Letters to the Editor
cynshep
Published Letters: 163 Editor's Choice: 46
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From Thomas Palley
[Read the article: It's still the economy, stupid]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"This history suggests that if today’s globalization crashes it will also be because of economic factors, but those factors will differ from the past because the system is different. The New Deal era created a system that remedied earlier financial fragility by restricting private ownership of bullion, and creating deposit insurance and lenders of last resort. It also created a new social democratic mass consumption economy in which income was more broadly shared owing to unionization, minimum wages, and social security provisions. However, a social democratic mass consumption economy is expensive for individual capitalists, giving them an incentive to evade its costs. That has been driving force behind globalization since 1980, and that is the contradiction in today’s system.
Business has a private incentive to escape the system to countries with lower costs. Yet, it still needs mass consumption. The system needs a solid middle class, but is also driven to hollow out that middle class. This contradiction has been papered over by consumer borrowing provided by deregulated financial markets and a 25-year asset price boom. The problem is that such borrowing risks proving unsustainable if incomes are hollowed out, and if it stops the economic merry-go-round may also stop. If that stoppage produces an economic crash, globalization may crash, too. This is because it lacks political support, having been a primary cause of middle class hollowing out."
Thomas Palley - Can Globalization Fail? - Lessons from History
http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=45#more-45
Or more succinctly:
"After all these years in the trade debate, people in Washington have drunk so much of the free-trade Kool-Aid that they still, to this day, don't see the crisis in trade policy unfolding in front of them." U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio
"Prosperity has neither trickled down nor rippled outward. Between 1973 and 2003, real GDP per capita in the United States increased 73 percent, while real median hourly compensation rose only 13 percent." - Robert Rubin [speaking of 'free trade Kool-Aid]
Bill Fleckenstein. “I continue to believe that worrying about the Fed being tough is exactly the wrong thing to worry about. This, after all, is the Fed that precipitated a stock bubble, and then a housing bubble to address what ensued. The Fed only knows how to do one thing, which is to print money and bail out whatever problem it previously created. If one wants to worry, one should worry about the consequences of Fed recklessness.”
"t makes many angry that, in a time when America seems to be strip-mining its environment, its credit and its people, we are ruled by the most reactionary American political party to take power since the days when strikers were shot by state militia units, a party that has chosen not to address any of these problems, but instead, tells us that all will be well." Sterling Newberry
And, lastly, my current favorite:
"You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy." Herbert Hoover
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I second Slamboni, and we all know she's an idiot.
[Read the article: It's still the economy, stupid]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Here's what Glorious Leader (Vrooom! Vrooom!) was babbling about while attempting to hold up Harley-Davidson, the beneficiary of a specially designed tariff barrier against imported motorcycles, as a example of the success of 'free trade':
• The death of Cuban President Fidel Castro by itself will trigger no change in the United States' 40-year-old trade embargo on the communist island. "The system has to change," he said. "Trade (with Cuba) doesn't directly benefit the people. Trade benefits the elite."
There but, strangely, not here. Trade with Cuba, and only Cuba, is a raw deal for everyone but 'the elites' says the scion of 5 generations of oil money.
Americans underestimate the challenges facing Chinese leaders as they seek to modernize their sprawling nation of 1.3 billion people. "I don't think people in the United States really understand," he said. "They've got enormous internal problems that they are working hard to deal with. Frankly, it's in our interest that we help them deal with them."
By borrowing money from them for a housing bubble which was driven in large part by 'second (or 3rd) home fever' by the wealthiest 1%?
From that same USAToday article*:
'Robert Scott, an economist with the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, said the president's trade policies benefit corporations and investors while leaving workers to fend for themselves.
"There's a rapidly growing number of workers in this country and around the world who are being threatened by the kind of globalization we're pursuing. ... It's a race to the bottom," he says."
"In 2002, the president imposed steep tariffs on imported steel. The measure, which was criticized even by many conservative economists, was regarded as a political gesture to win support for Republicans in swing political states such as West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which are big steel producers.
That same year, the president signed a new farm bill that contained billions of dollars in government subsidies for crop exports. Such payments encourage excess production of corn, cotton and other products, flooding world markets and depressing the income of farmers in poor countries.'
*http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/trade/2006-08-17-bush-cover-usat_x.htm
On the Harley free-trade brigade
By David J. Lynch, USA TODAY