Our Clueless Media and Self-Destructive U.S. Trade Policy

April 2, 2012

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.com

Early in February, when C-PAC, the political right wing fountainhead, convened in Washington, D.C., the media was wall-to-wall with coverage of speeches, interviews and analysis.

Last week, a top tier alliance of business, labor and political leaders met in Washington, D.C. to mull the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs and the closing of tens of thousands of manufacturing plants. It was a meeting remarkable for how little media attention it attracted.

C-PAC talked politics, and it was catnip to hordes of reporters, columnists and video editors. Critical issues like the hollowing out of America’s economy don’t seem to have the same attraction. It’s harder and not as much fun to write about world trade and economics than it is to ride the campaign bus and record every twitch of the body politic.

What a shame. It will take a lot of media attention to trigger the political action needed to reverse policy that continues to drain America’s strength and reduce Americans’ living standards.

Six million manufacturing jobs have been lost during the past decade. More than 35,000 manufacturing plants have closed. Many of the jobs remaining are now part of a two-tier system, paying newer employees $13 an hour for work that used to pay twice as much. As older workers retire, the lower rates will be the new norm. What we consider income inequality today is destined to get a lot worse.

An alliance of U.S. manufacturers and labor unions has come together to address this bleak situation. The takeaway from their meeting last week wasn’t that America’s struggling economy is an inevitable result of global market forces. What’s clear is that much of the nation’s problem with jobs and manufacturing is self-imposed.

For more the 20 years the U.S. has been negotiating trade agreements based on the wistful view that all nations share our dedication to free trade, or will, once they are part of a trade pact or experience the benefits that come with the free flow of goods and services.

No amount of real world experience seems to dislodge successive White House leadership from promoting international agreements that cost U.S.jobs and economic strength. The pressure to continue on this self-destructive course comes from the potent multi-national wing of American business and its Wall Street enablers who are making record profits in low wage, see-no-evil business environments offshore.

At the Alliance meeting, Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld, talked about how the Chinese have ravaged the U.S. solar industry by subsidizing their own companies with free land, low cost loans, guaranteed markets and other benefits. China is on a mission to control the solar cell and panel industries and for years has marshaled the full weight of government resources behind that effort.

But China is not a rogue trading nation in a club of Boy Scouts. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand have flooded the U.S. with nationally subsidized products---welcomed by U.S. free traders who have preached the holy grail of open markets.

For the U.S. “free” trade has been largely a one-way street going the other way. Less than five percent of the cars sold in Japan are made abroad. Japan taught other nations how to keep their currencies low to make their exports more attractive. While on paper, many nations vow to permit access to their markets, in practice government strategies make it difficult, if not impossible, for foreign business to operate.

The Obama White House has been as culpable in its failure to protect American manufacturing as the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Reagan administrations before it. And now it is pushing a “Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership” that sanctifies many of the worst policies of recent decades.

China and many of our trading partners just see the world differently than free trade economists do. What those nations are about is old-fashioned mercantilism, a doctrine where a government controls manufacturing and trade for its own ends and doesn’t leave winners and losers to be decided by the marketplace. In other words, they try to rig the game in their favor.

The U.S. government should easily be able temper those forces, not be sucked dry by them. Our markets are the richest and most desirable in the world. We should demand entry at a price that lets U.S. industry compete more favorably abroad and protects our people and our national wealth from predatory practices here at home. But all you have to do is look at our $500 billion annual trade deficit to know how stupidly a succession of U.S. governments have managed trade policy.

If the U.S. public realized how jobs, community survival and other factors central to maintaining our way of life were tied to trade agreements, U.S. negotiators would be forced to accept a far different set of priorities.

But the public won’t know until the media channels they depend on tell them. Judging by the lack of media attention to last week’s meeting, that’s not nearly as high on the media agenda as how many people showed up at Ron Paul’s pot luck supper in Wisconsin.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)