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So its OK when US companies buy assets oversees but if a foreign company dares to buy assets in the US its a scarilage?
What a friecking moron!
When Americans No Longer Own America
by Thom Hartmann
---The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality:
So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years.
The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their products here or overseas, but the ultimate cost of labor would be the same.
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle class. Our nation's largest employer has gone from being the unionized General Motors to the poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the 1970s to a minus .5 percent in 2005 - meaning that they're going into debt or selling off their assets just to maintain their lifestyle.
At the same time, federal policy has been to do the same thing at a national level. Because our so-called "free trade" policies have left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost" retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what we used to do with Third World nations - they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take those profits overseas where they're invested to make other nations strong. The "things" they're buying are, by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural resources.
Back in the pre-Reagan days, American companies made profits that were distributed among Americans. They used their profits to build more factories, or diversify into other businesses. The profits stayed in America.
Today, foreigners awash with our consumer dollars are on a two-decades-long buying spree. The UK's BP bought Amoco for $48 billion - now Amoco's profits go to England. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream Wireless, so their profits go to Germany, which is where most of the profits from Random House, Allied Signal, Chrysler, Doubleday, Cyprus Amax's US Coal Mining Operations, GTE/Sylvania, and Westinghouse's Power Generation profits go as well. Ralston Purina's profits go to Switzerland, along with Gerber's; TransAmerica's profits go to The Netherlands, while John Han Insurance's profits go to Canada. Even American Bankers Insurance Group is owned now by Fortis AG in Belgium.
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All because "flat world" so-called "free trade" policies have turned us from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily used to buy off big chunks of America. As www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:
· Sound recording industries - 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
· Metal ore mining - 65%
· Motion picture and video industries - 64%
· Wineries and distilleries - 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
· Book publishers - 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%
· Rubber product - 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
· Plastics product - 51%
· Other insurance related activities - 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%
· Glass and glass product - 48%
· Coal mining - 48%
· Sugar and confectionery product - 48%
· Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%
· Advertising and related services - 41%
· Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%
· Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products - 40%
· Securities brokerage - 38%
· Other general purpose machinery - 37%
· Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and optical media - 36%
· Support activities for mining - 36%
· Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation - 32%
· Chemical manufacturing - 30%
· Industrial machinery - 30%
· Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities - 30%
· Other food - 29%
· Motor vehicles and parts - 29%
· Machinery manufacturing - 28%
· Other electrical equipment and component - 28%
· Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial investment activities - 27%
· Architectural, engineering, and related services - 26%
· Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%
· Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%
· Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control instruments - 25%
· Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%
· Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%
· Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%
· Basic chemical - 24%
· Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%
· Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%
· Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%
· Printing and related support activities - 21%
· Chemical product and preparation - 20%
· Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%
· Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery - 20%
· Publishing industries - 20%
· Medical equipment and supplies - 20%
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold off our ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly believe that a "New World Order" with multinational corporations in charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately, democracy.
The "security" implications of turning our ports over to the UAE are just the latest nail in what the cons hope will be the coffin of American democracy and the American middle class. Today's conservatives believe in rule by inherited wealth and an internationalist corporate elite, and things like a politically aroused citizenry and a healthy democracy are pesky distractions.
Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our cons utions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…" he just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO.
As Simon Romero and Heather Timmons noted in The New York Times on 24 February 2006, "the international shipping business has evolved in recent years to include many more containers with consumer goods, in addition to old-fashioned bulk commodities, and that has helped lift profit margins to 30 percent, from the single digits. These smartly managed foreign operators now manage about 80 percent of port terminals in the United States."
And those 30 percent profits from American port operations now going to Great Britain will probably soon go to the United Arab Emirates, a nation with tight interconnections to both the Bush administration and the Bush family.
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about money. In the multinational corporatocracy's "flat world," money trumps the national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do - strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's "Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi Arabia: "War is good for business."
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author of over a dozen books and the host of a nationally syndicated noon-3pm ET daily progressive talk show syndicated by Air America Radio. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "What Would Jefferson Do?" and Ultimate Sacrifice.
So its OK when US companies buy assets oversees but if a foreign company dares to buy assets in the US its a scarilage?
What a friecking moron!
Try using some reading comprehension before replying.
The point is that the Republican's out of control spending has helped to expediate the sale of industries and commodities that once made this country strong and has underminded the American middle class.
But, as a Argentinian, who's country supports Hugo Chavez, I don't expect you to understand.
No it's not. The article is by an idiot who ultimately does not want foriegners to own American companies and does not believe in free trade.
Try using some reading comprehension before replying.
The point is that the Republican's out of control spending has helped to expediate the sale of industries and commodities that once made this country strong and has underminded the American middle class.
But, as a Argentinian, who's country supports Hugo Chavez, I don't expect you to understand.
By the way, have you read any of my posts about Chavez? I hate the guy, you idiot.
But as an ill-informed American red neck who is a true supporter of Chavez's ideas, I don't expect you to understand this issue nor the other issues discussed in this forum.
Free trade? Free trade for who? China? India, Russia? Who's really benefiting from free-trade? Walmart. Not American industry.
Certainly not the American workers who can't compete with countries that pay its workers .32 cents per hour.
smeagol is dead on. Americans want the benefits of free trade and yet they want their cake too.
Whoa. Crack open a cold one and relax.
But you're right, the jingoism is a bit old.
What benefits? Cheap goods that have to be subsequently subsidized by the America taxpayers? Is that worth your job?
Then those workers should specialize in something else. There is the tech industry, the service industry. But that is the way things are. Some countries are more compe ive building stuff because the cost of living there is lower, therefore they can afford paying lower wages.
By the way, many American companies are installed in these countries and are able to rip the benefits of these low wages too.
Quit complaining. America has the edge in many areas of the economy. Technology, Finance, Military . . . let other parts of the world benefit from their compe ive advantages. You guys already screw up the countries depend on agriculture with tariffs and trade barriers. You want to do the same thing to manufacturers. that.
Compe ion is great when you guys are the ones who don't have to compete.
Whatever Dan.
And that's what it comes back too for real the flat-worlders. They want us all to be waiters, grocery baggers, and cab drivers.Then those workers should specialize in something else. There is the tech industry, the service industry.
Since when is selling your industries competeing? Where are the real Americans and why is this Argentinian so for this?
eh? All goods are subsidized following that logic. Cheap goods benefit the mass of consumers. Not every job is going abroad.
In addition, why don't we take a look at US ownership of foreign assets? Maybe we should beat our chests because we own so much of the world?
Why? Because then they'd have no market to sell their products to? There are plenty of well paying jobs in the US. The problem is that the easy factory job that Joe Schmoe could get with a HS education and that paid a salary within spitting distance of what a college grad made is long gone. Does that mean we have to start restricting trade to cover Joe Schmoe's ass?
Can't you just feel Smeagal's hatred for America in this post?Quit complaining. America has the edge in many areas of the economy. Technology, Finance, Military . . . let other parts of the world benefit from their compe ive advantages. You guys already screw up the countries depend on agriculture with tariffs and trade barriers. You want to do the same thing to manufacturers. that.
WTO Bashers Would Slam The Door On The World's Poor
by Brink Lindsey
The anti-World Trade Organization protesters gathered for the meeting of WTO delegates in Seattle present themselves as unimpeachably high-minded. They are the champions of poor people, human rights and Mother Earth against the rapacity of corporate greed.
To protect and burnish that image, they pick their battles carefully. They rail against the WTO's secrecy, its lack of democratic accountability, its supposed domination by corporate interests.
They complain bitterly and at great length about a handful of WTO rulings in which environmental and food-safety policies were at issue. In short, the anti-WTO protesters are claiming the moral high ground.
But it's a claim that should be strongly resisted. Beyond the squabbling over tortuous technicalities of WTO procedures is an issue of epochal moral significance. And the Seattle marchers are on the wrong side of it.
For the first time in human history, mass poverty is no longer a necessary evil. It is avoidable. It can be eradicated. For the 1.3 billion people who must survive on incomes un der $1 a day, as well as the billions more still enduring conditions most of us would find unbearable, there is hope for deliverance. And the means of that deliverance is globalization.
Rapid alleviation of mass poverty has been demonstrated in East Asia. Consider South Korea in the 1960s, when its economy was on a par with those of West African countries. Today its output per head has reached the levels of Europe.
Or look at China, where an estimated 160 million people have been rescued from poverty in the past 20 years.
The Asian miracle, which still stands despite the region's recent financial crisis, shows the rapid gains in human welfare possible when countries pursue a policy of "outward orientation."
In the space of a single generation, active engagement in world markets and an openness to foreign investment have wrought breathtaking improvements in the lives of hundreds of millions.
Opposition to open markets has made these protesters the enemies of the poor.
The chief lesson of the Asian crisis is that if the miracle is to continue, Asian nations must open up their economies even further. That's the conclusion reached by reformist leaders like President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea and Premier Zhu Rongji of China.
The Asian miracle would never have been possible if the advanced industrialized countries had not opened their markets to East Asian exports. No other country can hope to follow East Asia's example unless it keeps its markets open.
Yet the WTO bashers want to slam the trade doors shut. They urge the imposition of tighter controls on cross-border trade and capital flows, which would restrict vital access by developing countries to rich-country markets and investment.
Some call for international controls enforced by an expanded WTO, while others want the WTO contracted or eliminated to allow more market closing at the national level.
The common denominator of the plans is a more restrictive international system, one that would leave the world's poor on the outside looking in.
Although they claim to put people over profits, the "progressive" anti-WTO forces are in fact doing the opposite. Instead of fighting vested interests, they have crawled into bed with them.
It is astounding, for instance, to hear Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, a group founded by Ralph Nader, make the case for import quotas on foreign steel. Since when did the profit margins of USX and Bethlehem Steel become a consumerist cause? Surely such alliances ought to call into question the moral pretensions of the anti-globalization crowd.
In the name of fighting corporate power, the WTO bashers provide a smoke screen for the most discreditable kinds of corporate power grabs.
But this is not the worst of it. The anti-globalization left also makes common cause with presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan and the nativist right-wingers he attracts, a cons uency including many who'd be all too happy to see yellow, brown and black people around the world remain forever poor.
Doubtless many of the Seattle marchers are genuinely, passionately concerned for the welfare of the world's poor. Yet through their opposition to open markets they have made themselves the enemies of the poor.
While hurting the very people they wish to help, they unwittingly serve the interests of special-interest hacks and xenophobic haters. That's about as far from the moral high ground as you can get.
Brink Lindsey is director of the Cato Ins ute's Center for Trade Policy Studies.
(This article originally appeared in The Bridge)[
Article and similar materials can be found here.
About the only jobs not going abroad are union protected jobs.eh? All goods are subsidized following that logic. Cheap goods benefit the mass of consumers. Not every job is going abroad.
"Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime" is found nowhere in the Bible.
But this is:
Better is the poor who walks in his integrity than he who is crooked though he be rich.
(Proverbs 28:6)
Free trade has done more to decrease human misery than anything humanity has ever tried.
America has a lot of very good compe ive advantages on the world stage. Bemoaning the loss of manufacturing jobs is silly. Change is inevitable.
The original article complains about "$.32 an hour jobs". Let's look at that a bit more closely.
Thirty-two cents an hour times 60 would be the weekly wage for this job.
.32*60=19.2
That for 52 weeks in a year is about $1000. Sucks if you are in America, but if that job is located in, say, a good chunk of the developing world, that means that job pays 50% better than the national average. (I assume average income in nominal dollars is about $600, feel free to look up the actual number, but I think that figure is fairly close--RG)
At one time the factory jobs here used to be better than average too. The problem with those jobs is the fact that we are light-years ahead of the rest of the world in living standards. There will ALWAYS be somebody who can train a group of poorly-educated people to operate simple machines in a country with much lower standards of living.
What we ARE good at are complicated machines, technology, and "knowledge" workers. That is something that a developing country simply can't do easily.
I would rather spend our efforts on capitalizing on our advantages than trying to compete against other nation's advantages.
So trade is crooked because the rich are opening themselves up to compe ion?
I don't hate America. I live hear and I like it very much.
I don't like it when developed countries take advante of their wealth and power and put barriers to other countries in their own development.
I hate America, Europe and Japan's farm subsidiy policies.
Free trade has made us richer, of that I have no doubt, but has it made us happier?Free trade has done more to decrease human misery than anything humanity has ever tried.
Only if you equate happiness with spending less time with your children and spouse, less time for your community and church. Dependency on anti-stress, anti-depressents, and other medications, even addicting your children. Always feeling like your running as hard as you can, but still not getting anywhere. Filling the yurning in your heart for that something else in life with junk that temporarily fills the void. Misled by false prophets who teach intolerance in conjunction with the word of the Lord.
This is what we have become as a society, but we can't be this way forever because like any addict, sooner or later, reality come crashing down on you, and that time is coming soon for us - get ready.. get ready.
Star TelegramNEW YORK - National security is a legitimate worry, but behind the dispute over whether to let a Middle Eastern company run U.S. ports lurks the nagging discomfort Americans feel whenever the growing pains of free trade and globalization hit home.
Last year, it was a Chinese company's attempt to buy a big U.S. oil company. Before that, there was outrage over U.S. companies "outsourcing" jobs to India and other lower-wage markets. And for the better part of three decades, there's been dismay at just how open our borders are to Japanese cars and other imports.
There was a time when our high-quality, lower-priced products were flooding other markets, generating fortunes in export revenue and a healthy dose of foreign resentment. That often led to tariffs, trade barriers and no shortage of angry protest from Washington
Those days are long gone. Imports of foreign goods exceeded exports of U.S. goods by a record $726 billion in 2005. This imbalance prompts frequent calls by politicians, companies and unions to retaliate against China and other nations who they say view free trade as a one-way street, or to subsidize those segments of the U.S. economy taking the biggest hit from imports.
The head of the United Auto Workers union, Ron Gettelfinger, has urged President Bush and Congress to "recognize that the foreign auto firms who are gaining market share in the United States did not succeed while their countries let `free markets' run their course. Japan, Germany, South Korea and other countries actively intervene to support their industries."
Among the unlikely "interventions" proposed by the UAW president was national health insurance. Such a massive federal program would neatly eliminate one of the most hobbling burdens for Detroit rather than forcing the automakers and UAW to come up with a sustainable business model - including health benefits much less luxuriant than autoworkers currently enjoy.
Other critics say it's naive for the United States to be so open to imports from countries that don't return the favor.
No doubt the general U.S. devotion to free trade has been abused. It may sound fair to respond with punitive tariffs and barriers. But that would be counterproductive and futile if one acknowledges the longer-term, less-emotional reality that market forces tend to be irrepressible, whether it's in China, the United Arab Emirates or the United States.
And despite the earnest desire to buy American, it's hard to find products that don't derive any benefit from globalization - an "impurity" that brings smiles at the cash register and would be sorely missed if the United States turned too tough on trade.
The near-term pain of trade deficits is the price for preaching capitalism to the world.
That's not merely high-minded symbolism. There is material payback for this leadership-by-example.
The flood of outsourced jobs to India, China and eastern Europe is boosting wages in those markets. As pay rises overseas, it becomes less economical for U.S. companies to find a labor bargain. Already, outsourcers are looking beyond India, a process that's likely to ripple through the world economy for decades. And with more disposable income on hand, consumers in developing markets come to demand products not made locally, including American goods.
Meanwhile, with all the dollars going to imports, from cars and appliances to the billions worth of foreign oil per day it takes to power those products, there's still major global demand for one American product that no low-cost producer has managed to replicate: the good name and credit of the United States.
We gripe that the Chinese are not buying our goods. They are. With all those dollars coming in, the Chinese government is one of the biggest customers for a unique American product called U.S. Treasury debt. An estimated three-quarters of China's $800 billion in foreign currency holdings are in dollars, and Treasuries account for most of it.
Likewise, hard U.S. assets remain an appealing place for foreign concerns to park their dollars, though often not without controversy.
In the eighties, Japanese real estate purchases were a hit to American pride. Now national security has emerged as a top objection. Last year, CNOOC Ltd.'s bid for Unocal provoked a political firestorm similar to the current spectacle over the sale of U.S. port operations to Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates.
In the Unocal deal, politicians bristled at ceding control of U.S. energy resources to foreign interests. The opposition prompted Unocal's management and shareholders to accept a lower bid from Chevron Corp. It was a pragmatic decision, but not in keeping with the capitalist spirit this nation touts at home and abroad.
Generally lost in the current debate is the reality that the American ports in question have already been under foreign control for some time. Granted, the current owner is based in Britain, an ally in the fight against terrorism, whereas Dubai Ports World is a company with secretive finances in a region politicians have linked with terrorism.
But the democracy the United States is attempting to "seed" in that part of the world is in no small way dependent on the spread of free markets and capitalism.
So the answer here may be to proceed cautiously, protecting national security, but also ensuring that the United States doesn't send the wrong message with a knee-jerk rejection of the ports deal.
Republican spending my foot. Look at the dumbass programs the
Try using some reading comprehension before replying.
The point is that the Republican's out of control spending has helped to expediate the sale of industries and commodities that once made this country strong and has underminded the American middle class.
But, as a Argentinian, who's country supports Hugo Chavez, I don't expect you to understand.
dimm-o-craps have ins uted. Remember guns and butter program
of LBJ great society? hmmmmmm?
I quote the following little snippet from a column written by Ross Mackenzie
(full column at this link: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/colu...02/188391.html)
Quote: For all this, the Pentagon is requesting $439 billion for fiscal 2007, or almost 7 percent more than the $411 billion authorized in fiscal 2006. Seems like a lot, and it is - about equal to the combined defense expenditures of the next 16 high-spending countries. Yet it is less than proposed next year for Medicare/Medicaid ($592 billion) and Social Security ($581 billion) - and hardly more than a third of the anticipated combined expenditures for both.
unquote.
Now two of the above are dimm-0-crap programs. And they are the
same dimm-o-craps who are screaming that the Republicans are cutting
these programs. Medicare/medicaid, to the bone, according to them.
You need to get real about your thinking!
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