FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Free Trade’ Category

For decades our politicians have promised us that the “free trade” agenda would bring us greater prosperity than ever before.  They insisted that merging our economy into the emerging one world economy would cause millions upon millions of new jobs to be added to the U.S. economy.  Unfortunately, it was all a giant lie.  Trading with other countries is not a bad thing as long as the level of trade is fairly equal on both sides.  When trade becomes very unequal, the consequences can be absolutely catastrophic.  Since 1975, the United States has bought more than 8 trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they have bought from us.  We are the only economy on earth that could have had 8 trillion dollars drained out of it and still be standing.  Instead of leaving the country, those 8 trillion dollars could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers.  If we could go back and have a “do over”, how much more prosperous would we be today if we had kept that 8 trillion dollars inside the country?

But instead of pursuing a balanced trade philosophy, our politicians were so enamored with the emerging one world economy that they threw all caution to the wind.

So we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth.

And this emerging one world economy is absolutely killing American workers.  It lumps them into a global labor pool with workers in other countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

Just think of it this way.  Imagine that you are a giant corporation that makes “widgets”.  You can make them in the United States, but you would have to pay your workers about $10 an hour, provide them with a whole bunch of benefits, pay very high taxes, and comply with a dizzying array of laws, rules and regulations.

Or, you could set up shop on the other side of the world where you could pay your workers a dollar an hour.  Those workers would receive no benefits and you would have to deal with very little red tape.

Which would you choose?

The “giant sucking sound” that Ross Perot once warned us about has become a reality.  Big employers are competing with one another to see who can outsource jobs the fastest, and American workers are the big losers in all of this.

As I wrote about the other day, right now there are some American workers that are actually personally training their replacements from overseas how to do their jobs.

If nothing is done about this, jobs are going to continue to pour out of high wage countries such as the United States and into low wage countries on the other side of the globe, and big corporations are going to keep laughing all the way to the bank as unemployment in America gets even worse.

The following are 22 stats that show how the emerging one world economy is absolutely killing American workers….

#1 One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

#2 The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

#3 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.  That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers.  Federal, state and local taxes would have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.  This is one reason why our national debt is getting ready to cross the 16 trillion dollar mark.

#4 When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.

#5 In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

#6 The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors.  This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.  The following is from a recent Fox News article….

To keep Chinese products artificially inexpensive on US store shelves, Beijing undervalues the yuan by 40 percent. It pirates US technology, subsidizes exports and imposes high tariffs on imports.

#7 According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

#8 The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was 295.4 billion dollars.  That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.

#9 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was only about 6 million dollars (million with an “m”) for the entire year.

#10 U.S. consumers spend about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and services from the United States.

#11 The United States has actually lost an average of about 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#12 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year.

#13 The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

#14 During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities closed their doors in America every single day.

#15 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

#16 As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.

#17 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

#18 The percentage of working age Americans that are employed right now is actually smaller than it was at the end of the last recession.

#19 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is nearly three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

#20 Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

#21 Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty.  Today, more than 100 million Americans are on welfare.

#22 In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced “free trade” and the emerging one world economy like never before.  Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

You can get a really good idea of how nightmarish the manufacturing job losses have been in the United States over the past 40 years by checking out this map right here.

And if everything posted above was not bad enough, some U.S. companies even find themselves competing with slave labor here in the United States.

Seriously.

Prison labor is absolutely destroying some businesses here in America.  The following comes from a recent CNN article….

Unicor is a government-run enterprise that employs over 13,000 inmates — at wages as low as 23 cents an hour — to make goods for the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

With some exceptions, Unicor gets first dibs on federal contracts over private companies as long as its bid is comparable in price, quantity and delivery. In other words: If Unicor wants a contract, it gets it.

One company that tries to compete with Unicor has been forced to lay off 150 people over the years because they lose so many contracts to them….

Wilson has been competing with Unicor for 20 years. He’s an executive at American Apparel Inc., an Alabama company that makes military uniforms. (It is not affiliated with the international retailer of the same name.) He has gone head-to-head with Unicor on just about every product his company makes — and said he has laid off 150 people over the years as a result.

“We pay employees $9 on average,” Wilson said. “They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.”

But this is also the kind of thing that U.S. companies are dealing with when they try to compete with big corporations that are exploiting cheap labor abroad.

If you are spending ten times as much on labor as your competitor is, it is going to be really hard to survive.

That is why it has become so hard to find products that are made in America.

Most of our jobs these days are low paying “service jobs”, cushy government jobs or jobs where people push papers around all day.

But those kinds of jobs do not create lasting wealth for a country.

Did you know that there are more tax preparers in the United States than there are police officers and firefighters combined?

Our economy is a giant mirage.  We consume way more wealth than we produce, but we are able to keep the party going because we are riding the biggest debt spiral the world has ever seen.

But at some point the debt spiral is going to end and the crash is going to come.

Until then, however, those at the very top are still really enjoying themselves.

For example, one of the latest trends is for rich kids to show off pictures of themselves enjoying their enormous wealth on Instagram.

Something has gone very, very wrong with this country.

So what do you think about all this?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

The Economic Collapse

Now I’ve seen it all.

The USSC upheld Obamacare by, basically, twisting the Constitution into a pretzel, crapping on it, whizzing on that and then eating it.

Finding first that the Commerce Clause bars the government from compelling one to enter into commerce, the analysis then turned to whether there was any way to save the constitutionality of the act.

The justices found one.

They re-interpreted the penalty clause as a tax.

And of course, Congress can levy taxes.

That’s the path taken by this tortured process — a path that could only be dreamed up if someone had already determined the outcome they sought instead of being an independent jurist.

The real surprise, however, is that Chief Justice Roberts, believed to be a strict constructionist on the court, managed to not only agree with this piece of tortured logic he found and constructed it as the opinion is his!

So much for judicial restraint and strict construction!

You really ought to read the dissent that starts on page 127 of the opinion.  Justice Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito eviscertate the majority, saying in part:

Here, however, Congress has impressed into servicethird parties, healthy individuals who could be but are not customers of the relevant industry, to offset the undesirable consequences of the regulation. Congress’ desire to force these individuals to purchase insurance is motivatedby the fact that they are further removed from the marketthan unhealthy individuals with pre-existing conditions, because they are less likely to need extensive care in the near future. If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, “the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.” The Federalist No. 33, p. 202 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

What little was left of The Constitution died today, June 28th, 2012.

And incidentally, the math on federal health spending coupled with this decision means that by the time a 55 year old man reaches 85 (his life expectancy, roughly) the Federal government will be attempting to spend roughly $15 trillion a year on health care.

(No it won’t, no we won’t get that far, and the detonation of our government on the fiscal side is now assured — or your health care will be sacrificed.  This is mathematics, not politics.)

69 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sent Barack Obama a letter expressing their concern that a new international treaty currently being negotiated would essentially ban all “Buy American” laws.  This new treaty is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it is going to be one of the biggest “free trade” agreements in history.  Critics are referring to it as the “NAFTA of the Pacific“, and it would likely cost the U.S. economy even more jobs than NAFTA did.  At the moment, the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.  Barack Obama is pushing hard to get the United States into the TPP, and Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada, Japan and South Korea are also reportedly interested in joining.  But quite a few members of Congress have heard that “Buy American” laws will essentially be banned under this agreement, and this has many of them very concerned.  You can read the entire letter that was sent to Obama right here.  Unfortunately, the leaders of both major political parties are overwhelmingly in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so the objections of these 69 members of Congress are likely to fall on deaf ears.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership will accelerate the flow of American jobs out of this country, and meanwhile our politicians will continue to insist that they are doing everything that they can to “create jobs”.

There is not much protecting American jobs these days.  The “Buy American” laws are one of the last remaining barriers that helps protect against much, much cheaper foreign labor, but now “Buy American” laws are in danger of being banned permanently as a recent article in the Huffington Post explained….

Since the 1930s, the American government has offered preferential treatment to American producers in the awarding of federal contracts. If a domestic producer offers the government a more expensive bid than a foreign producer, it can still be awarded the contract under certain circumstances, but more recent free trade agreements have granted other nations the same negotiating status as domestic firms. The Obama administration is currently pushing to grant the several nations involved in the Trans-Pacific deal the same privileged status, according to the Thursday letter.

The big problem is that foreign companies often have huge advantages over firms based in America.

In the United States, we have minimum-wage laws.  On the other side of the globe, it is legal to pay workers less than a dollar an hour with no benefits.

In the United States, we have thousands upon thousands of laws and regulations that businesses must comply with.  On the other side of the globe, there is often very little red tape.

The truth is that “free trade” is a really bad deal for the average American worker.  In the emerging one world economic system, labor has become a global commodity and U.S. workers must now compete for jobs with people on the other side of the planet.

Since U.S. workers are often 10 to 20 times more expensive than workers on the other side of the world, there has been a massive outflow of jobs from this country.  Treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership will accelerate those job losses.

You would think that our politicians would notice that our formerly great manufacturing cities are turning into hellholes.

For example, the following is how James Kunstler described what he saw when he traveled through Gary, Indiana recently….

Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and  neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaining denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the longed-for end of something enormous that hadn’t worked out well.

The economic guts of this country are being ripped to shreds right in front of our eyes.

Overall, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since 2001.

That number is so crazy that it is hard to fully grasp.

The truth is that the “free trade” agenda of globalists such as Barack Obama is absolutely devastating our economy.

There are hundreds of statistics which prove this.  I don’t have space in this article to reproduce them all, but if you are interested in examining many of them I recommend checking out the following articles….

1) 35 Facts About The Gutting Of America’s Industrial Might That Should Make You Very Angry

2) 47 Signs That China Is Absolutely Destroying America On The Global Economic Stage

3) America Is Being Transformed From A Wealthy Nation Into A Poor Nation At Breathtaking Speed

4) 17 Facts About The Decline Of The U.S. Auto Industry That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

5) If You Are A Blue Collar Worker In America You Are An Endangered Species

6) The Worst In The World – The U.S. Balance Of Trade Is Mind-Blowingly Bad

7) Free Trade Or Fair Trade? 20 Reasons Why All Americans Should Be Against The Insane Trade Policies Of The Globalists

When you combine a market that has expensive labor with markets that have ultra-cheap labor, it is inevitable that large numbers of jobs will migrate to the areas that have the ultra-cheap labor.

This isn’t rocket science.

That is why “Buy American” laws are such a good thing.  They help to protect American jobs.

But even if you do not work in an industry where large numbers of jobs are being sent out of the country, the loss of jobs still affects you.  The millions of Americans that are being displaced from jobs that have been sent overseas end up applying for other kinds of jobs.  So they become your competition.  This increases the demand for the jobs that remain and it keeps wages down.

As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.  Many of those jobs have been replaced by low income jobs, but you can’t support a family on a low income job.

The Obama administration tells us that the unemployment rate is going down, but the truth is that there are now almost 101 million working age Americans that do not have jobs.

Instead of looking at the “unemployment rate” which is manipulated so much, what I prefer to do is to look at the “employment rate“.  And sadly, the percentage of Americans with a job has been steadily declining.  The following are the percentages of working age Americans with a job during April during the past six years….

April 2007: 63.0%

April 2008: 62.7%

April 2009: 59.8%

April 2010: 58.7%

April 2011: 58.4%

April 2012: 58.4%

Some Americans have decided to escape the lousy job market by going back to school.  Others have decided to retire early.  Yet others have decided to become full-time dependents of the government, and a shocking number have decided to try to get on to the Social Security disability rolls.

But most Americans that are unemployed just want to get back to work.  Many suffer in complete anonymity and many never take a single penny from the government.  They just want someone to hire them so that they can put in an honest day of work for an honest day of pay once again.

Even if you still have a good job, it could be gone tomorrow.  This point was underscored by a comment that a reader identified as “DaytoDay” left on a recent article….

Well, I can relate to this, I just lost my job Tuesday. I worked for Uhaul and on the DAY that I became eligible for my benefits and 401k they canned me, exactly 90 days.

So, it’s just another reminder that those who work for corporations are nothing more than numbers. It’s sad reality, they don’t care if you have a family to feed, they don’t care about your bills, and they damn sure don’t care about quality…

I was notified while working, and was instantly let go, up until that point, there had been no warnings, no emails, no conferences, nothing… They simply fired me to avoid paying the benefits and 401k that was would have been entitled to.

And to think, this is the reward for being a good hard worker?

Other Americans are not able to find any work at all.  This is especially true for young Americans.  Millions upon millions of hard working Americans are graduating from college only to find that the “real world” can be very cruel.

For example, just check out the comment that a reader named “Simon” left on one of my recent articles….

I graduated from a top university just after the Collapse of 2008 (Class of ’09). I had already seen the number of customers at my college job go way down in that year. Got my four-year degree, had good grades, good work record. Now I live in south FL and I can’t even get a job in fast food, there is so much competition for minimum-wage jobs. No one wants to hire me to wait tables or bag groceries because I have a prestigious degree. The only thing I got out of college was 10 grand in debt, which is actually quite small (I came from a poor family, so I got a lot of free tuition to bribe me to be part of the university indoctrination). Good thing I defaulted on my loans a year or two ago or I would be in worse trouble. I just throw out all their threatening letters and never answer their calls- my friend told me it would work, and it did. Of course I’m no longer a “good citizen”- I don’t earn money, don’t pay taxes, don’t have health insurance, my credit is horrible, I’ll never buy a home or a new car—but who cares?

Millions of other Americans that have lost their jobs have been forced to take whatever they can get.  A reader identified as “Gary2″ recently left a comment on one of my articles describing what his family has been through….

Check this out—I had 12 years as a good worker (regional manager level position) several promotions-steller reviews-which I kept copies of BTW) regular good pay increases heck I even saved a persons life, got a big award plack for it, pictures with everyone etc and 4 months later was downsized–no warning no thanks for helping them pass many JACHO inspections (I was a regional manager for a hospital chain) nothing. Just that we decided to outsource your entire department and that you are no longer needed.

So now I get to be grossly underemployed making 1/2 of what I used to make with NO benefits. My wife is no longer a stay at home raise the kids mom and is also working. Together we still make less than I did on my own. This sucks.

As millions upon millions of Americans suffer deeply month after month, it is creating a volcano of anger and frustration that could absolutely devastate our society at some point.  A reader identified as “Cinderella Man” left the following comment on a recent article….

If anyone thinks that almost 50 million Americans on food stamps is a sign of recovery and pardon my language but you have **** for brains. The other day I went shopping and I spent $170 on my ten bags of food and I watched a man and his daughter ring up ten packs of cheap balogna he meekly asked the clerk if those were the 10 for 10 deal and she said yes. Then the Dad said to the daughter “I hope you like it were going to be eating it till we bust!” This is what our world has come to. A man is feeding his kid trying to stretch their meager food stamp budget by eating balogna for several meals. I couldnt help but think of the movie of my namesake Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe when his wife was frying balogna for every meal back during the first Great Depression. Ive seen it all in these past 4 years. From beautiful women in souplines and ****** hotels to living in my car and watching inflation destroy all of our lives. We are all 9 meals from anarchy.

Sadly, thousands upon thousands more good jobs are being lost each and every month.

But our politicians continue to integrate us even more deeply into the emerging one world economic system.  Huge numbers of jobs will continue to leave this nation and the standard of living for most American workers will continue to decline.

So have any of you ever had your job shipped out of the country?  Feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

The Economic Collapse

And nowhere is it more evident than in the trade balance report for this month.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that total August exports of $177.6 billion and imports of $223.2 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $45.6 billion, virtually unchanged from July, revised. August exports were $0.1 billion less than July exports of $177.7 billion. August imports were $0.1 billion less than July imports of $223.3 billion.

We are constantly told how “free trade” is good for America, and how it boosts our exports (and thus helps GDP – and employment.)

The truth is something else entirely.  Indeed, at this point one can no longer claim this is a “mistake”; it’s an intentional fraud that is pushed by multinational corporations and the politicians in their pockets.  How can one realistically argue with this chart?

You might as well print that gap in red, for the blood of our workers (and monetary balance.)  Or maybe yellow is accurate (you pick the pejorative that fits your particular worldview.)

When all is said and done this sort of utter crap requires the explicit “support” of the monetary authority (read: Bernanke) to be sustained.  Trade deficits cannot be sustained otherwise, as the shift of capital causes a change in the relative value of currencies (in a floating fiat currency regime) that cuts off the ability to sustain the imbalance.

So what has The Fed and Congress done?  Conspired to create credit to replace capital in the economy to the tune of nearly a half-trillion annually!

This in turn appears to make these trade deficits sustainable.  But all credit comes with interest due, and there is no such thing as a free lunch in this regard.  All we do is temporarily delay and compound the negative effects, shifting them to the nation’s citizens.

Inflation-adjusted (that is, looking at purchasing power) wages have declined in the last decade… there’s your consequences!

“Free trade” is misnamed – when you hear it, repeat back at the speaker “free financial rapes”, because that’s exactly what these policies are.

The United States is negotiating one of the biggest free trade agreements in history and there is barely a peep about it on the news.  Years ago, Ross Perot warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a “giant sucking sound” as millions of jobs left this country. It turns out that he was right. Starting on Tuesday, the next round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (also known as the “NAFTA of the Pacific”) will begin in Chicago.  We have already seen the Obama administration push hard for free trade agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia and the administration is making the Trans-Pacific Partnership a very high priority.  Membership in the “NAFTA of the Pacific” already includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.  The United States, Australia, Peru, Malaysia and Vietnam are scheduled to join.  Canada, Japan and South Korea are also reportedly considering membership.  So once this “free trade” agreement is ratified, will we hear another “giant sucking sound” as millions more of our jobs are shipped overseas?

Look, it is not really that complicated.  If you are a giant U.S. corporation, you can either make stuff here, or you can make stuff overseas where it is far, far less expensive to do so.

To greedy corporate executives, there are a lot of advantages to moving operations out of the country….

*It is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of these other countries.  After all, why pay an American worker 10 or 20 times as much as a worker on the other side of the globe?

*In many of these other countries you do not have to provide any health care for workers.

*In many of these other countries there are virtually no environmental controls to worry about.

*In many of these other countries there are virtually no labor standards to worry about.

*In many of these other countries you only have to deal with a fraction of the “red tape” that you have to deal with in the United States.

By merging our economies with the economies of societies that are far different from our own, we have created a “race to the bottom” that is incredibly destructive to the U.S. economy.

In Vietnam, one dollar an hour is considered to be a very good wage.

So how do you plan to compete against that?

These “free trade agreements” are direct assaults on the big, juicy paychecks of American workers.

If you do not know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, you need to get educated.

The following is a basic introduction to the TPP from Wikipedia….

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), also known as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, is a multilateral free trade agreement that aims to further liberalise the economies of the Asia-Pacific region; specifically, Article 1.1.3 notes: “The Parties seek to support the wider liberalisation process in APEC consistent with its goals of free and open trade and investment.”[1] The original agreement between the countries of Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore was signed on June 3, 2005, and entered into force on May 28, 2006. Five additional countries – Australia, Malaysia, Peru, United States, and Vietnam – are negotiating to join the group.

Apparently, one of the goals of the TPP is to reduce all trade tariffs among member nations to zero by the year 2015.  The proponents of “free trade” are absolutely thrilled.

We have all enjoyed the flood of cheap products from overseas.  It is nice to pay a little bit less for things.

But these cheap prices have come at a very high cost.  We are literally destroying the American economy.  If you walk into just about any store today and you start turning over products, you will find that almost all of them are made out of the country.

If our middle class jobs keep getting shipped overseas, our prosperity is going to vanish.  If the American people allow this to continue, the standard of living of American workers is going to continue to fall toward the level of workers in third world countries.

Arthur Stamoulis, the executive director of Citizen Trade Campaign recently had the following to say about why he is opposed to this new free trade agreement….

“They’ve shipped our jobs overseas. They’ve reduced the tax base, they’ve driven down the wages and benefits for the jobs that are left. We’ve had enough”

As you can see from the chart below, we have seen a massive decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States over the last few decades….

It is absolutely amazing that the Obama administration continues to tout more “free trade” agreements as a way to increase employment in the United States.

Sadly, nearly half the country is still going to run out and vote for the guy in the next election.

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.

So the answer is to ship even more of our jobs overseas?

Apparently the Obama administration actually believes that we don’t want those jobs.  The following is what U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told Tim Robertson of the Huffington Post recently….

Let’s increase our competitiveness… the reality is about half of our imports, our trade deficit is because of how much oil [we import], so you take that out of the equation, you look at what percentage of it are things that frankly, we don’t want to make in America, you know, cheaper products, low-skill jobs that frankly college kids that are graduating from, you know, UC Cal and Hastings [don't want], but what we do want is to capture those next generation jobs and build on our investments in our young people, our education infrastructure.

Can you believe that nonsense?  He believes that there are things that “we don’t want to make in America”?

Why is nobody calling for him to resign immediately?

Manufacturing jobs have traditionally been high paying jobs that can support middle class families.

But now we are losing millions of those jobs and the Obama administration simply does not care.

Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

America is being deindustrialized at warp speed and most Americans don’t even understand what is happening.

Look, even if U.S. firms wanted to stay in the United States and try to compete, they face almost insurmountable obstacles….

*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.

The truth is that even the “next generation jobs” and the “green jobs” that Obama keeps talking about are rapidly leaving the country.

For example, the third-largest producer of solar panels in the United States, Evergreen Solar, is leaving America.

Evergreen is shutting down its factory in Massachusetts, laying off 800 American workers and moving production over to China.

A recent New York Times article explained why Evergreen is making this move….

Evergreen, in announcing its move to China, was unusually candid about its motives. Michael El-Hillow, the chief executive, said in a statement that his company had decided to close the Massachusetts factory in response to plunging prices for solar panels. World prices have fallen as much as two-thirds in the last three years — including a drop of 10 percent during last year’s fourth quarter alone.

Chinese manufacturers, Mr. El-Hillow said in the statement, have been able to push prices down sharply because they receive considerable help from the Chinese government and state-owned banks, and because manufacturing costs are generally lower in China.

We are losing the “jobs of the future” and Obama is doing nothing about it.

Last year, more than half of all the solar panels in the world were made in China.

China is absolutely killing us on the global economic stage and Obama does not even seem to think that it is a problem.

The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.

Not only that, the United States now 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.

So don’t listen to any of the nonsense that Obama is spouting about creating jobs.

Not that most of the Republicans are putting forward any good ideas either.

The reality is that our politicians have lied to us.  Globalism is absolutely destroying our economy.

Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe?  Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

We are losing ground in almost every industry that you could name.  Even the “jobs of tomorrow” are mostly being created overseas.

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, says that our advanced technology companies are creating far more jobs overseas than they are in the United States….

Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology (STX), and other U.S. tech companies.

When is someone going to wake up America?  If we are even losing “advanced technology” jobs, then what kind of jobs are going to be left?

In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in “advanced technology products” of $16 billion with the rest of the world.  In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

Needless to say, that is not a good trend.

Our politicians promised us that the “global economy” would mean more jobs and more prosperity for us.

Well, that was obviously a giant lie.

Today, if you gathered together all of the unemployed people in the United States, they would make up the 68th largest country in the world.

If we allow all of this “free trade” nonsense to continue, our unemployment nightmare is going to continue to get worse and even more of our formerly great cities will end up looking like total hellholes just like Detroit does.

Sadly, virtually all of our politicians in both political parties are in favor of these “free trade” agreements.  In fact, most of them are pushing these kinds of agreements as one of the “solutions” to our problems.

The U.S. economy is being dismantled and deindustrialized right in front of your eyes.

If you plan on speaking out, you better do it now because it is almost too late to stop what is being done.

It is up to you America.

The Economic Collapse

The Market-Ticker