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Losing America’s Livelihood
By William F. Jasper
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Source: The New American, January 26, 2004
The
U.S. is headed for Third World status unless we change government
policies that are driving U.S. businesses offshore, destroying jobs and
putting entrepreneurs out of business. |
Up to 14 million jobs … are at risk of being shipped overseas, two UC Berkeley economists said Wednesday in a research report. — Contra Costa Times October 30, 2003 “We’re
trying to move everything we can offshore,” HP [Hewlett-Packard]
Services chief Ann Livermore told Wall Street analysts at a meeting
Wednesday. — Forbes, December 5, 2002
But as the US economy has slowly shifted toward service jobs, factory
jobs have been steadily lost — in fact, in just the past 39 months,
some 2.8 million have vanished. — Christian Science Monitor December 11, 2003 Will America be a Third World country in 20 years? — Paul Craig Roberts, columnist-economist, January 21, 2003
John Williams has been shrimping since 1960. Together with his wife,
Kathleen, he operates three shrimp boats out of Tarpon Springs,
Florida, north of Tampa Bay. He has weathered recessions, squalls and
hurricanes. But he is now facing a tidal wave that has already buried
thousands of his fellow shrimp fishermen. It is a tidal wave of foreign
shrimp — nearly one billion pounds of it — crashing onto the U.S.
market from Red China, Vietnam, Thailand, India and more than a dozen
other countries.
Last year Williams’ outfit, Gulf Partners, Ltd., hauled in about one
million pounds of shrimp. “We’ve produced about the same amount of
product for the past several years,” he told The New American,
“but the price we get has dropped dramatically. Our gross revenue has
dropped more than 50 percent. But our operational costs haven’t gone
down; in fact, they’ve gone up.” According to Williams, who is
secretary-treasurer of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an eight-state
coalition of shrimpers, the value of U.S.-harvested shrimp was cut in
half, from $1.25 billion in 2000 to $560 million in 2002. Employment at
southern shrimp plants dropped 40 percent.
The plight of America’s shrimping industry is symptomatic of the dire
consequences potentially awaiting every U.S. industry. It also starkly
illustrates how suddenly an entire sector of our economy can be
targeted and hollowed out, if not completely destroyed.
For generations, shrimping has provided a good livelihood for several
hundred thousand Americans in Gulf Coast communities from Texas to
Florida. Then, virtually overnight, foreign producers almost completely
took over the U.S. market and now provide 88 percent of the shrimp
consumed in the U.S. And it isn’t because the foreign shrimp industry
is more efficient or produces a better quality product. The real
tsunami hit U.S. shrimpers in 2002, when the European Union, Japan and
Canada banned shrimp from China, Thailand and Vietnam because of
detected residues of chloramphenicol, a potent, broad-spectrum
antibiotic suspected of causing aplastic anemia and other blood
conditions. China, Thailand and Vietnam unloaded their shrimp cargoes
on the U.S. market instead, even though federal regulations prohibit
use of chloramphenicol in food-producing animals and animal feed
products.
Shrimp fishermen like John Williams are fuming. “Another year like this
and there won’t be any domestic shrimp industry left to speak of,”
Williams told The New American,
noting that he recently saw a repossessed $800,000 shrimp boat sell for
$100,000 at a bank auction. “This is just plain wrong when a whole
industry of hardworking, taxpaying American citizens can be put out of
business like this by foreign competitors subsidized by their
governments.”
What Williams finds even more galling is that our government is
subsidizing his foreign competitors, too! Yes, the same federal
policymakers who have slapped domestic shrimp producers with onerous
regulations, are not only helping his foreign shrimpers with incredible
trade privileges, but actually aiding them with loans, grants and loan
guarantees as well. Through assistance provided by the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank and other foreign
aid programs, “we’re not only giving them loans and subsidies, but
advanced technology too,” Williams notes with exasperation.
In 2002 and 2003, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced the Shrimp
Importation Financing Fairness Act, which aimed to stop some of these
policies that are aiding the destruction of our domestic shrimping
industry. The Paul bill would declare a moratorium on federal
regulations that are making U.S. shrimping non-competitive and end
funding of federal programs and international institutions that provide
financial aid to countries that are dumping their subsidized shrimp on
our market.
Rep. Paul’s legislation names seven countries — Thailand, Vietnam,
India, China, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Brazil — as the main dumping
culprits. But paragraphs 8 and 9 of Section 2 are the real shockers in
the bill. Most Americans would be stunned to learn what our political
leaders are doing with our tax dollars. Those two paragraphs read:
(8) Since 1999 our Government has provided more than
$1,800,000,000 in financing and insurance for these foreign countries
through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and our
Government’s current exposure relative to these countries through our
Export-Import Bank totals some $14,800,000,000, bringing the total
subsidy of these countries by the United States to over $16,500,000,000.
(9) Many of these countries are not market-oriented, and hence their
participation in United States-supported international finance regimes
amounts to a direct subsidy by American taxpayers in the shrimping
sector of their international competitors.
That’s $16.5 billion.
With help like that, is it any wonder that these countries are able to
produce the glut of shrimp that is destroying our shrimping industry?
Different Industries, Same Story
What do Gulf Coast shrimp boat owners like John Williams have in common
with tool and die makers in the Great Lakes region, sawmill owners in
the Pacific Northwest, Midwest farmers, Texas ranchers, New England
manufacturers, or California software engineers and computer
consultants? The same thing that their business counterparts throughout
the U.S. in virtually every industry share: the threat of extinction
due to perverse government policies that penalize American producers
and reward their foreign competitors. They are caught in a vise of
regulatory policies that have driven their operating costs far above
those of their foreign competitors, and U.S. trade policies that
encourage foreign producers to dump their products on the American
market. On top of that, the U.S. government pours billions of U.S. tax
dollars into subsidies for their foreign competitors!
America’s tool and die industry is in danger of going the way of our
shrimping industry. Why should that concern the vast majority of
Americans who are not directly involved in this industry? Because it is
essential to all manufacturing. The industrial machinery that is used
to manufacture almost everything — from cell phones, toothbrushes and
Barbie dolls to computer chips, medical diagnostic equipment and
fighter jet engines — begins with tool and die makers. We cannot expect
to sustain a modern society, let alone defend ourselves and maintain
our prosperity and technological leadership, without them. But our tool
and die industry is rapidly disappearing. In Michigan, about 34,000
tooling jobs have vanished in the last five years, according to state
labor data. The National Tooling & Machining Association (NTMA)
reports that about 30 percent of the country’s toolmakers have gone out
of business since 2000 and many more are expected to follow.
“Guys that were earning $20 an hour two years ago making very
high-precision tools are now stocking shelves at Wal-Mart,” said NTMA
President Matt Coffey in a recent Detroit Free Press article
on the plight of the tooling industry. Coffey estimates that there are
fewer than 10,000 U.S. tooling companies today, down from roughly
14,000 a few years ago. Which could mean that 140,000 tooling jobs have
disappeared nationally since 2000. This trend will prove disastrous for
our country, if allowed to continue.
“One of the advantages our manufacturers always have had is that the
toolmakers were here and were good,” Peter Morici, former chief
economist for the U.S. International Trade Commission, told the Free Press.
“It undermines the whole manufacturing base in the long term if they go
away,” he noted. “When all these little toolmakers go away, they don’t
re-open. Their sons do something else and that skill is lost. The
decline of toolmaking is like the growth of a desert. Once it starts,
it’s tough to stop from spreading.”
Mr. Morici’s comments echo the alarm expressed by Bob Davis, general
manager of Modern Die Systems Inc. of Elwood, Indiana, in an interview
with The New American
last year (“Your Job May Be Next!” March 10, 2003). “Our government has
set it up so that it is unprofitable to manufacture here in the U.S.,”
he told this writer. Mr. Davis noted the tremendous disincentives to
production posed by taxes, regulations, employee medical insurance, and
labor union obstruction — the combined effects of which are driving
many businesses into the ground, or out of the country. We are killing
the goose that laid the golden egg. “Our country’s entire production
capability will be stripped bare if this continues,” Davis said. “And
with it will go all of the jobs and small and medium-sized independent
businesses that are the bedrock of the American middle class.”
Shooting Ourselves in the Foot
America’s small- and medium-sized businesses traditionally have been a
vital source of jobs, as well as a wellspring of creativity, invention
and innovation that has propelled us to global economic and
technological dominance. Limited government interference in the
marketplace combined with a general acceptance of Christian morality
was the key that unleashed the American entrepreneurial spirit and gave
rise to our prosperity and the development of a large middle class. But
the free enterprise system that made our economic miracle possible is
being suffocated in a socialist swamp of regulatory red tape. U.S.
regulatory costs — especially from regulations allegedly aimed at
environmental and safety risks — are particularly hazardous to small
and medium businesses.
The true extent of that hazard is amply exposed in an important study
released in December 2003 by the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM). The comprehensive NAM study significantly noted that “compliance
costs for regulations can be regarded as the ‘silent killer’ of
manufacturing competitiveness.” The report revealed that the
regulatory, tax and mandate burden is adding at least
a staggering 22.4 percent (nearly $5 per hour worked) to the cost of
doing business in the U.S. relative to our major foreign competitors.
To appreciate the magnitude of this burden, consider that these
external costs imposed by government are more than twice the average direct labor costs of U.S. manufacturers, which are 11 percent.
NAM President Jerry Jasinowski noted that the NAM study documents that
“we are essentially shooting ourselves in the foot competitively by
making it too expensive to make products in America.” What’s more, the
regulatory agencies have negated many of the impressive gains in
production efficiency of the past decade. “Taken together,” notes
Jasinowski, “external non-production costs have offset a large part of
the 54 percent increase in productivity achieved since 1990.”
“U.S. manufacturing has demonstrated the ability to overcome pure wage
differentials with trading partners through innovation, capital
investment and productivity,” said James Berges, President of Emerson,
a St. Louis-based manufacturer of industrial equipment. “But when the
additional external costs described in this [NAM] paper are piled on,
the task becomes unmanageable, even in the best companies.”
In fact, the piling on can be worse than unmanageable; it is often
fatal. Thousands of small and medium businesses already have been slain
by this silent killer and many more will succumb to its deadly effects.
(See sidebar.)
Driving Jobs Offshore
Even large corporations cannot absorb the crushing U.S. regulatory burden for long without losing competitiveness vis-à-vis foreign
producers. However, large corporations have options not readily
available to many smaller businesses: They can more easily move their
manufacturing and processing operations overseas, outsource many of
their service sectors to cheaper foreign providers, and import cheaper
foreign employees under various visa programs. And that is precisely
what they are doing, in huge quantum jumps that defy any historic
comparison.
America is in the midst of an enormous job outsourcing boom that gives
every indication of accelerating. In addition to the continued massive
hemorrhaging of America’s manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that began
two decades ago, we now have a huge and growing crisis involving the
flight of millions of hi-tech and white-collar jobs. If appropriate
action is not taken to address the factors propelling this massive
exodus, it is not an exaggeration to say that America is headed toward
has-been status. A much-quoted study by Forrester Research Inc. last
year predicted that at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136
billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries by 2015.
An October 2003 report by researchers from the University of
California-Berkeley’s Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics
suggests that the Forrester predictions may be extremely conservative.
According to the Berkeley researchers, as many as 14 million service
jobs are at risk of outsourcing.
The authors of the Berkeley report, Ashok Deo Bardhan and Cynthia A.
Kroll, note that “the recent boom in outsourcing is causing growing
apprehension in the U.S. that this may well be the largest out-migration of non-manufacturing jobs in the history of the U.S. economy.” (Emphasis added.)
Many of these jobs are going to India. By tabulating reports in Indian
newspapers and business journals for the month of July 2003 alone,
Bardhan and Kroll reported that they found “25,000 to 30,000 new
outsourcing related jobs announced by U.S. firms. In the same month,
there were 2,087 mass layoff actions carried out by U.S. employers
resulting in a loss of 226,435 jobs.”
“The jobs being created in India and elsewhere are in a wide range of
service sectors,” say Bardhan and Kroll, “such as geographic
information systems services for insurance companies, stock market
research for financial firms, medical transcription services, legal
online database research, and data analysis for consulting firms, in
addition to customer service call centers, payroll and other
back-office related activities.”
In addition to the millions of U.S. jobs that soon could be leaving for
India, China, Russia and other offshore destinations, there is the
added threat to American workers from imported labor. Hundreds of
thousands of American information technology (IT) workers have lost
their jobs in the past several years to foreign replacements through
the L-1 and H-1B visa programs. American software engineers, computer
designers, technicians, electrical engineers and other hi-tech
employees are being replaced by workers from India, Pakistan, the
Middle East and China.
No other country in the world has adopted such reckless and suicidal
immigration policies. Incredibly, the Bush administration is advocating
an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens that dwarfs the amnesty
proposals of Bill Clinton. Moreover, President George Bush and many
members of Congress enthusiastically favor more outsourcing, more L-1 and H1-B visas, and more immigration
overall. At a December 15, 2003 press conference, President Bush
stated: “I have constantly said that we need to have an immigration
policy that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee.” (Emphasis added.) There is virtually an unlimited supply
of willing employees worldwide who would be more than happy to
immigrate to the U.S., but how is that going to help put Americans back
to work?
It won’t, says Jan Frelick, who has experienced the outsourcing and
foreign “temps” up close and personal. Mrs. Frelick worked for computer
giant Hewlett-Packard in the San Francisco Bay area but transferred to
HP’s facility in the Sacramento area in 1990. As computer security
administrator for her division and a member of the division’s business
control team, she had a ringside seat from which she watched HP
outsource droves of jobs. “Then, on August 24, 2001,” Frelick told The New American, “it happened to me. I wasn’t ‘downsized’ — the term they deceptively use — I was replaced.
So were almost all other employees in many units. The IT Support Desk,
for instance, which previously was staffed completely by Americans, is
now staffed by people from India.”
False Solutions, Toxic Antidotes
The cheery advocates of globalization blithely dismiss concerns about
massive job losses, the wholesale gutting of our economy and the flight
of entire industries from our shores. Their mantra-like response is
that the huge exodus of jobs, manufacturing, and technology is actually
a good thing representing the elimination of obsolete remnants of the
“old economy,” to make way for the higher value, cutting-edge
technologies and jobs of the new global economy. These glib advocates
are dealing in voodoo economics and globaloney social science. The jobs
and technology we are outsourcing do not have to do with genuinely
obsolete technology like buggy whips and whale oil lamps, as the
globalists assert. They have to do with the production of real wealth,
real products and real services that are essential to sustaining a
modern, prosperous society.
Where are the wonderful new jobs the globalists keep promising?
Hundreds of thousands of skilled and experienced white collar and blue
collar workers — engineers, computer programmers, toolmakers,
accountants and technicians — are unemployed, or have been reduced to
taking near-minimum-wage jobs. Political forces, not market forces, are
driving these devastating changes. As we have noted above, it is
perverse government policies that are responsible for making American
companies uncompetitive, subsidizing our foreign competition,
outsourcing jobs and flooding our job market with immigrants and
“temporary” foreign workers. America has gone through economic
downturns before and seen periods of high unemployment. But the economy
has always rebounded and the jobs have returned as businesses have
revved up production. However, that is not going to happen with the
thousands of businesses and the millions of jobs we have been losing.
The Bush administration and its allies in Congress — Republican and
Democrat — have given no indication of reversing our disastrous course.
Indeed they are proposing supposed solutions that would prove to be
even more calamitous. They are saddling U.S. businesses with even more
oppressive mandates and regulatory overkill, while pushing for more job
outsourcing, more temporary worker visas, far greater immigration
quotas, an amnesty for illegal aliens and the removal of virtually all
tariffs.
Moreover, the president has staked out 2004 to push for completion of
the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement, a plan
to merge the countries of the Western Hemisphere into a European
Union-style common market. However, like the original European Common
Market, the FTAA is much more than a trade pact. It has been designed
to evolve into a supranational regional government, but in a much
shorter time span than it took the Europeans to arrive at that stage.
Like the EU, the FTAA’s central executive authority would be strongly
socialistic and would gradually claim the power to overrule the
national laws and constitutions of its member states. The FTAA
Declarations, Plans of Action and Charter drafts call for regional
“integration,” in accordance with the charters of the UN and the World
Trade Organization. The FTAA would establish a bureaucracy of agencies
to monitor, and eventually dictate, regional health, education, labor,
environment, foreign aid, immigration and security policies. Like the
EU, the FTAA is set up to acquire, gradually, full legislative,
executive and judicial powers. As such, it is plainly a power grab
disguised in the garb of a trade agreement.
The most frightening aspect of the proposed FTAA is the fact that its
realization would spell the end to our national sovereignty and sweep
aside constitutional impediments to the concentration of tyrannical
power. But the more immediately felt effects would include a rapid
dissolving of our borders and an enormous deluge of immigrants (both
legal and illegal) from Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same
time, billions of dollars of agricultural products, textiles,
manufactured goods and other products will flood our markets
devastating every industry sector in the same way that our domestic
shrimp industry has been wrecked.
These so-called solutions are manifestly suicidal. If America is to be
spared sinking into Third World status, we must completely reverse
course. That means awakening and energizing a minority of the American
public sufficient to compel Congress to: abolish the socialist
regulatory monster that is destroying our country’s competitiveness;
take back control of our borders and enforce sensible, reduced
immigration; end all U.S. taxpayer subsidies to foreign competitors;
and defeat the FTAA. It’s really very simple. Not easy, but simple.
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