Did you know that the new World Trade Center tower is being constructed with glass from China and steel from Germany? 1 World Trade Center, also known as “The Freedom Tower”, is not just another skyscraper. It is essentially a national monument. But that doesn’t mean that we are above awarding construction contracts to the lowest bidder. The new World Trade Center tower will contain 250 tons of steel from Germany and the lower floors will be surrounded with blast-resistant glass from China. This is yet another example of how the U.S. economy is being hollowed out. Once upon a time, the United States produced more steel and glass than anyone else in the world. But now we are being deindustrialized at a blinding pace. We have lost tens of thousands of factories and millions of jobs over the past decade. We are going to have a trade imbalance of about a half a trillion dollars this year. Meanwhile, our federal, state and local governments are going into massive amounts of debt in order to keep funding government activities at a level that our hollowed out economy simply cannot support any longer.
Did you also know that the new MLK memorial on the National Mall was also made in China?
Yet there was very little uproar about that in the mainstream media. A few activists out there made some waves, but generally people do not seem troubled by this.
The following is an excerpt from a report about the new MLK memorial in The Telegraph….
However, there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry out the work. Critics have openly asked why a black, or at least an American, artist was not chosen and even remarked that Dr King appears slightly Asian in Mr Lei’s rendering.
Mr Lei, who has in the past carved two statues of Mao Tse-tung, one of which stands in the former garden of Mao Anqing, the Chinese leader’s son, carried out almost all of the work in Changsha.
More than 150 granite blocks, weighing some 1,600 tons, were then shipped from Xiamen to the port of Baltimore, and reassembled by a team of 100 workmen, including ten Chinese stone masons brought over specifically for the project.
Well, if you don’t care about where our national symbols are made, you should at least care about the millions of jobs that we have been losing.
Since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
All of that money could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers. In turn, those businesses and workers would have paid taxes on all of that wealth.
But instead, all of that wealth went out of the United States.
The proponents of the theory of “comparative advantage” tell us that each country should focus on the things that they are most efficient at making, and then they should all trade with each other.
Well, when we merged our economy with the economies of nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages, suddenly we made it more “efficient” for big corporations to make almost everything overseas.
The more we have “liberalized” our trade, the faster we have lost jobs.
The American people need to learn the facts. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000, and over 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed down since 2001.
Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
Thank you George W. Bush and Barack Obama for such a wonderful economic miracle!
If we allow corporations to make stuff in countries where they can legally pay slave labor wages and then ship those products into the United States for free, we should not be surprised when we lose millions of jobs.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why there are fewer jobs in this country than there used to be.
Right now, if you gathered together all of the people that are “officially” unemployed in the United States, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.
Ouch.
But all of this “free trade” is also dramatically driving down wages for the people that still do have jobs.
According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.
You see, the truth is that “free trade” slowly but surely pushes down the standard of living of America workers. If American workers have to directly compete for jobs against people making a dollar an hour on the other side of the globe, it is inevitable that their salaries and benefits are going to shrink.
In addition to slave labor wages overseas, in a previous article I discussed a number of the other factors that are causing jobs to pour out of this country at a staggering pace….
*Many foreign nations deeply and directly subsidize national industries and the U.S. government lets them get away with it. That puts our industries at a vast disadvantage.
*The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. That puts our corporations at a vast disadvantage.
*Many foreign nations do not require businesses to provide health care for their employees. That puts our businesses at a vast disadvantage.
*Many foreign nations impose very little regulation on businesses. That puts businesses in the United States at a vast disadvantage. In the U.S., we have some of the most restrictive regulations in the world.
Right now, the United States is bleeding massive amounts of national wealth every single month.
In other words, we are getting poorer.
Today, the United States spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
Does that seem like “fair and balanced” trade to you?
The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
That trend sure is not heading in the right direction.
China is rising and we are falling.
For example, did you know that the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001?
Did you know that China is now the largest PC market in the entire world?
In a previous article, I mentioned some of the stunning new investments that U.S. corporations are making in China….
*Coca-Cola is opening up three new factories in China this year.
*Disney recently broke ground on a $4.4 billion project that will be known as Shanghai Disneyland.
*Procter & Gamble has invested over a billion dollars in operations in China.
*Caterpillar has built 16 factories in China and now employs more than 8,000 workers there.
*Ford is currently “building three factories in Chongqing as part of $1.6 billion investment that also includes another plant in Nanchang”.
The reality is that globalism is absolutely destroying our economy. Other countries are not playing fair with us, and the loss of jobs and factories is rapidly hollowing out our economic system.
But will you hear any of the candidates talk about this during the Republican debate tonight?
Of course not.
And Obama is busy pushing for even more “free trade” agreements.
Both major political parties continue to insist that what we need is even more “free trade”.
So we are going to lose even more jobs, even more manufacturing capacity, even more wealth and even more of our formerly great industrial cities are going to end up degenerating into hellholes.
This is an issue that conservatives, liberals and libertarians should all be able to agree on.
Other countries are cheating us blind, we are losing millions of good jobs and we have surrendered massive amounts of national sovereignty to organizations such as the World Trade Organization.
The people of the United States need to make the deindustrialization of America a major issue during the 2012 campaign season.
Our economy is getting hollowed out a little bit more every single day.
Please act now while there is still something left to save.