Exporting America

I just finished reading, a short, clearly written book, “Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas”, by financial commentator Lou Dobbs, the anchor of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight. Dobbs has made it a personal mission to speak out against politicians and multi-national corporations co-operating to export American jobs for short term gain while undermining our economy and devastating our middle class.

As pointed out in the book, American politicians accept multi-national corporate campaign contributions and in return surrender American sovereignty to the WTO and enter into so-called “free trade” agreements, like NAFTA and CAFTA.. People like Dobbs, who speak against this, are labeled anti-global “isolationists” and “protectionists” by the corporations and their political allies.

What Dobbs actually advocates is a balanced middle road between unfettered corporate greed and isolationism, the negotiation of fair trade agreements that not only protect American interests but also offer a fair exchange for our trading partner nations. Fair trade agreements also look out for the rights of workers in both nations and pay proper respect to the global environment.

Historically a Republican, Dobbs uses a good example from the Reagan years, when soaring gas prices created American demand for the import of Japanese autos. Under the agreement negotiated with Japan, limits were placed on the number of imports allowed. But if the cars were built in America, they were not counted against the limits. The result was Japanese auto makers built factories in America and hired American workers, which was good for America, while at the same time the Japanese auto makers were able to sell more cars in America, which was good for Japan.

Dobbs looks at these issues from the point of view of a middle class American worker. Proponents of so-called “free trade” are told to use business and economic terminology in their discussions, but play down the impact on the American worker. Alan Levenson, chief economist of the mutual fund giant, T. Rowe Price, wrote a three page article in their Spring newsletter about the impact of the trade deficit on the U. S. Economy, and did not once use the words “jobs”or “workers”. It’s as if workers are just assumed to be part of the machinery, rather than the human beings who do the actual work, pay taxes, vote and fight in wars.

In fairness to Alan Levenson, here is an article in which he does discuss outsourcing. Trying to read what he says really makes me appreciate the clarity of Lou Dobbs. Making predictions for “the long term” is one of the tricks of economist spin - they never seem to give much idea of about when we might reach “the long term”. Levenson seems to be saying the American job loss is not just attributable to outsourcing, but also to other negative factors in our current economy. Well that should be a relief to the worker who lost his job - if outsourcing did not take your job, then current deficiencies in the economy might have taken it anyway. And you can expect to get another job - in “the long term”.