Buy American: Rebuilding American Industry USA News / News Posted by rycroft on Feb 09, 2009 - 07:22 PM |
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Buy American: Rebuilding American Industry
Jazzman Chronicles - Jack Random - Disseminate Freely - “Mr. President, it is my sincere hope that legislative provisions like Buy America in the stimulus bill are dropped and that Congress will end once and for all the anti-competitive, anti-free trade practices that encumber our government, the military, and U.S. industry.” Senator John McCain (AZ)
Three months after having suffered a decisive rejection at the hands of the American voters, John McCain made his stand on the floor of the United States Senate, proposing an amendment to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. jazzmanchronicles.blogspot.com What was his proposal? What statement had he chosen to make to define his new role as an elder statesman of his party? McCain wanted to strip the stimulus package of its modest Buy American provisions that would require that wherever feasible American materials would be used in the rebuilding and construction of our aging roads, bridges, highways, schools and public buildings. My first thought was: Thank god this man was not elected president. My second thought was: With his home state suffering unprecedented foreclosures, rising unemployment, wage stagnation and deficient health care and retirement benefits, does he even bother to visit the people he represents? My third thought was: He and the thirty Senators that voted with him had just dropped the mask, exposing their flag-waving, bravado patriotism, “America First” façade as the lie we always suspected it was. Sensing an opening, the discredited band of Free Trade advocates were quick to compare the Buy American provisions to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. That legislation raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods, triggering a trade war that very likely exacerbated the depression. Even in the mouths of reactionary talk radio hosts and Fox News dignitaries, the analogy is particularly inept. In these difficult times, if there is any nation on earth that is not using its own resources to build domestic roads and bridges, then globalism has so distorted reality it has rendered common sense inane. In terms of economic efficiency and ecological responsibility, it is impossible to justify importing foreign materials if those materials are available locally. Further, America’s domestic industries were troubled but they were hardly in danger of extinction in the 1930s. Today’s industries have suffered under a protracted assault by the global free trade movement to the extent that they are only a shadow of what they once were. Under the mandates of free trade, we no longer make or service products; we push papers, run promotional campaigns, operate cash registers and manipulate stock markets. The reason Buy American for American infrastructure makes sense is that we need to rebuild both our industries and our infrastructure from the ground up. We need to restore our standing as not only an innovating society but as a producer of goods. We need to be able to buy American products without paying ten times the cost of imported goods. We need to be able to walk into a retail store and find American goods on the shelves. Buy American is not the solution to our current dilemma. It is only a very small part of the solution. The core solution is that we can no longer allow American retailers, contractors, corporations or the government to purchase goods from nations that do not pay their employees living wages. We can no longer afford to subsidize corporate profits on the backs of exploited workers. We can no longer afford to elect politicians who, even at this critical juncture with three and a half million jobs lost over the last year, choose to stand with the corporate masters of global free trade rather than with the people. Perhaps it is too late for the old guard to change their thinking. Perhaps it is too much to ask that they should wake up one day and suddenly realize that everything they have been sold was a lie, that every economic theory they were fed and raised on has been proven false, and that every standard political line about the majesty of the free markets should be retired forever. It may be too late for John McCain and the Free Market Fundamentalists but it is not too late for the people. When the same politicians the electorate thought were representing them come out against “Buy American” it tends to capture the attention of every Joe the Plumber and Erin the Autoworker. Global free trade has run its course. It was very good at consolidating wealth and extracting profits. It pulled every penny of profit it could from the resources of third world nations and a cheap labor force. With no one to guard the bank or oversee the accountants, it enabled the corporate titans to create the illusions of wealth where none in fact existed. All that is over. Everything now depends on building a new model of economics, one that embraces labor rights, living wages, environmental and social responsibility. John McCain may never understand the profound changes the world now demands but I pray that Barack Obama and his circle of advisors will. At this point I see no clear signs that our congressional leaders truly appreciate the depth of the crisis at hand. If they did they would not be debating minor provisions of the stimulus package, they would not have cut but fortified aid to the states, and they would not be producing a compromise package that will only slow the decline and ensure that a new stimulus will be required six months down the line. The numbers keep coming in, pounding us like a hard rain in a relentless storm, yet the politicians keep playing games as if the warnings are just rhetorical, as if the emergency is all but imagined, as if we could just click our heels and awaken from a nightmare. This crisis is real and though its causes are stripped naked and laid out before them, I fear our leaders are too blinded by the powers that guide them to see it. Jazz. JACK RANDOM IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS – WORLD EDITION. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS, PACIFIC FREE PRESS AND CANADA NEWSDAILY. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM. |
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