For many years the world has suffered under a "free trade" regime that eliminates good paying jobs in every country, sending the work to countries that keep wages low and restrict workers' ability to organize for a better life. The profits went to an already-wealthy few and the inequities increased, wealth concentrating massively at the very top.
And now consumers around the world have run out of money. This is not a surprise.
Did these "free" trade policies cause the recession?
Imagine a company in South Carolina that makes 20,000 pairs of shoes a week and distributes them to stores. Now, imagine that the company closes its South Carolina plant, opens a plant in a low-wage country, ships all the machines and raw materials there, ships back 20,000 pairs of shoes each week and distributes them to the same stores. Is that "trade?" Are the raw materials sent out of the country an "export?" Are the shoes brought back into the country an "import?"
The only thing that has been "traded" in this scenario is American jobs traded for huge executive bonuses. The workers in the low-wage country are not paid enough to buy any remaining American-made products. And, as the economic collapses as a result of shenanigans like this, American workers are no longer able to buy shoes so the executives won't be getting bonuses next year.
I submit that nothing in this example is "traded" except that our standard of living has been traded away. And this exchange brings little benefit to the workers in the low-wage country. This is exploitative trade, not free trade, and we need to protect our workers, the workers in other countries and the world's economy by demanding that our trade partners provide living wages and benefits. We can enforce this demand by attaching import tariffs at a level that makes our own goods competitive. This removes the advantage gained by exploiting workers - and the revenue reduces our own tax burden to maintain our competitive infrastructure. It is an incentive to pay their workers enough so they can reciprocate and buy the things we make here. Instead of the race to the bottom that led to this recession such tariffs create an incentive to raise standards of living around the world.
Let's have national policies that prevent exploitation of workers and the environment and that share prosperity. This is a choice between lifting each other up or continuing a spiral to the bottom.
Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson
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do we? nope
Now the politician
The Fed has roughly tripled the amount of dollars and credit in circulatio
This is not to say that all banks, lenders, and Wall Street firms are blameless. Many of them are politicall
What is needed is to declare processes that take many generation
that is why all the growing economies are investing so much in their mfg bases
once these countries develop their own bases they also develop their means of innovation and no longer need the first world
the first world is then left without a creative and a productive sector
We all learned about domestic national economics. The lessons we learned have little to do with global complexiti
todays model is simply all about labor arbitrage, currency manipulati
who ever really believed that consumers in these third world countries would be buying US made goods and services in any meaningful way?
We need more than policy. We consumers need to work hard to avoid such products and the companies that drive their production
We need to start shopping elsewhere, building up ethical business that support local jobs. Also, WalMart replaces other retail jobs with lower paying positions, and they consistent
If Americans really want to combat these harms of "free trade" they need to work hard to stop supporting unethical business. I realize during hard times some people can only afford shopping at WalMart, but many people don't realize WalMart is not always the cheapest price. Ipods cost the same everywhere
I think a business is just a thing, a legal construct. They can't be "ethical" any more than a chair can be. It is people who are ethical or not. And we have to understand that a few people run these corporatio
So when we understand that We, the People have power to regulate companies, and define the rules under which they operate, that is when we get our power back. All we have to do is make the rules. That is OUR job and We, the People have not been doing that. We have let the wool be pulled over our eyes with all this "free market" nonsense for decades now. And all around us we see the results. A very few wealthy people have ALL the money and power now.
Jack Lohman
http://mon
Greed is a fundamenta
YES...!
Among other things..
You’ve heard it, monkey see monkey do, so now everyone’s doing the same thing, they’re throwing their American workers out into the street and moving to where the work can be done for much less, adding to their profit! How long do you think that can go on without severely eroding the consumer base? This took a good 10 to 15 years, but the consumer is broke! The companies that did this are going belly up and so are some that didn’t. What we had was business planning by dummies.