Fritz Hollings makes the case for fair trade

For many years, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-SC) was one of my favorite U.S. Senators and would have made a great President. Hollings was a strong and consistent voice in the Senate for a strong national defense, fiscal responsibility and the need to protect the interests of working Americans. Despite his retirement from politics, Hollings is trying to wake up his fellow Americans about the dangers of free trade and the loss of our industrial capacity. Here are a couple of paragraphs from an essay by former Senator Hollings from American Prospect Online about what is needed to make the United States competitive again, protect our manufacturing base and remain a world power.

Hollings writes: "First, we need to stop financing the elimination of jobs. Tax benefits for offshore production must end. Royalty deductions allowed for offshore activities must be eliminated, and offshore tax havens must be closed down. Next, we need an assistant attorney general to enforce our trade laws and agreements. Currently, enforcement is left to the injured party. It takes corporate America years to jump the legal hurdles. At the end, the president, under his authority for the nation’s security, cancels the court order against the trade violation. Rather than waste time and money, corporate America moves offshore. Trade policy is set by a dozen departments and agencies. Policy should be reconstituted in a Department of Trade and Commerce with the secretary acting as a czar. Then trade treaties can be negotiated for the good of the U.S. economy, instead of for the good of the transnational. The department’s International Trade Administration, finding a dumping violation, should also determine the penalty. The International Trade Commission should be eliminated. Custom agents charged with drug enforcement and homeland security are hard-pressed to stop trade transshipments. We need 1,000 more Customs agents. We need more funding for research in physical and mathematical sciences and engineering; more funding for the Manufactures Extension Partnership Act and the Advanced Technology Program. The list of materials critical to our national defense should be enforced. H1-B Visas should be repealed, and the United States should give notice of withdrawal from the World Trade Organization."

"Finally, competition in world trade today is not for profit, but market share. The closed markets of Japan, South Korea, and China enable exports at cost with the necessary profit being made up in the closed domestic market. A Lexus selling for $33,000 in the United States sells for $47,000 in Japan. Corporate America’s rush to produce for profit in China is a losing game for the nation. Countries winning market share will come to control the market, which is happening now with automotive production in the United States. This production capacity furnished the tanks and planes for WWII. Akio Morita, founder of Sony Corporation, admonished Third World countries to develop a manufacturing capacity to become a nation-state. He then cautioned: 'That world power that loses its manufacturing capacity will cease to be a world power.' The United States must stop so-called free trade agreements merely to protect offshore production -- and start trading, opening up closed markets, and rebuilding the country."

To read the complete article by Fritz Hollings on American Prospect Online go to http://tinyurl.com/mkxwq Let's hope that the American people will make their voice heard and demand that our spineless leaders take action to protect U.S. jobs and industries.

Harold Meyerson had a thought provoking column in the March 22 edition of the Washington Post which points out some frightening trends http://tinyurl.com/mb3wx In his column, Meyerson cites a Princeton economist Alan Blinder who estimates that outsourcing may cost us 42 to 56 million jobs. Meyerson also points out, "The threat of globalization and the reality of de-unionization have combined to make the raise, for most Americans, a thing of the past. Between 2001 and 2004, median household income inched up by a meager 1.6 percent, even as productivity was expanding at a robust 11.7 percent. The broadly shared prosperity that characterized our economy in the three decades following World War II is now dead as a dodo." If job loss and stagnation continue thanks to the Bush-Clinton free trade policies, populism is going to have more electoral appeal than ever.

New Democrats who are basically Republican-lite on economics are going to be rejected and even a lot of middle class social progressives are going to be worrying less abortion and gay issues and more about matters of personal economic survival. Likewise, a lot of socially conservative middle and working class voters are going to return to their populist traditions and cast ballots more on the basis of economic issues especially if many Democrats are willing to stress economic populism and move center on the social issues. That's why a combination of economic populism and social moderation might be the wave of the future for Democrats.