There has been a lot of noise made about foreign trade policies and how bad they have been for this country. Donald Trump, who is making the most noise, does know a little about trade. Very little! He is always harping on our trade deficits with China, Japan, Mexico, etc. Those who oppose our trade policies are not altogether wrong but there is a much bigger problem that can easily be solved and it won’t affect our trade policies with foreign nations one little bit.
Opponents of foreign trade scream that foreign manufacturers are undercutting our prices by using cheap labor, thereby costing American jobs.
This is only partly true. Yes, there is a lot of that happening, but cheap products mean expanding markets. That creates demand, which is good for the economy in general.
The real problem comes from American companies, closing plants here and moving them overseas, making the same products cheaper, then sending them back here, to the same consumer they had before they moved. That’s what costs jobs. American products are then made by foreign labor and the American workers who originally developed those products are out of a job.
How do we stop that? It’s actually not too difficult if we have the intelligence to move in the right direction. Al it takes is passing a law law that says, an American company that closes up shop here and moves its operation to a foreign country in order to take advantage of cheap labor, will have to pay an egregious tariff on that product when they ship it back.
This will not effect foreign companies, only American companies who have made millions producing a product here and are not content to keep the workers who helped build their companies but want to try for bigger profits overseas, by moving jobs that made an American product to a country that will compete with American labor by making the product they created, cheaper.
If you are a greedy pig and want to make more billions on a product created and developed in this country by American ingenuity and sweat, and you want to move your factory to a cheap labor country, putting Americans out of work, we will take the profit out of those foreign made products by making you pay a premium when you bring it back here. The size of the premium would be tied to the cost of manufacturing the product here, using American labor. The income generated by tat tariff could be applied to the retraining of those who lost their jobs to the move overseas or to upgrading our infrastructure, which to a great extent, would be re-employing the manufacturing worker put out of work by management’s greedy maneuver.
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Watched Glenn Beck, a man for whom I have absolutely no respect, make a brilliantly intelligent case for why, if he wins the majority of delegates, Donald Trump should win the nomination for the GOP. I think that a Trump presidency would be a disaster for this country. Frankly, so would Ted Cruz or even John Kasich, but if we are to continue to be a Democracy, if we are to stand as a real country and not become Egypt, or some Third World mess, if we are to maintain democratic values, then the man with the most votes must win the election, no matter how much that ruffles the feathers of the Republican establishment or even our sane voters.
Brokering a convention so that he Republican oligarchs can rig a result that flies in the face of the voter’s decision is anathema to everything this country stands for. That is not the American way. That is the Venezuelan way, the Zimbabwe way.
Every GOP politician who is following a brokered convention plan is a threat to our democracy because he is trying to subvert the democratic process for his own goals. These assholes who have been screaming about the likes of Ted Snowden being traitors are themselves doing more to destroy America than the whistleblowers ever conceived of doing. They are not just giving up a secret, they are subverting the process by which we select our leaders. Beck, maybe for the first time in this life, is right. If Trump gets the most votes, he wins. If the American people are dumb enough to vote that way, they deserve what they get. Period, end of story.
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The job of a political party is to tell their constituents, show them who to trust and encourage them to vote along party lines. When that party gets to the point where they are no longer trusted by the voters, when the voters hear what they say and do the opposite, they are no longer a viable propostion. Look at our political history. Traditionally, parties organized blocks of voters, did stuff to help those voters in their everyday lives and then informed those voters who had been responsible for that help and therefore who they should vote for if they wanted that help to continue. Tammany Hall in NYC, the Democratic Party in Boston’s Southie, the Daly family empire in Chicago and Hughie Long in Louisianna come to mind as premier examples of this kind of structure.
At this point in time, the Republican Party tells its members how to vote and they run the other way. The primary candidates that are getting votes right now are both outsiders running against the party establishment. That’s even true to a lesser extent in the Democratic Party where Bernie Sanders is giving Hillary Clinton a respectable fight.
Why has this happened? Mostly, especially in the case of the GOP, because they no longer provide the benefits that past parties did, in exchange for the power that the people who benefited from their help vested in them.
There was a time when a loyal voter could go to the local party boss and get a job, or his kid out of trouble with the cops, or help in filing government forms for assistance, or help in solving any one of a hundred other problems that affected his life. Now the party promises to help this same voter in his quest for some bigoted goal like kicking out all the illegal Mexicans who he blames for taking some job he wouldn’t do anyway and nothing happens, mainly because the hack that made the promise doesn’t have the power to make it happen.
So the voter, being a little slow but not altogether stupid gets pissed off and along comes a phony like Trump who really isn’t part of the heart of the party and this phony tells the voter that he’s the real thing, acts like one of the boys, spews the same bigoted crap that the voter believes in, and all of a sudden the party is out the door. And they don’t know how or why it happened.
It happened because instead of helping the voters solve the problems in their lives, they have been playing them for suckers, not delivering on any of their promises, just taking what the voters can give them and never returning the favor in the form of functioning legislation that can help those voters in their everyday lives. The deal that existed in the old political scene, you vote for me and I’ll help you, has become you vote for me and the hell with you, and the dumb voters have finally gotten a little smarter. I say a little, because they have gone from the establishment liars to Trump who isn’t really any better, he just has more shine and glitter. And if they are unfortunate enough to actually elect him they will soon find that out.
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The mess in Michigan continues to expand even as the lead pipes that contain Flint’s water system are being removed. The claims and counter claims are through the roof, but one thing is clear. The city of Flint’s problems were created under management appointed by the Republican Governor, Rick Snyder. The decision was made to switch the water source, at least partly because of the wants of companies who had helped finance Snyder’s campaigns. The switch in water sources, was carried out, by a manager appointed by Snyder. It has been claimed that the basic cause of the switch was to save money but the state was in the black and had a huge emergency fund that had yet to be tapped. The whole thing stinks of stupidity, laziness, incompetence and quite probably greed. It’s time for Michigan to get rid of Snyder and to put Flint into federal receivership until the work can be done to clean up the water.
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Fascinating discourse on Politics Nation, when radio host, Ferdinand Amandi and his father; Americans of Cuban derivation had it out on the tube. It’s interesting how the old Cubans have never let go of the hatred of the Castro regime, while the young ones are willing to wait and see what can happen that could be good for both their countries.
I wonder why none of the old timers will acknowledge that Batista was at all bad for Cuba. I was in Cuba prior to the revolution and I, as well as many Cubans, can attest to the fact that under Batista there was great poverty. Yes there was wealth but it was only for the few, only for the friends of the President.
Many forget that Castro’s revolution was created to alleviate that poverty and even more forget that he appealed to the United States government for help in his fight against Batista. Of course we didn’t help him. United Fruit and our hotel and gambling interests fought tooth and nail against upsetting the apple cart. As always, corporate greed triumphed over national interest and human rights and we continued to side with someone far worse than Castro. So Castro asked other nations for help and the Soviet Union held out their hand. Our shunning of Castro is what led Cuba to became communist.
It is only the intransigence of the Cuban refugees who came to the US that has kept us from normalizing relations for the last 50 years. They hated Castro because he cost them money and unlike Castro’s followers, who stayed and fought for their beliefs, Batista’s fled to our shores and have spent the rest of their lives fighting, not Castro, but any normalization of relations between our countries. And they are still doing it, still subverting that process which would be good for Cuba and good for the United States.