Why was it when the international press reported of American failures under Bush, the US media picked up on those reports and used them to correctly illustrate the US landscape but NOW, when the international press critiques THE ONE, they are ignored by the US Media? Same for many bloggers. Bloggers critical of Bush linked international media reports correctly illustrating American missteps. But now? If the international press dogs Obama, not so much!
Read Rosemary Righter of The Times here http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rosemary_righter/article5613759.ece
An excerpt as follows:
"....Is Mr Obama a protectionist? Instinctively, yes; he has never seen a free-trade deal he would actually vote for, and he talks about trade policy as a tool “to support good American jobs”. But as the election campaign wore on, he toned down his invective against foreign competition, and, because his economic team is basically free trade, the jury is still out.
The verdict, however, will be in very soon. At the behest of the most protectionist Congress in memory, Mr Obama may be about to repeat, at the dawn of his presidency, the same historic error that the much derided Herbert Hoover made just before quitting the White House in 1933. In the depths of the Great Depression, he signed into law the innocent-sounding Buy America Act. It required the US Government to use American suppliers in all public contracts. Less notorious than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, “Buy America” did huge damage. It proved a disaster for US manufacturing exports and the global economy. Other governments followed suit, and it took decades to begin to reverse the closure of markets.
Now, prodded by America's mighty steel lobby, a key congressional committee has voted, 55-0, to attach a still more rigorous “Buy America” clause to President Obama's stimulus package. It bars federal funding of any public projects “unless all of the iron and steel used is produced in the United States”. The clause could be extended to asphalt, cement, heavy machinery, you name it. US dollars, the committee intones, must be used to create “American jobs in America, not Chinese jobs in China”.
Leave aside value for money. Pass over the detail that the US does not produce enough steel to meet domestic demand. Admit that, when economic activity evaporates as precipitately as it has this winter, “saving” jobs looks more important than ensuring long-term competitiveness. Admit, further, that all governments are in the hidden subsidy game right now, whether they boast about it, as in France, or deny it as stoutly as Lord Mandelson - whose “this is not a bailout” brings to mind Magritte's famous “ceci n'est pas une pipe” painting.
Agree, finally, that when you are the newly elected US President and the money you are preparing to print runs into the trillions, the queue at the trough is bound to form pretty fast. But the scale of the temptation is precisely what makes Congress's populist “Buy America” rider an irresponsible, innumerate, pernicious bit of political and economic folly.
If Mr Obama blocks this clause, he will anger the Left. If he does not, retaliation is inevitable. That will shut American workers out of “hundreds of billions of dollars of new business”. Caterpillar, to take just one example, is actively bidding for big infrastructure projects in China; it reckons that “Buy America” would kill its prospects there.
The truth politicians need to ponder is that the financial crisis has made sophisticates of us all. Most of us understand far more about how globalisation works, how the pieces hang together, than we did before everything went pear-shaped. We have made the connection between prosperity and globalisation - at the simplest level, that cheap T-shirts from Bangladesh leave us with more money for other things. We do worry about our ability to compete; we demand clear and impartial trade rules. But we can see how beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism creates more beggars - costing, not “saving”, jobs. It is time the language of politics caught up with us."
Hhhmmmm. Chickens....coming.....home....to roost?
Caterpillar just announced layoffs. About 20,000. Read here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-caterpillar-layoffs-090126-ht,0,2651573.story
No comments:
Post a Comment