While they try to stoke fear of socialism of the variety our NATO allies embrace, right wingers have no problem with the fact that most of our manufacturing jobs have moved to communist China and that we have indebted ourselves to China for $2 trillion mostly by running huge trade deficits. China has veritably become our banker. But the tea baggers have been carefully channeled to protest socialized medicine while conveniently forgetting about the more serious problem of letting ourselves go into debt to a communist country. And US manufacturers have sold out American workers in order to hire cheaper Chinese labor. So it's a double whammy - loss of jobs and indebtedness to a communist country. But it would be absolutely horrible and unthinkable if we became more like Sweden.
The scenario is relatively simple. Chinese workers work for less than US workers. So American companies set up factories in China and ship the goods back to be sold into the US market. So the US is left without jobs - in fact no new jobs have been added in 10 years - and, not only that but the US is left indebted to China who is becoming an economic powerhouse while the US economy withers.
ITHICA, NY—At one time, most manufacturing jobs that left the United States for China were concentrated in relatively low-skill, low-wage jobs in light manufacturing industries, such as apparel and textiles. However, an increasing percentage of jobs that are now leaving this country for China are in industries producing goods such as bicycles, furniture, motors, compressors, generators, fiber optics, clocks, injection molded parts and computer components.
According to a report produced for the U.S.-China Security Review Commission, more than 760,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost to China since 1992. Most of those jobs were in eight industries: electronics and electrical equipment, chemicals and petroleum products, household goods, toys, textiles, plastics, sporting goods, and wood and paper products.
The report also found that U.S. companies that are shutting down their domestic operations and moving to China and other countries tend to be large, profitable, well-established companies, such as Mattel, International Paper, General Electric, Motorola and Rubbermaid.
“There is a myth out there that direct foreign investment into China is for production for the big Chinese market and that U.S. companies are just moving their low-paying jobs in toys and textiles to China,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, Ph.D., a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University and the report’s author. “But our data show that it’s not true at all. These are highly skilled and good-paying jobs...that are not serving the Chinese market. Companies are moving to China to serve the U.S. market in auto parts, electronics, high-tech components, electrical machinery, chemicals and sporting goods.” In fact, contrary to the expectation that China’s 1.2 billion population would provide an ever-expanding market for U.S. goods, the value of goods imported to this country from China in 2000 exceeded the value of U.S. goods exported to China by a factor of more than 6-to-1. This resulted in a bilateral trade deficit of $84 billion, the report says. And, the trade deficit with China comprises almost 20% of the total U.S. trade deficit.
Be this as it may, we can't have health care reform because that would be socialistic. Heaven forbid we should become like western Europe, our NATO allies. Of course public education is OK, but public health insurance is not even as one option among many private health insurance options. It's OK for landlords to pay outrageous property taxes so their tenants can go to public school for free - a system that resembles communism more than it resembles socialism - but it's not OK to tax the wealthy so that poor people can have health insurance. Which is more important - your life or your education? Which is more important - losing everything you have to pay a medical bill or your education? You can get all the education you want by using free public libraries and the internet. MIT and other colleges have put their entire curriculums online. You can get a free education equivalent to any MIT graduate. You just don't get the diploma, that's all. But there is no hue and cry over public education, only over public health care.
And there is no huge hue and cry over the fact that a large portion of our national debt is owed to communist China. Why is that? Because it serves the interests of giant US corporations, the same corporations whose interests the right wing wing nut cases, the astroturfers, the birthers and the tea baggers serve. Whether or not these right wing demonstrators are complete dupes or are only too willing to join any cause that purports to give them an outlet for their incipient anger and bring down a black man to boot, the fact is that their anger and outrage is totally misplaced. They should be angry at the corporations who have sold them out in terms of job migration, and they should be angry at health insurance corporations who are the biggest cause of bankruptcy and denial of medical services leading to death in the world while making tons of profits and paying CEOs billions of dollars.
Bill McGuire, CEO of United Health Care, took home over a billion dollars in one year. Other CEOs are paid tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars while employing entire departments whose function it is to deny you health care or to cancel your policy altogether if you get sick. So between unemployment due to jobs moving to China due to corporations seeking the lowest cost labor input and rising health care costs due to health insurance corporations seeking to maximize profits, the right wing loonies have seen fit to protest that the US is becoming more like Sweden, France and Canada. Have they gone completely bonkers? The US was founded and settled by people from western Europe. So now we're going to side with China, a communist country, and not with the countries of western Europe whose denizens settled most of the US? It's totally nuts.
Most of the developed world has a rational, cost effective, humane health care system. But for the US to become more like the rest of the industrialized world, that would be socialism. We proclaim our extreme right wing privatization fetish at the same time we embrace our indebtedness to a communist country. That makes a lot of sense. It's not like we're going into hock to Sweden. At the same time we embrace a public school system that is more communistic than socialistic. It truly represents "to each according to their needs; from each according to their ability to pay." So if a landlord has a house he rents to a family with 10 children, the children all get to go to school and gain a public education for free while the landlord pays for it through property taxes. If it were truly a "free" educational system, the parents would pay a fee for each child regardless of their ownership of real estate, and the landlord would see a huge reduction in his property taxes. Similarly, our police and fire departments are socialized. This only makes sense as a fire in a house that is not protected by privatized fire insurance - that is insurance that would pay for a private fire department to come - could easily spread to one that is. Similarly, diseases that people who don't have health insurance carry and spread can infect people that do have health insurance. Isn't it better to prevent the spread of disease in the first place by covering everyone?
Socialism, communism and capitalism are only labels. In the final analysis they mean nothing. Every society existing today is some amalgam of all three. The important thing is to do what works, what is humane and what is rational. Socialized medicine makes sense just as socialized education does. What does not make sense is shipping jobs to China and then allowing them to gain economic hegemony over the US.
