Like the clear results on a pH test strip, the vote in the U.S. Senate this week on the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act showed Republicans' true color: Red. Red for China.
Or Mexico. Or Indonesia. Or anywhere multi-national corporations get tax breaks for exporting American jobs. In this test of loyalty, every Republican in the Senate voted for corporate greed over American workers.
No fluke, this is a GOP pattern. The red party has consistently sided with giant corporations to the detriment of the American economy and American workers. In voting against health care reform, Republicans chose giant health insurance corporations over uninsured Americans. In opposing financial reform, Republicans embraced Wall Street over the taxpayers who bailed out the big banks and don't want to do it again.
Republicans vainly attempted to rationalize those votes as opposing government regulation. There's no regulation issue in the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act.
That Act would have removed tax incentives the U.S. government gives corporations to close domestic factories, fire American workers and move production overseas. And, conversely, the Act would have instituted tax cuts for corporations that return foreign employment to U.S. soil.
Every Republican in the Senate voted against the Act. They voted to continue forcing Americans to give tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The GOP said it is right and proper for U.S. citizens to subsidize corporate killing of American manufacturing. And Republicans said it would be wrong to do the opposite -- to use tax breaks to encourage corporations to restore off-shored jobs to the U.S.
Democrats, whose first priority is American workers, are pushing a 17-bill Make it in America plan. The Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act is part of that effort to bolster domestic industry and employment.
In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this week, 86 percent of respondents cited corporate off-shoring of American jobs as the primary cause of the country's continuing economic distress.
Similarly, a bi-partisan polling team that conducted a survey of likely voters for the Alliance for American Manufacturing in April found large majorities believe manufacturing strength is crucial to U.S. economic security and that the government should fortify American industry. These voters told the pollsters that they believe America no longer leads the world in manufacturing but could again with proper support.
That can-do-it attitude is realistic. Already some manufacturers are on-shoring. General Electric is moving production of its energy-efficient water heaters from China to the United States. Caterpillar and NCR, a technology company, are doing the same. A survey in June found 21 percent of North American manufacturers brought production into or closer to the United States in the previous three months and another 38 percent planned to research such a move.
Manufacturers gave USA Today numerous reasons for this repatriation. Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen. They cited poor quality foreign manufactured goods; theft of intellectual property; long product delivery times interfering with response to consumer demand, and benefits from providing engineers easy access to assembly lines.
The trade publication, Supply Chain Digest, quoted two experts in an August story about the on-shoring trend:
"George Stalk, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, has led research efforts showing the inventory benefits for high margin, fashion-oriented goods from bringing production at least back to North America almost always trump the value of lower manufacturing costs in Asia. Those benefits come from both not losing sales from being out of stock and not getting stuck with obsolete inventory that a company can't sell or must mark down dramatically."
And, the story quoted Jeremy Leonard, a consultant for Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI:
"A lot of companies who have gone there to take advantage of cheap labor are starting to tell us that if you (calculate) total cost and don't just look at wages, it's actually not worth it."
Democrats sought to nurture and expand the repatriation trend. But like numerous Make it in America bills passed by the U.S. House, the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act died at the hands of Senate Republicans. Democrats had the majority with 53 votes for the measure, but Republicans, as they have all year, blocked passage by using a filibuster to require a super-majority of 60.
The next test for Republicans will occur Nov. 2. In the mid-term election, Americans red-in-the-face angry at the GOP for extending tax breaks to corporations for expatriating American jobs have the opportunity to show Republican politicians what it feels like to lose a job.
Follow Leo W. Gerard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uswblogger
These ultra-large American-based companies take much of their capital from American investors. They derive a lot of benefit from being American. But, the executives don't demonstrate much, if any, commitment to the communities in which they operate or any connection to those American investors whose 401k's provide them capital - because they are aggregated through fund managers that also have to connection to the American community.
Business ethics is an oxymoron.
Executive behavior is constrained only by enforcement of law. When the laws are weak and enforcement weaker - as with the Obama SEC only fining companies, which punishes the shareholder for executive behavior - then connection to the community is lost.
States provide sanction to this through a race to the bottom - Biden's little Delaware being known for its favorable laws for untrampled corporate greed.
Americans get their money taken from them by the IRS so that Bush, Obama, Biden and others can show their largesse to their major donors - executives of the biggest corporations. It is a total sham to say that a corporation does something - it is the executives.
Isn't it time for Americans to put some constraints on corporations and demand that they also serve the community that supports them?
Repugnantones will not make such a demand. Democrats are somewhat more likely to.
What we need is a party that is apologetically pro-labor, not one of the stale, old major parties that are bound in unbreakable webs of special interest ties.
What remains to be seen is which party takes a lesson from this.
"Although modern economic literature usually ignores the fact, the Nazi government in 1930s Germany undertook a wide scale privatization policy. The government sold public ownership in several State-owned firms in different sectors. In addition, delivery of some public services previously produced by the public sector was transferred to the private sector, mainly to organizations within the Nazi Party.
The Nazi government may have used privatization as a tool to improve its relationship with big industrialists and to increase support among this group for its policies. Privatization was also likely used to foster more widespread political support for the party.
The reprivatization of United Steel Works, which put Fritz Thyssen in the leading position in the trust, appears to be an example of the use of privatization to increase political support. It is worth remembering that Thyssen had been one of the only two big industrialists to support the Nazi Party before it became the most powerful party in the political scene.
Finally, financial motivations played a central role in Nazi privatization. The proceeds from privatization in 1934-37 had relevant fiscal significance: No less than 1.37 per cent of total fiscal revenues were obtained from selling shares in public firms. Moreover, the government avoided including a huge expenditure in the budget by using outside-of-the-budget tools to finance the public services franchised to Nazi organizations."
Germa Bel
2010
Fascism was “an authoritarian response to the contradictions of capitalism, when democratic institutions are no longer capable of patching up the "broken barrel" that is the free market. Instead, German industrialists embraced the statist policies of the Nazis, who merely cashed-in on the long Prussian tradition of political interventionism.
The suppression of a competitive price structure was achieved by the Nazis through laws that blocked market entry, setting up cartel arrangements based on compulsory prices that thwarted deflationary tendencies and froze the status quo of the corporate elite.
Economic control became a technique of mass domination as a quasi-dictatorship of industrialists laid bare the class bias of fascist "corporatism." This "compulsory order" guaranteed profits, socialized losses and enriched capital-intensive industry.
Moreover, state control over banks enabled the Nazis to embark on a huge military build-up, which funneled monetary expansion into a growing military-industrial complex. An autarkic philosophy of economics, as Franz Neumann called it, led to the collapse of German purchasing power, the crowding out of capital investment for consumer goods production and a dwindling domestic market for the very bourgeoisie that gave Hitler his mass support. Workers' wages plummeted, labor unions were crushed, and German business became a parasitic class.”
A distinctive fascist political economy, which can best be summarized as the creation of a wartime economy in peacetime.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
History News Network
NAFTA was passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat President.
10 R Senators voted NO (28 Ds voted no)
34 R Senators voted YES (27 Ds voted yes)
How can anybody be SOOOO WRONG!!!!!! WRONG
You are WRONG
(http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=103&session=1&vote=00395#position)
Title: Clinton woos Republicans to secure Nafta vote: President offers to support re-election of all who help get trade accord through US Congress as narrow victory predicted
IN A final drive to win votes for the North American Free Trade Association, President Bill Clinton has offered support at the next election for Republicans who vote for it. 'I don't believe any member of Congress should be defeated if they vote for Nafta,' he said.
The US Trade Representative, Mickey Kantor, said yesterday the White House was close to winning the 218 votes necessary to pass the agreement - ending trade barriers between the US, Canada and Mexico over 15 years - in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. Vice-President Al Gore, whose victory over Ross Perot in a television debate last week has given momentum to the pro-Nafta forces, said yesterday 'the undecided members of Congress still hold the balance'.
There is a growing belief in Washington that the trade agreement will just win in Congress, but also some surprise that President Clinton should have made it a make-or-break issue for his presidency. The President's offer will be resented by the unions and other core Democratic supporters.
It is not a question of being caught up in the left/right paradigm, when every member on the Right votes against the interests of Americans.
What is free about the so-called "free market"? Other countries are glad to take our jobs, and to artificially give their currencies unfair advantages, but that is not freedom.
This should be front page headlines across the nation, letting people know where republican loyalties lie. We must end tax breaks for companies exporting jobs.
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/007526.html
"Well, you might be thinking that corporations from other countries (e.g. Japan, Germany. China, Britain, India, etc) will displace US corps from foreign markets if US corps face higher costs abroad. Sure nuff. Leaders of Japanese, German, and Chinese corps will cackle with glee as corporations from those countries win those other markets and leave US corps to amortize their R&D over a smaller number of US customers.
You might also be thinking those foreign corps will then displace the US corps from US markets using their scale from foreign operations. Hey, that's how the mercantilists in Japan and, coming soon, China do it with considerable success. But Obama, in spite of thinking he's way more worldly and international than you and me, doesn't seem to have a clear understanding of the whole "US corps no longer dominate most markets" idea. He seems to think he's ruling a country that is back in the 1950s with unchallenged supremacy. Or maybe he's not thinking much at all. Time to go golfing might be the main thrust."
The claim that there is a tax break for sending jobs overseas is a pure distortion. There is a tax deferral, but that deferral helps employ Americans overseas. In regard to taxes the United States has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. Japan is lowering theirs soon so we will be #1. #1 at detering business from conducting operations on our shores. It isn't Republicans that have kept that rate high.
Do you blame ticketmaster for the rising cost of going to a Yankee game? Ticketmaster has no more control over Yankee ticket prices than insurance companies have over medical costs.