Lost in the furor is a basic economic question: what are we going to make? From The Oregonian, about a Port of Vancouver ceremony for an expansion project:
In a ceremony full of speeches, however, a top longshore official nearly stole the show by asserting that free trade agreements may have benefited cargo shipping, but not American workers.
Brad Clark, president of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 4, aimed his words at Congress in general and, in particular, Democratic U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and U.S. Rep. Brian Baird — all of whom attended the ceremony on a rocky patch of Terminal 5.
“When I started on the docks over 20 years ago,” Clark said from his prepared remarks, “our terminals were full of American-made cargo ready for export. With the signing of various free trade agreements, this is no longer the case.”
—snip—
He concluded: “As we look around this beautiful new terminal, many of you visualize the profits that will be made with the increase in import vessel calls.
“But my vision, my dream, is that before I retire, this space will be used to export cargo — cargo that is manufactured by the American worker.
“If that dream happens, you benefit, I benefit, my union benefits and most importantly, this nation benefits.”
Sometimes you forget we used to send stuff the other way, and people around the world liked our stuff. Americans are pretty hard workers, clever and will do a great job if you don’t crap all over them just to satisfy CNBC.
Now that we buy airplane wings from China, and soon won’t have any workers left who know how to make them, it’s a good thing we have lots of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads because we’re not going to have any airplanes to drop conventional bombs if China invades Taiwan.
I read somewhere the banking/financial sector earned 40% of all U.S. corporate profits in 2007. And that sector doesn’t make a damn thing. All they do is skim fees off the top of people selling pieces of paper to each other.
Bankers provide lubrication for the economy in the same way that oil lubricates your car. But what good is oil if you don’t make cars?
@1 Naaaaaaah….wait a few years more for Chiang Kai-Shek to get a little colder in his grave and mainland China will just quietly assimilate Taiwan, as they did with Hong Kong.
Until we make stuff again here, we will continue to decline. And its the corporate conservatives fault.
How many items in your house were not made in the USA?
The blame lies on the people buying the product if you want to place blame.
@6 Bullcrap. The recording industry managed to lobby its way to get horrendous performance royalties levied against anyone using the Internet as a broadcasting medium, thanks to the Library of Congress (which handles copyrights) having put together a royalty-determination process based at the RIAA’s suggestion on a “willing-buyer/willing-seller” principle. The only problem was, in making the determination, the only “seller” considered was the major-label recording cartel, and the only “buyer” was Launch.com, whose founder, Mark Cuban, later admitted he’d made an under-the-table deal with the RIAA to set an unreasonable royalty rate designed to put all his competitors out of business. Then he sold his company to Yahoo and turned his attention to basketball.
The over-the-air broadcasters, by the way, stayed out of the conversation because they viewed the Internet as competition. Now they find themselves subject to a full-court press in Washington to charge them royalties, because…well, since the Internet guys were paying, it’s only fair.
Willing buyer/willing seller? More like grudging buyer-greedy monopoly.
So, suppose you or I am the buyer, and we go to the store. Well, if we’re really careful, read labels and don’t mind paying more, we might manage to buy mostly domestic groceries. Go to the haberdashery, on the other hand, and it’s another story. Whether you buy your shirts from Wally World or Ralph Lauren, they were probably made in the same Chinese factory.
Let’s see you go around and ask a few gas stations whether all the fuel in their tanks came from the North Slope or a California cow pasture.
Electronics? Out of the question. Even if your computer’s a Dell that was assembled in Texas, almost all the component parts came from offshore. Even though the heart of the Intel processor was made in California or Oregon, the wafers were actually sent offshore to be cut into individual chips, tested and packaged. If you bought a copy of Microsoft Office to install on it, yeah, the code was written in Redmond, albeit partly by H1B “visitors”–but the CD’s may well have been mass-produced and packaged overseas.
To be honest, I have a quite a bit of stuff in my home that was made in the US, but a lot of it’s 20 or more years old. Now you can go ahead and tell me I’m not helping American enterprise by spending enough money–or would you prefer that I wait until there’s some Republican goon in the White House again, so you can crow about that?
Don’t hold yor breath. I’m old, and I may die before then.
@6 Bullshit. You can’t buy stuff made in the U.S. anymore, no matter how hard you try. Over 90% of processed food products have imported ingredients. Have you tried to buy an American-made TV or washing machine lately? Consumers don’t have a choice about buying foreign goods because that’s all there is.
@7 “Let’s see you go around and ask a few gas stations whether all the fuel in their tanks came from the North Slope or a California cow pasture.”
Actually, here in the Pacific Northwest, most of the gas does come from American oil. Specifically, from Alaskan oil.
That Brad Guy has some balls to speak real truth to power.
Before the current crash the biggest export through the Port of Seattle was scrap and recyclables heading to China.
Not the stuff to base an economy on.
@6: Utterly wrong. The fault lies with our government protectionism for the better off and the rich. U.S. auto workers compete with Korean and Mexican workers directly. Can the same be said for doctors? Lawyers? Newspaper columnists? Corporate CEO’s? Investment bankers?
This nation has consciously adopted social policies that shift income upward, leaving the poor and workers out in the cold, leaving lickspittle like marvin to assert this to be the outcome of ‘market forces’.
But then, marvin is a disingenuous liar. And much the worse, he knows it.
@11 Presumably, “Cash For Clunkers” is helping with that, too. Most importantly, it’s helping banks write more loans so they can buy and sell the collective indenture of the rest of us poor sots.
@12 “Marvin”, “disingenuous” and “liar”? That’s doubly redundant, isn’t it?
@14: Art
triply redundant, perhaps…I’d state it is what it is, but IOZ would not be happy.
The only way to create wealth is to take something, and turn it into something more valuable. Unless you count stealing…
Until we start making things here, and protecting American Jobs, there will not be any recovery.
When Reagan became president 22% or our GDP was manufacturing. Now it is 6%, and they count hamburger builders.
We are sinking fast, and no one is saying a word because “corporate profits” are acceptable. Anyone speak Chinese?
I just wanna say one word to you: Plastics. The United States makes the best plastic in the world.
Oh, by the way….The cute and cuddly Glenn Beck opened his Thursday program with the claim that the whole real estate/derivatives meltdown was due to ACORN “forcing” banks to write all those flaky mortgages.
Awe, c’mon. Be fair. With several boats, cars, Sub-zero’s, mistresses and recreational homes apiece, the banker class generates an inordinate amount of collateral business activity. Just imagine, if you can, the number of pool boys and illegal landscapers they’ve gainfully employed.
18 Now you are starting to learn the truth. Good for you, theres hope!