[Bret L]

PAT BUCHANAN: The high price of free trade

Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2009


"Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany, Ga., known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down. Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs.

How could tires made on the other side of the world, then shipped to
Albany, be sold for less than tires made in Albany? Here’s how.

At Cooper Tire, the wages were $18 to $21 per hour.

In China, they are a fraction of that.

The Albany factory is subject to U.S. health-and-safety, wage-and-hour
and civil rights laws.

The Chinese factories are exempt from such laws.

Environmental standards had to be met at Cooper Tire plant.

Chinese factories are notorious polluters.

Thus did China, from 2004 to 2008, triple her share of the U.S. tire
market from 5 percent to 17 percent and take down Cooper Tire of
Albany.

But not to worry. Cooper Tire has seen the light. It is now opening
and acquiring plants in China, and sending Albany workers over to
train the Chinese who took their jobs.

Welcome to 21st century America, where globalism has replaced
patriotism as the civil religion of our corporate elites.

Since 2001, the United States has run $3.8 trillion in trade deficits
in manufactured goods — more than twice the $1.68 trillion in trade
deficits we ran for imported oil and gas.

Our trade deficit with China in manufactured goods alone — $1.58
trillion over those eight years — roughly equals the entire U.S. trade
deficit for oil and gas.

U.S. politicians never cease to wail of the need for “energy
independence.” But why is our dependence on the oil of Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf, Nigeria, Canada, Mexico and Venezuela a greater concern than
our dependence on a non-democratic rival great power for computers and
vital components of our weapons systems and high-tech industries?

As Auggie Tantillo of the American Manufacturing Trade Action
Committee compellingly argues: “Running a trade deficit for natural
resources that the United States lacks is something that cannot be
helped, but running a massive deficit in manmade products that America
easily could produce itself is a choice — a poor choice that is
bankrupting the country and responsible for the loss of millions of
jobs.”

How many millions of jobs?

In the George W. Bush years, we lost 5.3 million manufacturing jobs —
one-fourth to one-third of all we had in 2001.

Where China was responsible for 60 percent of the U.S. trade deficit
in manufactured goods in 2008, in the first six months of 2009 it
accounted for 79 percent of our trade deficit in manufactured goods.

Let us start doing unto our trading partners as they have done unto
us.

Where they have tilted the playing field against us, let us tilt it
back again. Cut profits from moving factories and jobs abroad and
increase their profits for bringing them back to the U.S.A.

It’s not rocket science. Hamilton, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln
all did it."

http://www.trentonian.com/articles/2...5056742145.txt