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When Americans No Longer Own America
By Thom Hartmann
02/27/06 "ICH"
-- -- The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a
painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world"
globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver,
and in the process are selling off America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by
Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored
nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us
into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of
tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong
for over 200 years.
The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor
in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import
shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in
those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a
90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose
to make their products here or overseas, but the ultimate cost of
labor would be the same.
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and
promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs,
they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax
nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into
our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and
thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have
been wiped out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle class. Our
nation's largest employer has gone from being the unionized General
Motors to the poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from
having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the 1970s to a minus
.5 percent in 2005 - meaning that they're going into debt or selling
off their assets just to maintain their lifestyle.
At the same time, federal policy has been to do the same thing at
a national level. Because our so-called "free trade" policies have
left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other
countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to
buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost" retailers). But
we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those
dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what
we used to do with Third World nations - they are buying us, the
USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in
America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take
those profits overseas where they're invested to make other nations
strong. The "things" they're buying are, by and large, corporations,
utilities, and natural resources.
Back in the pre-Reagan days, American companies made profits that
were distributed among Americans. They used their profits to build
more factories, or diversify into other businesses. The profits
stayed in America.
Today, foreigners awash with our consumer dollars are on a
two-decades-long buying spree. The UK's BP bought Amoco for $48
billion - now Amoco's profits go to England. Deutsche Telekom bought
VoiceStream Wireless, so their profits go to Germany, which is where
most of the profits from Random House, Allied Signal, Chrysler,
Doubleday, Cyprus Amax's US Coal Mining Operations, GTE/Sylvania,
and Westinghouse's Power Generation profits go as well. Ralston
Purina's profits go to Switzerland, along with Gerber's;
TransAmerica's profits go to The Netherlands, while John Hancock
Insurance's profits go to Canada. Even American Bankers Insurance
Group is owned now by Fortis AG in Belgium.
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power
generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All
because "flat world" so-called "free trade" policies have turned us
from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted
consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily
used to buy off big chunks of America. As
www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate
the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:
· Sound recording industries - 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
· Metal ore mining - 65%
· Motion picture and video industries - 64%
· Wineries and distilleries - 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
· Book publishers - 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%
· Rubber product - 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
· Plastics product - 51%
· Other insurance related activities - 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%
· Glass and glass product - 48%
· Coal mining - 48%
· Sugar and confectionery product - 48%
· Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%
· Advertising and related services - 41%
· Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%
· Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products - 40%
· Securities brokerage - 38%
· Other general purpose machinery - 37%
· Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and
optical media - 36%
· Support activities for mining - 36%
· Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation - 32%
· Chemical manufacturing - 30%
· Industrial machinery - 30%
· Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial
investments and related activities - 30%
· Other food - 29%
· Motor vehicles and parts - 29%
· Machinery manufacturing - 28%
· Other electrical equipment and component - 28%
· Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial
investment activities - 27%
· Architectural, engineering, and related services - 26%
· Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%
· Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%
· Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control
instruments - 25%
· Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%
· Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%
· Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%
· Basic chemical - 24%
· Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%
· Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%
· Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%
· Printing and related support activities - 21%
· Chemical product and preparation - 20%
· Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%
· Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery - 20%
· Publishing industries - 20%
· Medical equipment and supplies - 20%
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold off our
ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly
believe that a "New World Order" with multinational corporations in
charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the
problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with
quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately,
democracy.
The "security" implications of turning our ports over to the UAE
are just the latest nail in what the cons hope will be the coffin of
American democracy and the American middle class. Today's
conservatives believe in rule by inherited wealth and an
internationalist corporate elite, and things like a politically
aroused citizenry and a healthy democracy are pesky distractions.
Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals,
supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our
missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened
us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a
Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying
jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans
now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to
use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is
being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation
that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first
bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration
of Independence, "He has combined with others to subject us to a
jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our
laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…" he
just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade
Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United
States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal
levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives
of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American
Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO.
As Simon Romero and Heather Timmons noted in
The New York Times on 24 February 2006, "the international
shipping business has evolved in recent years to include many more
containers with consumer goods, in addition to old-fashioned bulk
commodities, and that has helped lift profit margins to 30 percent,
from the single digits. These smartly managed foreign operators now
manage about 80 percent of port terminals in the United States."
And those 30 percent profits from American port operations now
going to Great Britain will probably soon go to the United Arab
Emirates, a nation with tight interconnections to both the Bush
administration and the Bush family.
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about money. In the
multinational corporatocracy's "flat world," money trumps the
national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the
environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do
- strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's "Rights of
Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's "Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to
avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller
wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in
Saudi Arabia: "War is good for business."
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling
author of over a dozen books and the host of a nationally syndicated
noon-3pm ET daily progressive talk show syndicated
by
Air America Radio.
www.thomhartmann.com
His most recent books are "What Would Jefferson
Do?" and Ultimate Sacrifice.
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