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.
We reformed welfare inside the U.S.A., and then started it up outside the U.S. Delicious irony at its very best!
Here in Orange County CA, our unemployment is 3.2% and yet, up the coast, Portland OR. is at 7.2%. There are so many other factors other than federal policy that help/hurt the economy. With city, county, & state taxes, regulations, and judicial systems in play, I am always suprised by the lack of accountability of "local" leaders concerning the economy compared to the President.
I sure don't see people getting poorer.
Simple. If he is not part of the solution, then he is part of the problem. Bush has spoken clearly on this matter: He thinks oursourcing is wonderful.
An error in this assumption is catastrophic. It is best to error in such a manner to be "fail safe, safe fail".
You did a lot of talking but I see no numbers showing that legitimate Engineering jobs (not those fake bubble computer engineering jobs) have left the country by a large percentage.
He left out the dot.com boom and 9-11. The dot.com boom put people in unstable jobs that were doomed to disappear. 9-11 erased $8 trillion from our capital. That will stop a lot of job creation. Our annual GDP is still only about $10 trillion.
The 2.4 million job increase so far will soon start to take accelerate and this commentary will look plain silly.
I surely have. I guess you don't even know any engineers.
Ha! I have an engineering degree and I lost my job last year to China. I'm on pace to make more this year than last though. The economy changes, we have to change with it.
Do your own research. I know well the conditions of my trade and the numbers of available jobs now as compared to merely two years ago.
On "monster.com", there were 6,000 to 8,000 jobs posted at any time in my field. There are precicely 130 nationwide today. This is the same story from all sources. There are very few "head hunter" firms in business these days.
Could you tell me what I'd have to gain by making this shit up?
100,000 companies of, I believe, 100 employees or larger are included in the unemployment statistics while the vast majority of businesses are smaller than 100 employees and are not part of the equation. So the rate is faulty from the start. But that being said, the fact is not everyone can have their dream job or even maintain a job that they have a degree for. Life is fluid and if your stat is right in regards to the 20.3 months average unemployment then you are seeing the result of how endlessly extending federal unemployment benefits encourages people to continue a "paid vacation" while at the same time they fret about not finding exactly what they want. There is NO reason for one to be out of work for almost two years; you may have to take a paycut but that job still helps one maintain their dignity which is always important in the long run.
Whether people want to accept it or not this is a global market and will remain so for the rest of existing time. Tarriffs are not the answer - they alienate and should only be sparingly used in regards to other gov't's federal sunsidizing of entire industries and even then we must be careful. Oh, by the way, Pat Buchanan can go pound sand!
Same thing happened with Bush Sr.
Its all about jobs and job security and the President and his party are deaf, dumb, and blind...AGAIN!
Not only that, they are insulting the newly unemployed, well educated, new lower middle class workers by calling them isolationists while we await the free trade nirvana that will engulf the USA any minute now... /sarcasm
Jeez..they NEVER LEARN!
That's anecdotal, doesn't prove much.
On "monster.com", there were 6,000 to 8,000 jobs posted at any time in my field. There are precicely 130 nationwide today. This is the same story from all sources. There are very few "head hunter" firms in business these days.
Is that an accurate way to measure jobs, by a website that was one of those bubble sites? I rather see statistics with a good representative sample-size.
Could you tell me what I'd have to gain by making this shit up?
I didn't say you were making anything up, I just haven't seen anything from you that shows any nationwide hard facts or significant statistics. I've seen some anecdotal evidence from you, but that doesn't tell me much about what the percentages of legitimate engineering jobs leaving the country are.
Do they really think it's the job of the president to maintain their standard of living?
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