Friday, March 11, 2005

Destroying America with Greed, Not Bombs

I ask each US reader to please take a few minutes absorb "It Takes A Pillage" by Avedon Carol at The Sideshow. Below are brief excerpts from her, followed by a devastating, completely factual article by a former Reagan Administration official.

My question is.....is this patriotism? Does this reflect love of country? Is this why conservatives voted to reelect President Bush? In good faith, I sincerely doubt it.

Remember.....after 9/11, Osama bin Laden publicly pledged that the US would be destroyed not by force or violence, but by bankruptcy. All trends are now moving rapidly in that direction because of a foolish war and Bush policies of corporate giveaways, job outsourcing and the denigration of US education . Very rapidly.

Our national security and way of life are permanently threatened by economics and greed, not bombs, planes or "enemies" thousands of miles away. Wake up and take this seriously!
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" Where are Bush and his corporate cronies planning to live once they finish asset-stripping the United States?

When I talk about how they are asset-stripping us, I'm not just talking about things like the bankruptcy bill and other more obvious policies that isolate the United States (such as alienating the UN and forcing Europe to take a containment position toward America), I'm also looking at the way they've been moving both military and industrial intelligence to other nations, chiefly China. Out-sourcing means more than just giving your job to some guy in China; it means that while the Chinese are learning to do your job, Americans are not.

This doesn't appear to be a short-term project. As you may recall, two Bush administrations have been engaged in handing over our top-secret technology to the Chinese..... "
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Turning Chinese by Paul Craig Roberts ( author of the article below) was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.
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"The February payroll jobs figures released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a continuation of America's descent into a third world service economy.

The Bush administration cheered the creation of 229,000 private sector jobs (which still leaves Bush with a net private sector job loss during his reign). However, once we look at the details, the joy vanishes: 174,000 of the jobs, or 76% of the total, are in nontradable services.
Administrative and waste services (largely temporary help and employment services) account for 61,000 or 35% of the new service jobs. The remainder are accounted for by construction (30,000), retail trade (30,000), healthcare and social assistance (27,000), and waitresses and bar tenders (27,000).

The US has apparently lost the ability to create high productivity, high value-added jobs in tradable goods and services. The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled by offshore production for home markets and outsourcing of knowledge jobs.

The BLS reports that the number of employed US technical workers has fallen by 221,000 in six major computer and engineering job classifications during 2000-2004. The largest drops were suffered by computer programmers, followed by electrical and electronics engineers, computer scientists and systems analysts.

So much for the new economy that economists promised would take the place of the lost manufacturing economy.

America's remaining job market is domestic nontradable services. While India and China develop first world job markets, the US labor market takes on the characteristics of a third world work force. Only jobs that cannot be outsourced are growing.

The Bush economy has seen a loss of 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, a rise in the unemployment rate of 1.2 percentage points, and a stagnation in real weekly earnings.

How bad will things have to get before economists realize that outsourced jobs are not being replaced? Indeed, many American companies are ceasing to have any presence in the US except for a sales force.

Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, declared recently: "What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company." Cisco is establishing a new R&D center in Shanghai. The US corporation manufactures $5 billion of products in China where it employes 10,000 people.

That is just one company, and there are many doing the same thing. The result is abandonment of the American work force by American corporations. Little wonder the Bush administration is the first administration in 70 years to have a net loss of private sector jobs.

If one US company or a few move offshore, their profits improve and consumer prices are lower. However, when work in general moves offshore, American lose the incomes associated with the production of the goods they consume. Domestic production is turned into imports, with the result that America draws down its accumulated wealth in order to pay for the imports on which it is dependent.

The dollar's value and status as reserve currency cannot forever stand the trade and budget deficits that are now part and parcel of America's economic policy.

Unless there are major changes soon, America's economic future is a third world work force with a banana democracy's worthless currency."

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