ON WEDNESDAY 10TH
MARCH Stock Market Shares took a severe tumble, a
"steep fall" in value as it is described by the
financial media, their "biggest one-day loss" HOWEVER in the afternoon of
11th March : The euro rebounded and safe-haven Swiss
fracs rallied broadly after news of the Madrid bombings.
And arms dealers shares rose too as America and the Brits
fight over General Dynamics, the makers of Abrams Tanks. This fight may herald the takeover by
USA of Defence Industry armaments in Europe.
the echo we
feel in ireland and europe:
The Jobs Crisis in the u.s.a.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
March 10, 2004 - WorldNetDaily.Com
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 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.
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!
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.
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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