09.22.10
Can’t Even Buy That Toilet
Today, the Los Angeles Times opinion pages prints the opinion of a UC-Irvine economist, one who appeared in the New York Times on Labor Day.
Economic treason is the thrust of Peter Navarro’s “America’s Trade Traitors.” That’s the title in the hardcopy edition, bought with 75 cents cash money. Not the title you’ll see on the free version, which goes for unobjectionable timidity.
A lot of us have already figured out that beggaring Americans and their jobs for the sake of slave labor and evasion of environment laws and regulation in China has crushed much of the economy for the middle class. And since we have a consumer society, once you have destroyed the buying power of the middle class, put over ten percent of them out of work, and exhausted all their credit, all that they can afford to buy are essentials.
There was, for example, no valid reason for this — the 10 cent Chinese Mojo Deluxe blues and rock harmonica glued to a cheap paperback on how to play harp — to exist in US stores. When made in America, it was already cheap. The only motivation to ship a “blues and rock harmonica”-making operation to China was greed and expedience.
And that was explained here in 2008, in a story on how US guitar manufacturing had been shipped to China and other slave labor countries, the American-made product up-priced for the rich and those fewer and fewer on a major label expense account. While it fired the domestic workforce except for a smaller one seasoned with craftsmen who can make “distressed guitars” for snobs.
It’s easy now to condemn Fender for it. Their executives have explained they didn’t want to do it, but it was the competition … Keep in mind, this was a California company which decades ago featured a significant domestic workforce.
But back to Peter Navarro. For the Los Angeles Times, he writes:
What these groups fail to understand (he’s speaking of a group of 31 lobbyists, including US trade groups and businesses which have recommended the government not do anything about China’s artificially low currency), and what many Americans have failed to grasp, is this: The flood of artificially cheap Chinese goods putting America out of business has merely been a down payment on this country’s present and future unemployment, and higher unemployment means less purchasing power for consumers and less business for retailers over the longer run …
What all these American business groups and corporate executives now doing business with China fail to understand is this: When jobs move to China, Americans are damaged. These days, you don’t have to look far to see the victims.
Robert Reich has been singing a similar tune. He, however, is not really off the hook. This didn’t just go on in Republican administrations.
Navarro, on the other hand, excoriates the Obama administration for not delivering on any of the president’s promises made before election day that he would “crack down on unfair Chinese trade practices …”
Writes Reich, on his blog:
But [the consumer society] can’t run on its own because consumers have reached the end of their ropes.
After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top, the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going. It can’t send more spouses into paid work, can’t work more hours, can’t borrow any more. All the coping mechanisms are exhausted.
Anyone who thinks China will get us out of this fix and make up for the shortfall in demand is blind to reality.
So what’s the answer? Reorganizing the economy to make sure the vast middle class has a larger share of its benefits. Remaking the basic bargain linking pay to per-capita productivity.
Consider Tom Friedman yet again, with quotes from his recent rubbish on “green” plastic-mining in China and how that poor American businessman had to send his work there because he couldn’t get favors here. Skating and slipping on green-whipped creme, dance and shake those arms, Mr. Wonderful!
China Toilet Blooz Reprise
I bought a new toilet
It was made in China
That’s where all the jobs went!
Nothin’ could be finah!You buy that toilet
It was made in China
Crap in a hole
Crap in a hole
Crap in a hole!
Buy a bag of lime…They still make that here