Forget about liberal v. conservative, Progressive v. Tea Party. Bringing back manufacturing to U.S. soil is a matter of national security, and I’ll tell you why.
Let’s start with an A.P. article on P.7B of today’s Denver Post about how China just raised their tariffs again on imports of all U.S. larger cars and SUV vehicles. They did this in retaliation for the U.S. warming of economic and strategic relations with other parts of Asia, Australia, and the E.U.
For those of you who keep up with this sort of thing, you know that China has already imposed a 25% tariff on all goods entering their country, while enjoying a 2.5% tariff on all goods they exported to the U.S. No, the decimal point is not a typo.
The idea behind the U.S. strengthening economic ties with other parts of Asia and the E.U. (sans China) is that, together, we may be able to offset China’s increasingly enormous economic clout and voracious appetite for world political domination.
Former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brezinski strongly advocates such an alliance, not only on economic grounds, but in order to help broker an equitable reconciliation of China with India, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, so they don’t end up going to war with each other and start WWIII.
So that this alliance may stand on its own and stand up to China, the strategy necessitates that we are able to supply our trading partners with valuable goods and technology over the next couple of decades, independently of China’s influence.
Mr. Brezinski has the right idea, but according to Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, authors of a book called Death By China, we may no longer have the manufacturing capacity to get the job done, because U.S. manufacturers have shipped their factories overseas, mainly to China.
According to Navarro and Autry, the book “documents the myriad ways that a powerful, wealthy, and corrupt Chinese Communist Party emboldened by a growing nationalistic frenzy is becoming the biggest threat to global peace, prosperity, and health since Nazi Germany.
From currency manipulation and abusive trade policies, to slave labor and deadly consumer products, China’s ruthless rulers threaten the livelihood of the citizens of every developed nation.
These thugs have created a frightening amoral society ruled by a constant fear hidden to outsiders and bought off with the ill gotten profits of a myopic quest for economic advantage at any cost – social, environmental, or civil rights concerns be damned.
Worse, as with everything else, China is scaling and exporting the model around this world, threatening their neighbors and exploiting developing nations across the globe with a new imperialism.
While America worries that Al-Qaeda or Iran may get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction, China is using our Wal-Mart dollars to build them by the score; filling brand new nuclear submarines with missiles aimed at our heartland and building stealth planes designed to obliterate our friends in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.”
Assuming that these guys are correct, and I believe that they are, how are we supposed to strengthen our economic ties with Asia and the E.U. to go up against the monolithic power of China, when we either make our goods in China or buy all our parts from China?
Think about that for a moment, and then think about how our U.S. multinational corporations have beat feet for the Orient to make a buck and left us vulnerable to a threat that makes Al Qaida look like the cast from The Breakfast Club.
If we don’t bring manufacturing back to our shores very soon, and I mean yesterday, our children can kiss what is left of the American dream goodbye.
A meaningful response to this very real threat should transcend every domestic political ideology. Both sides of the aisle and the middle should be immediately changing tax, trade, and banking policies to incentivize the return of U.S. manufacturing to our shores and to disincentivize outsourcing to countries that refuse to support a fair and balanced trade policy.
We can sit a listen to the Cheney family telling us how in danger we are by getting our troops out of Iraq, like we really have anything to fear from Iraq alone, or even Iraq and Iran together, except that Haliburton's loss of military contracts may reflect negatively on their quarterly dividends. But, since Iran is currently good buddies with China, that particular alliance is something about which we should be very concerned.
Please then, let us pause for a moment from our incessant arguments about what is morally a better domestic policy for the U.S. and concentrate together about how to meet what I firmly believe is nothing less than an existential threat to this country.
J. Brandeis Sperandeo
