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You can knock us Americans down, but you can't keep us down.
For example, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were crashed to the ground on 9/11. But now, a new tower is rising from those very ashes — a soaring steel and glass monument to the American spirit, a powerful symbol of our national resiliency!
Well — except for the glass. A company named Beijing Glass got the government contract to provide the window panes that'll cover the first 20 stories of the tower. Yes, the monument to our national spirit is being sheathed with made-in-China glass.
What? Can't Americans make glass?
Of course — but our biggest corporations, like Corning and Guardian, have been quietly and quickly moving their production and our jobs to China. In just the past nine years, 30 percent of these jobs have been lost.
"Those who're looking through the rearview mirror waiting for the glass industry to come back, should know it isn't going to come back," the chairman of Guardian told the New York Times in January. Indeed, Guardian now employs more workers in its 36 foreign plants than it does here.
Well, chirp the usual flock of free trade economists, it's all about China providing "economies of scale" for manufacturers. Hogwash.
The glass industry's rush abroad is all about getting cheap labor and massive subsidies from the Chinese government. For example, shipping heavy glass from Beijing to Manhattan would be prohibitively expensive — except that China subsidizes the transportation.
This is not free trade, it's a raw deal. There should be a stiff tariff on all subsidized glass coming from China — and the new World Trade tower is so symbolically important that every inch of it should be American made. For more information, contact the United Steelworkers glass industry department: usw.org.
Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow, on sale now from Wiley Publishing. For more information, visit jimhightower.com.
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They rejected my idea... When the rubble pile was 40 feet high, they could easily have erected 40 foot slabs of concrete around it, poured more concrete into the center, sealed it up and made it what it most appropriately is, a grave. With a very large Grave Marker.
One of the designs that made it to the Top Ten is a tower that looks amazingly like a hand giving the one-finger salute to God.
Posted by brotherjonah2
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Since Reagan blew out our tariffs in the 1980s (and Clinton kicked the door totally open with GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO), our average tariffs are now around 2-4 percent. And the predictable result has been the hemorrhaging of American manufacturing capacity to those countries that do protect their industries through high import tariffs but allow exports on the cheap - particularly China and South Korea.
If President Obama and our Congress don't soon learn the lessons Alexander Hamilton taught us in 1791, which he learned from Henry VII and were borrowed by Japan, South Korea, and China, we'll continue to see American industry slowly die. And with it will go the American middle class.
Posted by billd
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