Posted on 11/06/2010 7:22:24 PM PDT by roses of sharon
Via Katzblog and Kate Lucadamo, Mayor Bloomberg made two interesting comments while doing an interview with the Wall Street Journal from Hong Kong, where he's traveling in his new role as head of C40 Cities, one of which waded heavily into trade policy with China, a contentious topic.
The other may not thrill the new members of congress elected on Tuesday (or their longer-serving colleagues).
Regarding trade with China, the mayor said, "“I think in America, we’ve got to stop blaming the Chinese and blaming everybody else and take a look at ourselves,” he said.
“Let me get this straight: There’s a country on the other side of the world that is taking their taxpayers’ dollars, and trying to sell subsidized things so we can buy them cheaper, and have better products, and we’re going to criticize that?”
Earlier, in an interview, the mayor was deeply, undiplomatically critical of provincialism and populism in U.S. Congress.
“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.”
It's the latest example of Bloomberg saying something that isn't necessarily politically expedient, but which his supporters find as a sign of strength for that very reason.
He was vague enough to make it unclear if he didn't also mean decades-old veterans, who "couldn't read the Health Care Bill" before voting for it.
I wonder why Sarah Palin doesn't get the same credit for the same courage for the same reason?
“Free Trade” ideology has been bred into Americans for years. It is taught in universities and on the editorial pages of our largest newspapers. Most people see it as a great benefit to the United States. It was not just Bill Clinton and George Bush who favored it. So did Congress and so do Governors of our states
You and I think it is utter BS but we are only 5-10% of the population. If it was up to me the Japanese would never have been allowed to build automobile plants here and we would have had imposed targeted tariffs years ago
I think people are taking his comments the wrong way. If the US had good political and corporate governance (both are severely lacking), the US would be in a position of strength and would not be so reliant on China. China is taking advantage of our weaknesses, this is not China’s issue, it is ours!
The US is in critical need of reforming government and taking measures to ensure good corporate governance (good corporate governance is something most people greatly understand). I will not give a dissertation on China’s government or economy, but they are clearly on a stronger path than the US.
Bloomberg is correct is that we need to look inwards to resolve our problems. My take anyways...
Funny.
The previous Congress couldn’t bother with reading the bills they passed. Maybe illiteracy is a common problem among elected officials.
That's just the way we are headed.
And idiots like Boomberg are leading the way.
I can tell he has not read much history himself.He is an ignorant Utopian liberal psychopomp, who should be put in a pen and fed like a pig, on the slops of better men than he.
Democrats fear words!
Silly Bloomberg
Everyone knows you can’t know what’s in a bill until you pass it!
There were a few members that voted for health care that admitted as much.
Hmm. What's worse? to have people in charge who CAN'T read but WOULD, or people who CAN read but WON'T.
I know which one I would choose.
Did he make his own money or is this family money that he has? If he made his own money than I would say he is pretty intelligent, but if he was “willed” the money than I agree with your assessment.
Another salient remark from the genius that condemned “White, middle-aged, bald guys that hate health care reform”.
That's a facile, narrow and provincial view of the process. You've left out a few of the players, and focused on the wrong decades.
The process began in the 60s. I remember arguing with a real live communist as we commuted to work, and I recall the puzzlement of seeing the beginnings of our conversion to a "service society." How, I wondered could we maintain preeminence in technolgy if we all simply provided services to each other and allowed manufacturing, steel production, machinery and technology of all sort to fend for itself? We now know the answer. We can't.
Unions and a management style that had a culture of indifference to long term planning, which China does not, guaranteed the fast slide into helplessness. Communist atomic fuel runs our nuclear reactors, and China manufactures our electronics and passenger airliners. It didn't happen overnight, and it did not happen in stealth. Without a sleeping and indifferent population it could not have been possible. An impossible path was chosen, and the result was inevitable.
We are mimicking the entire process, as we speak, in the social arena today. With precisely the same inevitable result: It is impossible to maintain a strong and dynamic society half free and half slaves to ignorance. We not only tolerate it, we encourage and enable it in the name of egalitarianism and political correctness. Half slave and half pets.
A good supply of efficient demagogues can make great profit from that.
Other reasons companies headed to China was because the politicians and their supporters kept insisting on a steady stream of minimum wage increases and heavy regulation by the EPA and OSHA to the point of ridiculousness, and high taxes that inevitably must be passed on to the consumer, making product pricing uncompetitive, not to mention the volume of paperwork that burdens every business here.
Then, there’s always the litigation factor where US employees look for ways to sue for disability even when it’s clear they aren’t disabled and still win because our jury system is so corrupted that having deep pockets means you are always liable to an emotion-driven rather than logic driven juror. And then there are the affirmative action laws and so on that make firing crooked or incompetant employees diffcult and expensive, if not impossible once they lawyer up.
And then when you pay your employees, they don’t even get much of it because government steals away a huge chunk of their earnings, too, making paychecks less valuable than the intended “face value,” and in the process demoralizing workers because they know people who don’t work are the beneficiaries of those stolen wages.
It’s not companies seeking more profit that is the problem so much as it is all the populist barriers to entrepreneurship and profitmaking that pandering politicians have put in the way of domestic companies - with the blessing of their often unwise constituents, who should bear some of the responsibility.
The only problem with free trade is when you try to do it without freeing your own entrepreneurs first, and instead yoke all the honest ones to a grotesquely oversized and meddling big government while giving favors and handouts to the ones whose motto is “In Bribes We Trust.” Heck, we don’t even have “free trade” inside our own borders between Americans, we are so loaded down with regs. The government was supposed to protect interstate commerce and instead all it has done is intrude and interfere in commerce by overreaching in every way possible and in some ways no one thought possible.
What does China have to do with balancing the budget and cutting taxes? It was Sestak the democrat that attacked Toomey over MFN for China, not the other way around.
This is just the general opinion of anyone outside NYC: Whoever is different from us is a backwoods, brain-dead redneck. I don’t know why he is criticizing people for not having passports, since most NYCers have never been outside the tri-state region, and most of them are certain that everything outside of greater New York is savage and uncivilized wilderness.
On the other hand, those of us who have lived in cities and towns outside NYC know this: Most other cities in our country are cleaner, nicer, better built, and friendlier than NYC. In addition, most NYCers are uneducated and boorish when compared to the people in fly-over country that NYC liberals like Bloomberg disdain so much.
Oh. lol. Have a good day!
His remarks are puzzling to me because it was the Democrats, in union-funded ads, who campaigned on a platform of protectionism and "Republicans shipping jobs overseas.". The new Republican congress includes the most dedicated free-traders like Rand Paul and Pat Toomey. Sestak's most successful ad went: "PAT TOOMEY WANTS TO CREATE JOBS...IN CHINA."
Bloomberg's remarks are ignorant and projecting.
If our elected representatives “can’t read” then they’ll just get their lawyer drones to read to them. The ability to read is less of a qualification for high office than plain and simple personal I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y.
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