Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
Rebuilding American manufacturing not only returns jobs to our country, but also keeps profits here in America. Instead of strengthening China, we'd be rebuilding our own nation...
Why are we using tax policy to subsidize giant American corporations in their dependency relationship with the Communist Chinese dictatorship?
For 30 years, American corporations have been helping build China into a massive industrial empire while collapsing manufacturing capacity here in the United States. That country now has a stranglehold on things essential to America, from pharmaceuticals to electronics to consumer goods, all because of a neoliberal fantasy that if we helped them become wealthy through trade they would become more democratic.
American politicians in the pocket of big business went along with this bizarre plan to increase corporate profits and cut US labor costs, and we now see the extraordinary damage it has done to our working class people and our nation, all while strengthening a brutal overseas authoritarian regime.
In recent weeks, China has been busted for running a police operation in New York City to harass Chinese dissidents (they're doing this all over the world, according to The New York Times), has again explicitly threatened war against Taiwan, and two weeks ago committed a hostile interception of US aircraft in the region.
Yet America is China's largest financial supporter, having largely funded that country's government and growth into a modern economy by moving over 60,000 US factories there since the beginning of the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.
As the Council on Foreign Relations reported, "U.S. manufacturing employment dropped from 26 percent of the workforce in 1970 to 8.5 percent in 2016."
When I lived and studied in Beijing in 1996, that country made and exported almost nothing: the tallest building in the city was an American hotel at 10 stories (I used to eat dinner there). You could walk the streets for hours and not see a single car: the major thoroughfare in front of Tiananmen Square was a sea of black bicycles.
And American stores in 1996 were filled with American-made products. Sam Walton's Wal-Mart stores sported banners proclaiming "100% Made In America" (the title of Walton's autobiography).
Today, however, it's almost impossible to find products not made in China in most American stores; without cheap Chinese goods, everything from Walmart to Amazon to your local dollar store would be mostly empty shelves.
If this seems crazy to you, you're not alone.
From 1793 until 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and GATT/WTO, the United States had protected its domestic industries and workers by leveling the playing fields of labor and manufacturing costs.
This was mostly done by tax law, through country-of-origin regulations, and import tariffs. Alexander Hamilton laid it out in 1793 with his Report on American Manufactures and President George Washington adopted the protectionist policies that built America for over 203 years, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
From the 1920s to the 1990s, America was the world's largest importer of raw materials and largest exporter of finished goods. American-made products were available in every country in the world, defining the standards of excellence and quality. We shipped steel ore into the country and shipped out washing machines, cars, and televisions to the world.
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