatest opportunity to be their best and to see the rewards of their efforts.
If we can be in consensus on that, then I will be your strongest supporter.