Economy

[indago]

Journalist David Leonhardt wrote for The New York Times 11 November 2014:
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The fact remains that incomes for most Americans aren’t growing very fast and haven’t been for years. Median inflation-adjusted income last year was still $2,100 lower than when President Obama took office in 2009 — and $3,600 lower than when President George W. Bush took office in 2001. That’s not just because of the financial crisis, either: Last month was another solid one for job growth and another weak one for average wage growth, the latest jobs report showed.

...What can Washington do?
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"Washington" has already done it. They have furthered the enablement of

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

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How Do We Get People Work?

What’s happening to our national economy today isn’t just another one of those inevitable economic dips in the business cycle that always come along after an expansion that has gone on too long, a recession. What’s happening now is a symptom of something far more fundamental and worrisome—an expression of genuine economic decline. A regression.

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On Free Trade — The whole idea of a free market is little more than a scam perpetrated on the public in order for those Few who control the wealth to take advantage of the many who work for a living. These Few are supported by an elaborate system of government sycophants whom they manipulate by means of campaign financing, and corporate media toadies whom they influence through ownership, advertising revenues and control of corporate media board seats. Executives who run the government and corporate media on behalf of the Few live largely in denial of their purpose, often deluded enough to believe they serve the public interest.

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Republicans, with the help of Democrats, have undermined the American economic system:

It is well known in this country that the United States has a well advanced economic system and society; advanced beyond the economies of some of the other countries with which we trade. Our working people are protected in the workplace by legislation which requires a safe workplace environment. Our manufacturers are required to clean discharges into the environment to limit pollution. Many working people have contracted with employers a retirement program, and health insurance. Compensations for labor have advanced commensurate with the liberties and freedoms of the Americans, allowing Americans to have a more autonomous lifestyle. The United States is being invaded by goods from foreign countries that have provided a haven to our manufacturers who wish to avoid the costs of a clean environment, and a free people. Some of these countries have manufacturers of their own who avoid these responsibilities. The Americans cannot compete on this type of "free trade" basis. To compete, the Americans would have to regress back fifty to one hundred years, a move hardly acceptable by the American people.

[indago]

Take China, for example...

We have two completely disparate economic systems between China and America. The average wage of a worker in China made around $1.25/hr in 2007. The average wage of a worker in America at that time was around $20.20/hr. Now, if you're talking regressing our complete economic system back to a time when the American worker made $1.25/hr., then you would get no argument from me. That would be around 1920. The average house cost $3100; a pound of butter: 70¢; a pound of coffee: 47¢; a gallon of gas: 18¢; a dozen eggs: 47¢; half gallon of milk: 33¢.

[indago]

And speaking of regression...


Rick Newman wrote for Yahoo Finance 12 August 2014:
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The recession officially ended more than five years ago and ought to be a distant memory. These should be boom times with widespread optimism and robust spending. Yet consumers are gloomy and the economy is limping along at subpar levels of growth.

It’s becoming clear why: While jobs have returned, incomes have not. The latest evidence is a study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors that highlights stark disparities between the jobs lost during the recession and jobs gained since. The types of jobs lost paid nearly $62,000 per year, on average. The jobs gained during the past six years pay only about $47,000. That 23% shortfall adds up to about $93 billion in lost wages per year — money not being spent because it vanished from the economy.
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[indago]

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It is rare when a government official actually blames himself for his mistakes. That straight talk occurred in the June 4 issue of Foreign Policy in Focus when Robert Cassidy, President Clinton's Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Asia and China, took himself to task for the trade agreement he negotiated with China. He began: "As the principal negotiator for the landmark market access agreement that led to China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), I have reflected on whether the agreements we negotiated really lived up to our expectations. A sober reflection has led me to conclude that those trade agreements did not." Cassidy notes that only two groups benefited from our trade agreement with China: "multinational companies that moved to China and the financial institutions that financed those investments, trade flows, and deficits." The American economy and the American worker were the big losers with up to 2.5 million manufacturing jobs lost.
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[indago]

I was on a message board a few years back where there were some union participants. I was pointing out the hypocrites that voted for the free trade agreements, and mentioned the Levins, both the Senator Carl Levin, and his brother in the House of Representatives, Sander Levin. They are both Democrats. The union participants said that their unions had recommended their support in the 2008 elections, so they were going to vote for them.

After the election, I went to the message board and saw phrases like: "WE WON"; and "The recession is over!" I checked the records and found that the unions had indeed voted back in the two aforementioned hypocrites.

[indago]

And then there is Senator Richard Durbin (D) and a speech he made in the Senate on 11 February 2004. The Senator talked about how he and a group of Senators had "dinner at Walter Reed Hospital with the soldiers who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom are undergoing important medical treatment and rebuilding their lives and strength to return to their families, and some to return to service to our country." He asked them about their experiences, and their injuries, and how they came about, many of them noting that they were in a Humvee when a roadside bomb, or a rocket propelled grenade, exploded. He asked what the Senators could do for them. The Senators were told that the soldiers had to find scrap metal to attach to the sides of the vehicles in an effort to support the inadequate armor.

The Senator said that he visited the Rock Island Arsenal in his State where the new armor plated doors were being assembled for the Humvees, and was told that it would be one year before they were completed.

From Congressional Record, Senate, Senator Richard Durbin (Democrat, Illinois): "I said: Why is it taking one year? He said: Because there is only one steel-fabricating plant left in America, and it is in Pennsylvania. It makes the steel that we can convert into the armor plating for these doors. We are using everything they produce as fast as they produce it. So when the issue comes up about loss of manufacturing jobs, and loss of American jobs, and loss of our industrial base, it is more than a cold discussion of statistics; it is a discussion about the reality of our economy and the reality we face. Whether you live in North Carolina, where we have lost textile jobs, or you live in Illinois, where we have lost steel jobs, the fact is, as we lose these jobs, we lose our capacity. When it comes to something as basic as steel, that capacity plays out so that our soldiers in Iraq today are more vulnerable to enemy attack because we cannot produce the steel in America."

Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat, while a Congressman in the House of Representatives, representing his constituents in Illinois, voted for the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), GATT (General Agreement on Tariff and Trade), and when he became a Senator representing the State of Illinois in the Congress, voted for the China trade agreement, the Chile free trade agreement, and the Singapore free trade agreement.

AFL ENDORSES DURBIN

[indago]

Mark Gaffney, Michigan AFL-CIO President, noted that unions are going to emerge from this recession with one-quarter, or even one-third fewer members... "We're losing a helluva lot of members".

Well, no shit!

And who's fault is that?

Journalist Peter T. Kilborn wrote for the New York Times 24 October 1995:
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Whatever anger organized labor has sometimes felt toward the White House was indiscernible Monday night, when President Clinton spoke for 45 minutes to 1,020 friendly delegates of the AFL-CIO, whose four-day convention began Monday in midtown Manhattan. American labor unions were once furious with the president over his endorsement of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and many promised to campaign against anyone in Congress, Democrat or Republican, who voted for it. Yet Monday, as the president reached the dais at the Sheraton New York Hotel, the delegates chanted "Four more years!'' and "We want Bill!'' "Whose side is Bill Clinton on?'' asked Thomas R. Donahue, the federation's president, introducing Clinton. "Make no mistake about it. He's on your side.''
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[indago]

Hedrick Smith, reporting in a FRONTLINE program, noted: "When trade agreements were signed between the U.S. and China in the 1990s, bringing China into the World Trade Organization, American political and business leaders embraced the idea. China's 1.2 billion people were viewed as an enormous untapped market for American-made goods. The reality, experts say, is the opposite. China's exports to the U.S. have skyrocketed."

In the report, it was also noted: "Yvonne Smith, the communications director at the Port of Long Beach, literally sees the imbalance in U.S.-China trade. She reports that through Long Beach alone, the U.S. is importing $36 billion in goods yearly from China and exporting just $3 billion. By her account, the mix of products is very unfavorable to the U.S.

"We export cotton, we import clothing," Smith reports. "We export hides, we bring in shoes. We export scrap metal. We bring back machinery. We're exporting waste paper, we bring back cardboard boxes with products inside them."

Overall, the U.S. trade deficit with China reached a record $124 billion dollars in 2003 and the figure is headed even higher this year. Today, U.S. imports from China outpace U.S. exports to China by more than five to one, and the deficit shows no signs of abating."

[indago]

William Greider, a political journalist writing for The Nation, wrote: "For decades, globalization advocates insisted, for example, that the solution to America's trade deficits was more "free trade." Each new trade agreement has been heralded as a market-opening breakthrough that would boost US exports and thus move toward balanced trade. That is not what happened — not after NAFTA (1993) and the WTO (1994), nor after China normalization (2000). In each case, the trade deficits grew dramatically. (Yes, it's true that since the early 1970s US export volume has grown by more than five times, but import volume has grown by eight times.) Economists have also claimed that ending deficit spending by the federal government would eliminate the trade gap. Yet when the federal government's budget did finally come into balance in 1999, the trade deficits were exploding. This discredited explanation is nonetheless being recycled, now that huge federal deficits have been spectacularly revived by the Bush Administration."

Chantell Taylor, writing for the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, wrote: "Throughout his presidency, President Clinton has given lip service to labor organizations at home while surreptitiously selling out American workers in trade negotiations abroad. In his 1999 State of the Union address, President Clinton told America that: "we ought to tear down barriers, open markets, and expand trade. But at the same time, we must ensure that ordinary citizens in all countries actually benefit from trade - a trade that promotes the dignity of work, the rights of workers, and protects the environment." Yet the President has aggressively continued to push the status quo free trade agenda, chartering new accords that replicate the existing failed model and refusing to change one iota of substantive obligations that protect labor at home and abroad." It was also noted: "President Clinton sold the NAFTA to skeptical American workers by promising to condition his support on the signing of a labor side agreement, then betrayed labor when he ultimately caved in to the dissent of Mexico by deleting from the NAALC "provisions that provided the possibility of trade sanctions and monetary penalties for a persistent failure of a party to the NAALC to enforce its own labor laws . . . ." The deletion essentially removed all teeth that the NAALC may have had to enforce workers' right to collective bargaining and freedom of association".

[indago]

"When the bulk of the American (and Mexican) people remained opposed to NAFTA, Clinton bought Congressional votes with pork barrel concessions and promises of trade relief. Thus Rep. Johnson (D-Tex) traded her vote for $ 1.7 Billion in additional govt aircraft production and Rep. Pickle got a trade center built in his district. Critical votes of the Florida delegations were changed by promising protection for citrus and vegetable growers. Protection for Florida and Midwest beet sugar growers was also included in the implementing language in exchange for more votes. Almost 20 of these deals that swung votes in the critical House vote are discussed in ref 3. Some of the promises were kept, but many, like the agreement to protect Florida's tomato growers and U.S. broom corn growers were not."

President Clinton did a lot of arm-twisting in the Congress to get the NAFTA passed, and now we are living with the results, which were predicted over two hundred years ago.

[rstrong]

President Clinton did a lot of arm-twisting in the Congress to get the NAFTA passed,

Specifically, he had to arm-twist Democrats. Republicans were already in favor.

NAFTA was a Republican show from the beginning. The Canada-U.S. free trade agreement was signed by Reagan. NAFTA was an expansion of this agreement that added Mexico, and was signed by Bush I in 1992. Since the agreement had been signed by Bush I under his fast-track prerogative, Clinton did not alter the original agreement. The U.S. House passed it with considerably more Republican than Democrat support.

All Clinton was really responsible for was getting Democrats on-side, and a couple add-on agreements that attempted to raise Mexican worker and environmental standards, to try to level the playing field for American workers.

and now we are living with the results,

For America, the results have been VERY good.

Under NAFTA, the US EXPORTS far more manufactured goods to Canada than it imports. That trade surplus accounts for nearly 600,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs in America, but is hurting Canada. (citation) The agreement also gives America guaranteed access to Canadian oil. Even Canada does not get preferential access.

It helps America that in Canada a trade agreement becomes the law of the land. Meanwhile the U.S. simply overrides NAFTA - from softwood lumber to durham wheat to livestock to trucking to manufactured goods - at the whim of any lobby group.

As for Mexico, remember Michael Moore's movie "Roger & Me", about all the auto industry jobs that disappeared to Mexico? That was BEFORE NAFTA. NAFTA helped level the playing field, and send some exports in the other direction.

And if you don't believe that jobs went in the other direction, just take a look at the effect of the tariffs Mexico imposed on a few items, in retaliation for the US not honoring the trucking part of the agreement. According to a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, those tariffs have resulted in the loss of $2.6 billion in U.S. exports and 25,000 American jobs. Texas agricultural products have been particularly hard hit. (citation)

"But the number that best displays the nonsensical nature of the debate is 66% - the increase in the manufacturing output of American industry since 1993." [when NAFTA was signed]

[...]

"Put another way, the main job killer of the past 14 years has not been the "giant sucking sound" of jobs going to Mexico, as enunciated by Ross Perot. Rather it has been that giant humming sound of machines replacing humans." (citation)

The US has the largest manufacturing base of any country, and it's only increasing. (citation)

[indago]

I have no problem at all with criticism of Clinton and other pro-corporate, anti-worker and anti-environment (the other big issue with trade deals) Dems. However, the virtual absence of mention of the even more pro-corporate, anti-worker and anti-environment GOP in indago's posts and her/his inability to address the above facts about the passage of NAFTA indicate an unrealistic and/or dishonest bias.

Then, you must have missed this:

Republicans, with the help of Democrats, have undermined the American economic system

[indago]

You must have missed this: "the virtual absence of mention of the...GOP"

Shall we count the mentions of Democrats?

I wrote: "Republicans, with the help of Democrats, have undermined the American economic system", then proceeded to show just how the Democrats helped the Republicans. Do I have to explain everything to you? You probably need help taking a shit too!

[indago]

...Shall we count the mentions of Democrats?

Dems - 6
Clinton - 10
GOP - 1
Daddy Shrub - 0
Baby Shrub - China's entry into the World Trade Organization, Central American Free Trade Agreement, free trade agreements with Australia, Bahrain, Chile, Morocco, Oman, Peru, Singapore, Ukraine - was only mentioned re budget deficits.
Anti-"free trade" Dems - 0

Did you use a counter app for that, or did you have to take your shoes and socks off?

[indago]

Columnist Ray Buursma wrote for The Holland Sentinel 23 March 2011:
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Remember the Reagan standard? Are you better off today than you were a decade ago? Two decades? Three? Unless you make more than $380,000 a year, the answer is no. In fact, your standard of living over the last quarter century has actually decreased while millionaires have added 30 percent to their net wealth. Why? Two reasons.

First, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs went overseas while the politicians you elected did nothing to stop them. Yet you continue to elect leaders who offer nothing but tax cuts, as if that would stem the flow of disappearing jobs.

Did you demand your leaders address America’s trade imbalance or continuous outsourcing of jobs? Did you demand your leaders require foreign countries to buy a dollar’s worth of American goods for every dollar of goods they sell here?

No and no. You didn’t bother. You simply crossed your fingers and prayed, “I hope my job’s not next.” You made concessions to your employer and hoped that would stem the exodus of jobs, or at least yours. How’d that work for you?
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[indago]

Journalist Ian Austen reported for the New York Times 8 February 2007:

Nortel to Cut Another 3,900 Jobs ...About 1,000 of those positions will be shifted to lower-cost operations in Mexico, China and India.

Journalist Peter Jackson reported for the Associated Press 15 February 2007:

Hershey plans to cut work force by 1,500 — ...moving a bigger chunk of its production to Mexico.

OhioRebel posted on ePluribus Media™ 10 December 2006:

The season's greeting that 700 workers in Ohio received Friday is that their jobs will be gone by this time next year. Siemens Energy & Automation Inc. said it plans to close two plants in western Ohio and move the jobs to operations in Mexico or outsource the manufacturing to third-party suppliers, the Associated Press reported.

Journalist Charlie LeDuff reported for the New York Times 30 October 2006:

You may have seen Don Rackley before. You see people like him every election cycle. The human prop, he calls himself. He says it with a ring of bitterness.

He is the sort of man you see on television sitting at the counter of a diner in a down-and-out steel town, or a struggling textile town, some American place teetering on despair. The candidates come for the morning, roll up their sleeves, promise changes. The cameras snap the pictures. Then everybody leaves.

In February 2004, John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina and a White House hopeful, was that candidate in this part of the country, a place of chicken pens and cotton fields in the triangle of Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga. The region was once humming with factory jobs paying $15 an hour to start, with benefits and vacation. ...the Carrier Corporation, an industrial air-conditioning manufacturer and the financial anchor of Warren County, had just announced it was shutting its profitable plant and shipping many of the 1,300 jobs to Mexico, the latest in a string of closings in the area.

Bloomberg News reported 4 October 2006:

The Whirlpool Corporation, the world’s largest appliance maker, said yesterday that it would dismiss about 1,200 workers in Arkansas and Indiana and shift some of its production to a lower-wage factory in Mexico.

Journalist Paul Blustein reported for the Associated Press 4 July 2004:

Report Urges U.S. Firms to Outsource Jobs — A report by an influential consulting firm is exhorting U.S. companies to speed up "offshoring" operations to China and India, including high-powered functions such as research and development.

Journalist Elisabeth Malkin reported for the New York Times 13 November 2006:

The Perot Systems Corporation, which manages information technology for companies, is setting up a technology center in Guadalajara where it expects to employ 270 engineers by the middle of next year. ...a company spokesman, Joe McNamara, said that lower pay for engineers was only one of several reasons Perot Systems decided to set up in Mexico.

Journalist Julie Creswell reported for the New York Times 27 October 2006:

Law Firms Are Starting to Adopt Outsourcing — ...While certain law firms hired companies to handle travel or records storage, most drew the line at sending client billing or confidential documents out of their offices, let alone out of the country. A number of large law firms, though, are starting to tiptoe onto far-flung shores. The latest is Clifford Chance, one of the largest law firms in the world with 29 offices in 20 countries, which will announce plans today to consolidate and move big chunks of its administrative functions like accounting and technological support to an operation in Delhi, India, by next spring. ...While corporate America has embraced sending clerical, customer and technical support functions overseas, law firms have been much more reluctant to do so. Their chief concern is that confidential client documents or information could be leaked, stolen or simply lost.

Journalist Lynnley Browning reported for the New York Times 15 February 2004:

IT is one of the best-kept secrets among tax preparers: a growing number of accountants across the nation are using workers in India to prepare tax returns for clients in the United States. This year, at least 100,000 returns, both federal and state, will be prepared by Indian citizens in places like Bombay and Bangalore, according to L. Gary Boomer, the chief executive of Boomer Consulting, a technology consulting company based in Manhattan, Kan., that has 250 accounting firms as clients. That number of returns is four times larger than last year, and many more times the several thousand just two years ago, said Mr. Boomer, who is also a certified public accountant.

Contrary to some who say that it is machines that are replacing jobs in the US, outsourcing has been the most devastating.

[rstrong]

Journalist Ian Austen reported for the New York Times 8 February 2007:

Nortel to Cut Another 3,900 Jobs ...About 1,000 of those positions will be shifted to lower-cost operations in Mexico, China and India.

Nortel was in a death spiral. It didn't move the jobs elsewhere; it ceased to exist. And Nortel was a Canadian company. If it weren't for the ability to shift jobs elsewhere that you're complaining about, those jobs wouldn't have been in the US to begin with.

For all the US companies you list that moved jobs elsewhere, I can list companies that have moved jobs from Canada to the US.

[indago]

For all the US companies you list that moved jobs elsewhere, I can list companies that have moved jobs from Canada to the US.

If the job picture is a wash, why this:

"People aren't looking at the statistical aggregates," said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "They care about their standard of living, and most Americans think their standard of living has declined." Look, too, at the percentage of adults either working or searching for work. It's a measure called labor force participation. The government counts people without jobs as unemployed only if they're seeking work. If more people stop looking, labor force participation falls. At 62.8 percent, the U.S. participation rate hasn't budged over the past 12 months. And it's down a sharp 3.6 percentage points from 2007. That means a lower proportion of Americans are engaged in the job market and benefiting from the economic upswing.

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[rstrong]

Your quote doesn't mention outsourcing.

You don't recall that big effing recession starting in 2008? You don't think it would be a completely different picture if you started the clock in 2010 instead of 2007?

[indago]

Your quote doesn't mention outsourcing.

If you look real hard, you will see "people without jobs". Now, if you think real hard, you just might find a reason why there are "people without jobs".