- 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%
Where do foreign countries and companies and oligarchs get all these dollars to buy US goods? By and large, we gave them to them, in the form of $600 billion a year or so trade deficits that go back to the Reagan era that kicked off modern neoliberalism.
When we buy more from, for example, China or Israel or Saudi Arabia, than they sell to us, we end up with a surplus of their consumer goods (which eventually end up in our landfills) or oil, while they end up with a surplus of US dollars (which they use to buy our companies, real estate, and increasingly since it was legalized by the Supreme Court in Citizens United, our politicians).
This was not how the Founders intended it.
The Republicans rejected traditional American trade policies in the 1980s under Reagan, and then most Democrats rejected them with the rise of the DLC and Bill Clinton in 1992, and in both cases they turned their backs on over 200 years of American policy that turned us into the industrial powerhouse of the world.
The rise of American industry was no accident, as I noted in my book Rebooting The American Dream.
To start at the beginning:
On April 14, 1789, George Washington was out walking through the fields at Mount Vernon, his home in Virginia, when Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, showed up on horseback. Thomson had a letter for Washington from the president pro-tempore of the new, constitutionally created United States Senate, telling Washington he'd just been elected President and the inauguration was set for April 30 in the nation's capital, New York City.
It created two problems for Washington.
The first was saying goodbye to his 82-year-old mother, which the 57-year-old Washington did that night. She gave him her blessing, and told him it was the last time he'd see her alive as she was gravely ill, and indeed, she died before he returned from New York.
The second was finding a suit of clothes made in America. For that, he sent a courier to his old friend and fellow general from the American Revolutionary War, Henry Knox.
Washington couldn't find a suit made in America because in the years prior to the American Revolution, the British East India Company (whose tea was thrown into Boston Harbor by outraged colonists after the Tea Act of 1773 gave the world's largest transnational corporation a giant tax break) controlled the manufacture and transportation of a whole range of goods, including fine clothing. Cotton and wool could be grown and sheared in the colonies, but had to be sent to England to be turned into clothing.
This was a routine policy for England, and is why until India achieved its independence in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi (who was assassinated a year later) sat with his spinning wheel for his lectures and spun daily in his own home. It was, like his Salt March, a protest against the colonial practices of England and an entreaty to his fellow Indians to make their own clothes to gain independence from British companies and institutions.
Fortunately for George Washington, an American clothing company had been established on April 28, 1783, in Hartford, Connecticut by a man named Daniel Hinsdale, and they produced high-quality woolen and cotton clothing, and also made things from imported silk. It was to Hinsdale's company that Knox turned, and helped Washington get -- in time for his inauguration two weeks later -- a nice, but not excessively elegant, brown, American-made suit. (He wore British black later for the celebrations and the most famous painting.)
When Washington became president in 1789, most of America's personal and industrial products of any significance were manufactured in England or in its colonies. Washington asked his first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, what could be done about that, and Hamilton came up with an 11-point plan to build American manufacturing, which he presented to Congress in 1791.
By 1793, most of its points had either been made into law by Congress or formulated into policy by either Washington or the various states (more on that later).
Those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen, and were only abandoned, after more than 200 successful years, during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton (and remain abandoned to this day). China, instead, implemented most of Hamilton's plan, and has brought about a remarkable transformation of its nation in a single generation.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
