Media attention recently homed in on the revelation that the United States Olympic Team's uniforms, designed by Ralph Lauren, were made in China. Senate majority leader Harry Reid ignited the controversy by expressing his shock over the decision to make the uniforms in China, even calling for all of the uniforms to be burned. I think most of us weren't as shocked. Many people commenting on the news articles online expressed a "so what?" response. Everything is made in China anyway, right? Today's generation has grown up in what I see as a culture of imports. It is natural that they see no problem with so many of our goods being imported (over 60% of manufactured goods sold in this country are now made abroad). To many of our younger citizens, that has always been the case. It is a predicament of our own making. We enjoyed lowered prices, but now face far-reaching negative consequences.
How did we create this culture of imports? After World War II, America was the lone superpower remaining. The Marshall Plan was ushered in to help devastated European countries get back on their feet. It was a rousing success. American products were the best in the world and it was important that other countries had enough money to purchase them in order to keep our industries growing.
Later, America made concerted efforts to continue knocking down trade barriers and to buy foreign goods. It helped other countries greatly, but by the 1990s, it was apparent that the money was not coming back in equal measure, eventually forming large deficits in trade. Japan became an industrial powerhouse after the war -- mostly thanks to American efforts to help them rebuild their country. We assisted in the drafting of a constitution that placed a newly developed focus on industry. Soon, Japan became an industrial leader in a number of fields, to the point where six of the top 10 best-selling cars in America today are Japanese. America helped many countries back on their feet, and our consumers delighted in the lower prices their imported goods could offer.
At the same time, other countries made purchasing their own domestically manufactured products a national priority over the following half century. As an example country, South Korea created a national manufacturing policy that today has them at the top of the world in manufacturing and industry. Until recently, it was strictly taboo for South Koreans to be caught handling or buying foreign-made goods. South Korea's sense of consumer nationalism has survived to this day, long after a time when it was "necessary" for them to uphold it. This kind of "us-first" thinking lifted these countries and their largest corporations to a stature previously unfathomable. It is easy to see why companies like Hyundai have reached international success when you consider that 99% of the cars on the roads of Korea are Korean-made. This is true for Japan and many other countries, too. Their consumers's domestic buying preferences are a crucial benefit for their private manufacturers. Similar preferences and cultural attitudes have prevailed in Germany, now economically the strongest country in Europe.
In America, younger generations have been brought up in a culture of "free trade," where the pervasive attitude is that "industry doesn't matter." A culture of imports dominates. Manufacturing as a share of total employment has fallen from 30% in 1970 to only 10% in 2011. Other countries have suffered losses in the manufacturing employment sector as well, as a natural response to increased productivity and mechanization. Even with this, the industrial employment of Germany is still 20%, Japan is 17% and France manages to have 13%. Come on, America. Let's use our combined efforts to at least match the manufacturing employment rate of France. It would bring our unemployment rate of 8% back down to the traditional 5%.
In this new race to the bottom, we are trading satisfying, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in manufacturing and industry for low paying, low-impact jobs stacking shelves at endless superstores packed with low-grade imports from other countries. Salaries get depressed, unemployment rises, and people can soon afford only the cheapest, usually imported, goods, accelerating the cycle and digging a deeper hole for all of us. Those cheap imports aren't so cheap any more. The exchange became: good jobs sent abroad for which we received low-quality items and low paying jobs.
Those Olympic uniforms are a symbol of our current, culturally caused unemployment problem. We felt comfortable outsourcing the production of everything we used to make, from American flags to the trinkets at the Smithsonian gift shop. As we did with pollution, smoking, and car safety, we need to wake up, recognize we have an import addiction problem, and start making the individual and governmental changes to pull ourselves out of this mess.
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Your Turn: USA Olympic uniforms made in China
| 1 | United States | 46 | 29 | 29 |
| 2 | China | 38 | 27 | 23 |
| 3 | Russia | 24 | 26 | 32 |
| 4 | Great Britain | 29 | 17 | 19 |
| 5 | Germany | 11 | 19 | 14 |
| 6 | Japan | 7 | 14 | 17 |
That greed is the root of most of the problems in the U.S. Take away the jobs and next a feeling of despair and feeling excluded from society starts taking hold in a large segment of society. Then it turns to anger, resent, and lawlessnes as people find another way to live. Oh yeah, any nice dog will start to bark and bite if all you ever do is kick him!!
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Incredible! Not only does Alan Uke never answer the question, he wrote an entire book on the subject without ever pointing out that our de-industrialization and subsequent loss of prosperity were deliberate acts carried out against the American people precisely by Uke's social class.
Globalization is not a force of nature. It was deliberately created by the American business sector, when it realized that the good relations Nixon had started with China could lead to fabulous profits if only China would sell the American business sector its labor cheap. And at 90 cents an hour, it was very cheap, and the profits were out of this world.
That's exactly how we got CEOs making $40, 50 million a year. All that money that would have gone to pay American workers went instead to the CEOs (minus 90 cents an hour for the Chinese workers).
Oh, but we got cheap appliances, didn't we? No, we actually didn't. It's true that the blender our parents bought at Sears cost $89.95 in today's dollars, while we can pick up a blender at Walgreen's for $14.99. However, that blender our parents bought lasted their entire married lives, while the blender from Walgreens worked for six months before it started smoking trying to crush some ice. So we buy another $14.99 blender, and in 10 years, we've spent three times what our parents spent on a lifetime of appliances.
We must create a culture in which the rights of the people have priority. When people are secure in their homes and their food supplies they can say NO when the military invites them to fight their wars, they can say NO when a corporation wants to frack their land, they can say NO when the government says we have to tax you more to pay for food stamps for 1/6th of population & housing for many. When people are secure in a location and a shelter and their food supply they have power in their hands - and the government, military, corporations will have to be very respectful to the people if they want us to take their jobs. Power to the People!
American companies learned long ago that outsourcing and investment in other Countries is
very profitable !
Policy response from US Government is "Tax the Rich" !
America is it's own worst Enemy. The Rich go somewhwere else.
There are so many credits, deductions, carry backs, carry forwards, etc., that most US corporations pay a trivial amount in taxes, compared to earnings. A better way would be to scrap the corporate income tax, and adopt a gross revenues tax, which functions much like a sales tax, as some countries have done. No more credits, deductions, depreciations, etc., just 3% of gross revenue from all sources. Levels the playing field.
According to the Wiki article on taxes, the 400 richest Americans in 2010 earned an average of $344 million each, and paid an average of 16.2% in federal taxes. That's roughly equivalent to paying the payroll tax (Social Security, Medicare) and no income tax at all.
You may also notice that the Forbes 400, the 400 richest Americans, are all billionaires, and they all live in America. They haven't gone anywhere else.
Even with America's manufacturing base replaced by robots on the assembly line and other jobs shipped overseas; we would not be in such a bad unemployment shape if the service and other sectors like finance, education, health-care etc etc, (which we should be good at), worked well.
But:
We ourselves criminally manipulated the banking system.
We ourselves manipulated Wall Street with Hedge Funds, Insider trading and lax enforcement.
We speculated on the market; creating bubbles, for last 2 decades.
We ourselves manipulated home-building and related industries causing the boom and bust.
And:
We ourselves are mismanaging our school and college education system.
We are mismanaging health-care delivery, which could be an international industry.
We are mismanaging energy management which could be an international industry.
We are mismanaging environmental pollution which could be an international industry.
We ourselves are mismanaging our and the world's monetary debt.
We ourselves are mismanaging world peace.
It is not the consumers of imports that is destroying America. Rather it is the leaders in various walks of life in various communities under the banner of "Exceptionalism" have been delluding them selves by design or by ignorance. And holding consumers hostage through financial manipulation and slick marketing techinques.
No, WE never felt comfortable with "free" trade. The government and industry felt comfortable with it and NO ONE took the side of the consumer, just as no one is taking the side of the consumer now and probably will not in our Mad Max future either.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
YouTube - 1. A prophetic interview with Sir James Goldsmith in 1994 Pt1
http://desip.igc.org/gatt01.html
Goldsmith on GATT: Part 1
"THE NEW UTOPIA: GATT AND GLOBAL FREE TRADE
by SIR JAMES GOLDSMITH
Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony
SENATE COMMERCE GATT IMPLEMENTATION
October 5, 1994
Global free trade has become a sacred principle of modern economic theory, a sort of generally accepted moral dogma. That is why it is so difficult to persuade politicians and economists to reassess its effects on a world economy which is changing radically.
The ultimate objective of global free trade is to create a worldwide market in products, services, capital and labour. Its instrument to achieve this is GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
I believe that GATT and the theories on which it is based are flawed. If it is implemented, it will impoverish and destabilize the industrialized world while at the same time cruelly ravaging the third world..."
Other Western countries, such as Germany, took steps to protect their labor markets from global labor arbitrage.
But the U.S. decided its workers should live by the Iron Law of Wages:
"The doctrine or theory that wages tend toward a level sufficient only to maintain a subsistence standard of living. "
http://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.pl?term=IRON%20LAW%20OF%20OLIGARCHY
Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences
"IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY
First defined by German sociologist Robert Michels (1876-1936), this refers to the inherent tendency of all complex organizations, including radical or socialist political parties and labour unions, to develop a ruling clique of leaders with interests in the organization itself rather than in its official aims. These leaders, Michels argued, came to desire leadership and its status and rewards more than any commitment to goals. Inevitably, their influence was conservative, seeking to preserve and enhance the organization and not to endanger it by any radical action. Michels based his argument on the simple observation that day-to-day running of a complex organization by its mass membership was impossible. Therefore, professional full-time leadership and direction was required. In theory the leaders of the organization were subject to control by the mass membership, through delegate conferences and membership voting, but, in reality, the leaders were in the dominant position. They possessed the experience and expertise in running the organization, they came to control the means of communication within the organization and they monopolized the public status of representing the organization. It became difficult for the mass membership to provide any effective counterweight to this professional, entrenched, leadership. Michels also argued that these inherent organizational tendencies were strengthened by a mass psychology of leadership dependency, he felt that people had a basic psychological need to be led. See: OLIGARCHY / ."
Globalization's New Underclass
"Stephen Roach (New York)
Billed as the great equalizer between the rich and the poor, globalization has been anything but. An increasingly integrated global economy is facing the strains of widening income disparities -- within countries and across countries. This has given rise to a new and rapidly expanding underclass that is redefining the political landscape. The growing risks of protectionism are an outgrowth of this ominous trend.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Globalization has long been portrayed as the rising tide that lifts all boats. The surprise is in the tide -- a rapid surge of IT-enabled connectivity that has pushed the global labor arbitrage quickly up the value chain. Only the elite at the upper end of the occupational hierarchy have been spared the pressures of an increasingly brutal wage compression. The rich are, indeed, getting richer but the rest of the workforce is not. This spells mounting disparities in the income distribution -- for developed and developing countries, alike.
Try building advanced electronics without ANY components made in the US... you won't get far. Remove the US electronics industry from the world and NOTHING electrical and electronic would work. There wouldn't even be electricity.
The computer erratically computes, the TV pixilates, the printer vibrates, the phone can't ring, the microwave burned out, the stereo shuts off when volume escalates; even the fan only blows air to intimates. How about it corporations? Give us products that work with in-continent customer service and warrantees that mean something. We will come back, we will buy; we will even pay more. Make buying American mean good product and see.
work at jobs which pay a living wage. Ronald Reagan decided to destroy the unions and was the first president to put America into debt. The "trickle down" effect was a trickle out debt. Now we have a presidential candidate who has offshored his money so he won't have to pay taxes on it. His company ended thousands of jobs and put a period to the life of many companies. That is how he became so rich, Let him explain why he did this and who else benefitted. Obama would do a lot more than he has if he weren't faced with a Republican party which would rather see Americans hungry than have the 1% of the 1% pay taxes. It would be a joke if it weren't so tragic.