Free Republic

Tom Friedman, please take note. China’s lack of political wrangling is not an asset, it’s what will drag it down. Friedman’s and other liberals’ utopian dream of a benevolent dictator has never worked. It fails because unrestrained dictators, with the best of intentions, make mistakes – often grandiose mistakes. And when they are criticized and challenged, they fight to hold on to power. And then they become the Stalins, the Pol Pots and the Kim Jong Ils of the world. And China’s single party autocracy has made a grandiose mistake. It has embarked on a building spree that according to...

The globalists at the United Nations are busy preparing their agenda for the Rio + 20 Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which will be held on June 4 – 6, 2012. They have prepared a draft entitled “Enabling a Flourishing Earth: Challenges for the Green Economy, Opportunities for Global Governance”. It is truly amazing that this is not being devised in Dr. Evil’s hidden lair in the depths of some inactive volcano or on a deserted island. This has been made available for everyone to read. It reveals the true intent; the hopes, dreams and aspirations for this new...

The State Department’s support of a controversial oil-pipeline project is putting pressure on the White House to move forward after three years, despite objections from environmentalists. A series of public hearings concludes Friday on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run from Canada’s oil sands in Alberta down through America’s midsection to the Texas Gulf Coast. So far, the State Department has published reports in favor of the project, which is projected to create 20,000 jobs and reduce the nation’s dependence on overseas oil.

Is this something Tea Party should take as a cause? Usually Republican party is for Free Trade, but its time we keep our jobs right here in this great country of ours. Can Tea Party change the conversation on trade issues?

CNBC is currently running a pretty good expose on China, sweatshops and "freetrade".

The America Family Association has organized ten powerful economic graphs that put financial facts and figures into visual form. Sometimes you can quote economic statistics to people until you are blue in the face and it won’t do any good, but when those same people see charts and pictures suddenly it all sinks in. As you examine the economic charts below, pay special attention to what has been happening to the U.S. economy over the last 30 or 40 years.

To gaze upon the world of American corporations is to see a sunny place of terrific profits and princely bonuses. American businesses reported that third-quarter profits in 2010 rose at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed. Staring at such balance sheets, you might almost forget that much of the nation lives under slate-gray fiscal skies, a place of 9.4 percent unemployment and record levels of foreclosures and indebtedness. And therein lies the enduring mystery of this...

'The mainstream base is not concerned with where Obama's birth certificate is'PALM BEACH, Fla. – Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh are two of America's best-known characters, but when it comes to articulating a truly conservative political message, Rush says he needs to take the Donald to school to get it right. "If Trump is serious about [running for president], I'm going to request a meeting," Limbaugh said today from his South Florida radio studio. "I'm gonna take him aside. I'm gonna say, 'Whoever is telling you about conservatism is misleading you a little bit.'" Trump has been making the rounds...

I thought readers should see this account sent to me from Tyler S of Tucson (and Brooklyn) of the counter protest. I wasn't there but it rings having attended so many of these lefftists hatefests, they are all diabolically the same: "Firstly, I wanted to tell you that I attended the 9/11 rally today, and thought that it was a wonderful event - your organization did a marvelous job orchestrating everything, and I could not imagine it could have gone more smoothly. I will also apologize in advance, as this might be a rather wordy letter, but hopefully worthy of...

05/31/2010 13:07 CHINA Foxconn suicides: capitalism and Marxism treat people like animals by Wei Jingsheng The great dissident analyzes the series of suicides in the Guangdong factory and points the finger at the Chinese social system, which transforms businessmen (even Western) into devils without morals, cancels labour rights, morality and democracy in the name of profit. The collusion of business and media in the West. /snip The theory of Karl Marx was really not so good, as it brought a century disaster to the human race. Yet, to the least, Karl Marx was a person with some sympathy. Should he...

"Thank you, Hu Jintao, and thank you, China," said Hugo Chavez, as he announced a $20 billion loan from Beijing, to be repaid in Venezuelan oil. The Chinese just threw Chavez a life preserver. For Venezuela is reeling from 25 percent inflation, government-induced blackouts to cope with energy shortages and an economy that shrank by 3.3 percent in 2009. Where did China get that $20 billion? From us. From consumers at Wal-Mart. That $20 billion is 1 percent of the $2 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up with the United States over two decades. Beijing is using its...

China’s share of world markets increased during the recession. It will keep rising MANY people start the new year by resolving to change their old ways. Not China. On December 27th Zhong Shan, the country’s vice-minister of trade, declared that China will continue to increase its share of world exports. Figures due out on January 11th are expected to show that China’s exports in December were higher than a year ago, after 13 months of year-on-year declines. China’s exports fell by around 17% in 2009 as a whole, but other countries’ slumped by even more. As a result China overtook...

NEW YORK — Chrysler Group LLC is planning to build the Fiat 500 small car at a plant in Mexico, according to a report published Monday. The automaker could also build an engine for the 500 at a plant in Trenton, Michigan, and is weighing building another compact car similar to the 500 in the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Chrysler spokesman Gualberto Ranieri declined to comment Monday.

They're not just like the Irish--or the Italians or the Poles, for that matter. The large influx of Hispanic immigrants after 1965 represents a unique assimilation challenge for the United States. Many optimistic observers have assumed--incorrectly, it turns out--that Hispanic immigrants will follow the same economic trajectory European immigrants did in the early part of the last century. Many of those Europeans came to America with no money and few skills, but their status steadily improved. Their children outperformed them, and their children's children were often indistinguishable from the "founding stock." The speed of economic assimilation varied somewhat by ethnic...

The Phoenicians were not the first ancient people to sponsor long-distance seaborne trade, but they and their Carthaginian children were the first to perfect it. They are the real pioneers of what we will call maritime capitalism. How did they do it? By taking advantage of a unique window of opportunity. During the Middle Bronze Age (traditionally dated to the first half of the second millennium BCE), first Babylon and then Egypt dominated the Middle East. As their power faded, no single power dominated. In this climate of peace and stability, trade took the place of war. Babylonia tried to...

A U.S. federal probe has found that about a third of American Apparel's factory workers in the Los Angeles area had supplied suspect or invalid records and were not authorized to work in the United States. The findings, from a January 2008 federal investigation, may deal a blow to the corporation's image as a proponent of immigration reform. But the company said on Tuesday the potential loss of those 1,800 workers would have no significant impact on its results. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency found that some 1,600 current employees at American Apparel's Los Angeles factories appeared to...

Anyone worried that, once in charge, Democrats wouldn't be vigilant in protecting our southern border can relax. The grave threat of Mexican long-haul truckers has been shut down. With any luck, Mexicans will never have the temerity to attempt to deliver commercial goods into the United States again. At least such is the fervid hope of the Teamsters, the fiercest adversary the Mexicans have faced since President James K. Polk sent Winfield Scott south in the Mexican-American War. The union can't abide Mexican trucks because they represent competition, and so they must be blocked - legal obligations, economic rationality and...

Trade: The new administration watered down a protectionist "Buy American" provision in the Senate stimulus bill and hoped all sides would go away happy. But they won't, as the European Union envoy to the U.S. explains.As if the $900 billion stimulus package wasn't controversial enough, provisions requiring purchase of U.S.-made iron and steel for government contracts that were slipped into the House version, and of all manufactured goods in the Senate's, have annoyed more people than expected — across the world. Last week, leaders from Canada, Brazil, China, the U.K., India, Mexico, Germany and the Czech Republic, among others, spoke...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued a set of thinly veiled warnings to China on Saturday, cautioning that it could risk its share of further gains in Asia’s economic prosperity if it bullied its neighbors over natural resources in contested areas like the South China Sea. Three years ago at the same lectern here, Mr. Gates’s predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, bluntly criticized China’s swift military buildup. Last year Mr. Gates struck a more conciliatory tone, saying Beijing and Washington had a chance to “build trust over time.� Mr. Gates seemed to take a third approach in his remarks to a...

I rarely write a column that receives more criticism from my conservative readers than from my liberal ones. And it is even rarer when the column in question approaches a topic from what is supposed to be a “conservative” perspective, as it usually does. Yet this is precisely what happened recently when I wrote a column titled “Memo to the Democrats: We Need Free Trade with China.” It targeted the leading anti-trade voices in the Democratic Party, particularly Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and continued by explaining why free trade with China does indeed benefit the United States, at least...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands of children in southwest China have been sold into slavery like "cabbages", to work as labourers in more prosperous areas such as the booming southern province of Guangdong, a newspaper said on Tuesday. China announced a nationwide crackdown on slavery and child labor last year after reports that hundreds of poor farmers, children and mentally disabled were forced to work in kilns and mines in Shanxi province and neighboring Henan. "The bustling child labor market (in Sichuan province) was set up by the local chief foreman and his gang of 18 minor foremen, who each manage...

For those of you in the Baylor University area, tonight is your chance to ask Juan Hernandez about his radical, open-borders agenda and his role in the McCain campaign. The event is free and open to the public. Bring your video camera: Dr. Juan Hernandez, author of The New American Pioneers, will speak at 6 p.m. Thursday in Kayser Auditorium on Mexican immigration. His lecture will be based on his notes, “Why are We Afraid of Mexican Immigrants?”Hernandez, a member of former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s cabinet, will be the final speaker for The Academy for Leader Development and Civic...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been widening its investigation into the hundreds of adverse reactions _ including difficulty breathing, nausea and falling blood pressure _ linked to U.S. health care company Baxter International's heparin injections. Heparin is derived from pig intestines, and China is the world's leading supplier. U.S. and Chinese officials have been investigating heparin samples but have reached no conclusions, Wu Zhen, the deputy commissioner of China's State Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday. The U.S. FDA found a contaminant in 20 of 28 samples of raw heparin from Baxter's main supplier, Scientific Protein Laboratories of...

A Chinese company with ties to Beijing's military and past links to Saddam Hussein's army in Iraq and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger, Pentagon officials say. Huawei Technologies will merge with the Massachusetts-based 3Com network-equipment manufacturer in a deal announced last week. Huawei has been linked to the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, which involved millions of dollars in payoffs to Saddam's regime during a time of U.N. sanctions. The announced merger follows a July computer attack on the Pentagon that U.S. intelligence officials say involved Chinese military hackers. The hackers were detected breaking...

Mexico’s president Felipe Calderón used the occasion of his first state-of-the nation address to declare war on the United States (AKA Azatlan), proclaiming that, "Mexico does not end at its borders," and "[w]here there is a Mexican, there is Mexico."El gato is out of the bag. The 400,000 illegal aliens who cross our southern border with Mexico each year – now 12 million strong - are not here to "do the jobs that Americans won’t do." They are an invading force waging Mexico’s protracted campaign to achieve "La Reconquista."Calderón’s ambitions are being aided and abetted by a Fifth Column in...

Texas Governor Rick Perry is being called to task by an author and investigative journalist for vetoing bills that would have blocked construction of the controversial Trans-Texas Corridor. Dr. Jerome Corsi has been one of the leading voices warning the American public about the consequences of the Trans-Texas Corridor, which will be part of a superhighway -- purported to be four football fields wide -- that will allow Mexican trucks to enter the U.S. and traverse the core of the country all the way to Canada. The best-selling author asserts that Governor Perry cleared the way for construction to begin...

OTTAWA — It's a threat that has left-wing Canadian nationalists and right-wing U.S. congressmen in rare and dismayed agreement: a freeway, four football fields wide, stretching from Mexico to northern Manitoba. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum say the corridor - dubbed the NAFTA superhighway - is a primary goal of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America established two years ago by the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico. At separate press conferences in Ottawa yesterday, the road was held out as an example of the potentially repugnant effects of the trilateral partnership....

WASHINGTON — Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress Tuesday (June 12) that one out of four U.S. jobs are vulnerable to offshoring. Blinder, now an economics professor at Princeton University, told the House Science and Technology Committee that American jobs in science, technology and engineering are most vulnerable to offshoring. Blinder testified during a hearing on the offshoring of U.S. technology jobs. Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) last year successfully pressed the Bush administration to release a controversial 2004 Commerce Department report on offshoring. The report singled out chip design as one of the next...

Tainted Chinese products flood U.S. market May 20, 2007, 06:58 PM Other news, World WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) — Tainted apples and toxic mushrooms were among 107 Chinese food imports detained at U.S. ports last month, it was reported Sunday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration detained the imports, along with more than 1,000 Chinese shipments of tainted dietary supplements, toxic cosmetics and counterfeit medicines, the Washington Post reported. The FDA found dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical, frozen catfish with banned antibiotics, scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria and mushrooms covered with illegal pesticides, the Post reported....

The vast production of food in the United States is one of the greatest achievements of American free enterprise society of a superior system of patents that encourages the invention of fantastically efficient farm machinery. In one of America's favorite patriotic songs, we wax lyrical about our "amber waves of grain." The Clinton administration conned American farmers into being the principal lobbyists in 2000 for passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations for China, which gave Chinese goods unconditional access to U.S. markets. Former President Bill Clinton promised in his State of the Union address that Permanent Normal Trade Relations for...

China Apologist : U.S. Must Decline as China Returns to Former Greatness By William R. Hawkins Friday, April 06, 2007 The CNA Corporation is a non-profit organization that is best known for operating the Center for Naval Analysis, which for over 50 years has worked closely with the U.S. Navy to develop strategies and weapon systems to defend American security.  It opened a new China Study Center on March 27, which seems like a natural evolution of its work given Beijing’s rise as a global geopolitical rival to the United States.  China has the world’s third largest shipbuilding industry and its rapidly...

The House on Tuesday approved a resolution urging the United States to pull out of a cooperative economic, security and public health agreement with Mexico and Canada. Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, said he is sponsoring HJR7 because he sees the Security and Prosperity Partnership as potentially, "wiping away our borders and becoming a common nation with a common currency" similar to the European Union. Before Tuesday's 47-24 vote, Rep. Scott Wyatt, R-Logan, questioned what the so-called SPP really entails. He pointed to the government's Web site, spp.gov, which describes the partnership as a "dialogue" and not a signed agreement. "I...

A coalition to stop the Trans-Texas Corridor voiced its concerns Sunday in Austin, citing border security and gun rights as key issues not being addressed. The large crowd in attendance at the meeting represented a cross section of Texans and included a veterans group out of Houston. “We didn’t fight a war so our government could give away our land,” said ret. Col. Sam Horton of Houston. World War II veteran, ret. Col. Arthur Peterson of Houston, said national security is at stake because the Gov. Rick Perry-supported transportation project would help erase borders between the United States and Mexico...

AMERICAN manufacturers no longer make subway cars. They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States. Similarly, imports are an ever-bigger source of refrigerators, household furnishings, auto and aircraft parts, machine tools and a host of everyday consumer products much in demand in America, but increasingly not made here. [...] the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up. [...] But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers...

Since the end of World War II, the United States has promoted free trade in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement. The objective is to promote growth by encouraging trade based on comparative advantage. The logic: Let national economies specialize in what they do best, higher productivity and lower prices will follow, and everyone can live better. Now, thanks to resistance from developing countries led by China, India and Brazil, the Doha Round of WTO negotiations is almost certain to fail. President Bush faces tough resistance in Congress...

WASHINGTON - America's deficit in the broadest measure of trade shot up to an all-time high in the summer, reflecting the huge jump in the country's foreign oil bill. The Commerce Department reported Monday that the current account trade deficit increased 3.9 percent to a record $225.6 billion in the July-September quarter. That represented 6.8 percent of the country's total economy, up from 6.6 percent of the gross domestic product in the spring quarter. The current account is the broadest measure of U.S. trade because it tracks not only the flow of goods and services across borders but also investment...

U.S.-made products are losing market share to imports across a wide range of core industries in the United States, according to a new study. Among 114 product categories, U.S.-based producers boosted their domestic market share in only three categories between 1997 and 2005: heavy trucks and chassis, computer storage devices, and computer chips. Imports gained market share in 111 categories. The survey from the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a nonprofit group in Washington of small and midsize manufacturers and a critic of U.S. trade policy, used Census Bureau data. The survey excluded inexpensive consumer products found in Wal-Marts, Targets...

Farmers and ranchers live in an ocean of numbers. And like the tide, the numbers - pigs-per-litter, gain-per-pound, bushels-per-acre, dollars-per-bushel - can't be held back; they keep coming and keep adding to our nation's food story. The U.S. Department of Agriculture swells the tide with annual, quarterly, monthly, biweekly, weekly and daily reports. The data are the dots by which all in agriculture and food steer. The steering is about to get harder. Two late August USDA reports confirm that 2006's big numbers won't be big enough for American food producers. At first blush, the first report, the Outlook for...

Derrick Yannayon, assistant lab manager at Standards Testing Laboratories, sets up a tire for the bead unseat test. The lab, headquartered in Massillon, Ohio, tests tires to see if they meet federal standards. (Photo by Gus Chan)   China's Prices Undercut U.S. Tire Makers, Causing Plant Closings BY THOMAS W. GERDEL [Massillon, OH] -- Rapidly rising imports of tires, especially from China, are increasing pressure on American tire makers to close more plants and cut domestic production. Passenger-tire imports, which have been steadily increasing every year this decade, topped the 100 million mark in 2005, with Chinese imports up...

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn. Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman’s Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation’s most modern highway straight into the heart of...

An Alabama employment agency that sent 70 laborers and construction workers to job sites in that state in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina says the men were sent home after just two weeks on the job by employers who told them "the Mexicans had arrived" and were willing to work for less. Linda Swope, who operates Complete Employment Services Inc. in Mobile, Ala., told The Washington Times last week that the workers -- whom she described as U.S. citizens, residents of Alabama and predominantly black -- had been "urgently requested" by contractors hired to rebuild and clear devastated areas of...

In his 1995 book "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy," the late Christopher Lasch argued that America's political and cultural elites had opened up a gap between themselves and ordinary Americans. "Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse," he wrote. They are increasingly detached from their fellow citizens and drawn to an international culture, Lasch said, or what we would today call a transnational culture. Consider the current immigration debate in this light. In the transnational view, patriotism, assimilation and...

Arab and US officials are growing nervous at the prospect of a second congressional uprising against the acquisition of American assets by a Middle Eastern-controlled company in the wake of the Dubai Ports World debacle. Snip ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Under pressure to produce broad immigration reform legislation by the end of the month, a U.S. Senate panel on Thursday neared agreement on a proposal that would give some of the 12 million illegal aliens living in the country an opportunity to earn citizenship. Although no vote will be held until after a weeklong congressional recess, the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday appeared ready to back a proposal by panel member Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, who has worked on the issue with his Republican colleague John McCain of Arizona. The panel, which is working on...

(snip)....Under a three-year contract that went into place Feb. 1, state agencies are directed to buy all their office supplies from Atlanta-based Office Depot. In the past, agencies had been allowed to choose from several companies, including several North Carolina suppliers. "The small businesses are the ones who pay the most taxes back to the state," said Christopher Sharpe, vice president of Piedmont Office Suppliers in Greensboro. "It won't put us out of business, but it will definitely hurt the bottom line." He estimated the contract will cost six independent suppliers in the state more than 100 jobs and $24.5...

LONDON/TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Toshiba Corp. (6502.T) has agreed to buy Westinghouse, the U.S. power plant arm of British Nuclear Fuels, for $5.4 billion to bolster its position in the world's resurgent nuclear power industry.

Google Inc. launched a search engine in China on Wednesday that censors material about human rights, Tibet and other topics sensitive to Beijing _ defending the move as a trade-off granting Chinese greater access to other information.

Chinese companies are racing to enter the U.S. auto market. One manufacturer previewed this week at the North American International Auto Show, and another plans to hit dealerships by the end of next year. "For sure, nobody needs another manufacturer, if all we were going to do was manufacture another car. But we are going to make a dramatic change in the price [structure] of higher-priced cars," said Malcolm Bricklin, the 66-year-old chief executive of Visionary Vehicles, a New York City company that has long-term plans to sell 1 million cars a year built by China's Chery Automobile Co. in...

Microsoft Corp. has shut down the Internet journal of a Chinese blogger that discussed politically sensitive issues including a recent strike at a Beijing newspaper. The action came amid criticism by free-speech activists of foreign technology companies that help the communist government enforce censorship or silence dissent in order to be allowed into China's market. Microsoft's China-based Web log-hosting service shut down the blog at the Chinese government's request, said Brooke Richardson, group product manager with Microsoft's MSN online division at the company headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Though Beijing has supported Internet use for education and business, it fiercely polices...

WASHINGTON — A defense bill approved by Congress would allow open competition for a multibillion-dollar contract to supply refueling tankers for the Air Force. President Bush is expected to sign the measure, squelching an earlier House-approved bill that would have helped Boeing by keeping the Pentagon from buying military equipment from the parent company of European jet maker Airbus.