Greenwashing

All of a sudden, after supporting right-wing fiscal policy for 20 years, Allan Greenspan has decided to get some old-time religion and claim that he had nothing to do with that mess:

WASHINGTON - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his new book, bashes President Bush for not responsibly handling the nation’s spending and racking up big budget deficits.

A self-described “libertarian Republican,” Greenspan takes his own party to task for forsaking conservative principles that favor small government.

“My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending,” Greenspan wrote.

He never seemed to raise a peep about it before, and indeed he cheered on the Bush tax cuts, which caused the most damage to the federal budget, not spending. He PRESIDED over the Presidency of the man who supposedly taught that "deficits don't matter," so coming out now and trying to disassociate with a Republican ideology he championed is just crass.

I agree with Atrios.

It usually goes something like this:

If only the bastards had done exactly what I told them to do!

At times it may even be correct, but any competent person should understand that the bastards (politicians) are not going to do exactly what you want them to do. They may enact only 4 points of your 5 point plan. Key provisions might be altered to forge some Broder-blessed "compromise." Lobbyists will come in and muck things up for preferred interests. The politicians may be insane and/or incompetent.

This is, of course, the lament of the pundit also. The choice is never between your pony plan and something else, the choice is between competing packages which have some realistic chance of being enacted. There is value in discussion and think pieces, of course, and there is value in discussing what a pony plan might look like. But at key moments sophisticated people understand that their contribution to the political discourse is going to either be an endorsement of some policy or opposition to it.

And Greenspan chose endorsement, time and again. And the man who facilitated the dot-com bubble did the same for the now-busting housing bubble, nor did he stand in the way of a severe trade deficit that has us beholden to those who paint lead on our kid's toys. We are staring into an economic abyss, and Greenspan, the most-watched economic figure in modern times, cannot walk away saying "I told you so." That doesn't wash.

Senator Dodd: Cut off Chinese imports until they stop poisoning us

This is the greatest blow to the neoliberal consensus I have seen in a long time. And it's a courageous call to action from Senator Dodd.

This is an issue of safety. Parents should be confident that the toys and food that they give their children have been inspected and are safe. That's why I am calling on the President to use his authority to immediately suspend all imports of toys and food from China. It's not enough to simply talk about working for fair trade agreements. We need leadership that will act to enforce fair trade. We have the legal right and power under the WTO to keep products out of our country that threaten the health and safety of our families, and I'm going to do all I can to ensure we do so.

Only in our similarly poisoned political culture would this be seen as controversial. The Chinese have been operating for years with virtually nonexistent labor standards, allowing them to overpower our manufacturing base by producing goods at rock-bottom prices. They have not created a flat world, but one completely tilted in their favor, which uses what amounts to slaves to give us complacent Americans 99 cent packs of tube socks. Predictably, this inattention to any kind of human rights or quality control has led to poisoned food, poisoned toys, foodstuffs made out of cardboard, toothpaste with antifreeze, and probably a hundred other various depredations we just haven't heard about yet. In this situation, the only sensible thing to do is to not allow such items into American homes until we can get a handle on how wide and deep it actually goes. Senator Dodd's call is Common Sense 101.

But, as HTML Mencken notes, this will be met with howls of "protectionism!" and "you want to kill our economy!" And those howls will be coming from a particular source:

The problem here is the 21st Century version of The Jungle, with the Chinese government in the place of the meat packers, the Chinese people being the Lithuanian immigrant workers, and the American public… is still the American public, being poisoned by Corporatist pigs defended, now as then, by a complacent and complicit intellectual class (back then, stodgy laissez-faire men; and now, neoliberal economists and globalization cheerleaders) whose anger is only aroused by the muckrakers and dissenters whose position Dodd, to his immense credit, echoes [...]

While the current FDA is amazingly incompetent and corrupt even by normal Bushite standards of incompetence and corruption (which is saying a lot), even the “best” Clintonoid FDA couldn’t possibly inspect all the food imports. The problem can only be solved by insisting through trade pacts that imported food is produced according to American environmental, labor, and safety standards. They want our market, fine; they must treat their workers, the environment, and consumers by our rules (which admittedly aren’t all that great right now, either, also largely in thanks to Corporate-whorish Sensible Liberals, but better by far than China’s). However, demanding such a remedy requires moral courage, something economics textbooks don’t teach — though there is apparently an esoteric chapter in them that instructs in the fine art of dishonestly using moral language.

If you want to see trade and globalization rocket up to the top of the public consciousness, you'll join with me in broadcasting Senator Dodd's call to action far and wide. I don't think he's the most populist candidate in the Presidential race; he's not calling for the cancellation of NAFTA or the WTO, for example. But he's bringing to light a very pervasive issue in completely rational and sensible terms, namely that we shouldn't let poison into our homes. This would be a bold first step into unmaking the ridiculous economic consensus that globalization is a net positive and "wouldn't you rather have lead paint in your toys than have to pay a dollar more for them?"

Senator Dodd's going to take a lot of heat for this one, let's get his back.

1.8 Million Jobs

The last time that our corporate Dem minders patted us on the head and told us that they had everything worked out while they got together with lobbyists and the business community to sell American jobs down the river was when China entered the WTO. This was supposed to open up new markets and be a goldmine for the US economy. And it was - for the very rich. For anyone that works for a living it was a nightmare.

Contrary to the predictions of its supporters, China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) has failed to reduce its trade surplus with the United States or increase overall U.S. employment. The rise in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 1997 and 2006 has displaced production that could have supported 2,166,000 U.S. jobs. Most of these jobs (1.8 million) have been lost since China entered the WTO in 2001. Between 1997 and 2001, growing trade deficits displaced an average of 101,000 jobs per year, or slightly more than the total employment in Manchester, New Hampshire. Since China entered the WTO in 2001, job losses increased to an average of 441,000 per year—more than the total employment in greater Dayton, Ohio. Between 2001 and 2006, jobs were displaced in every state and the District of Columbia. Nearly three-quarters of the jobs displaced were in manufacturing industries. Simply put, the promised benefits of trade liberalization with China have been unfulfilled.

On the same day that George Bush and the Democrats make a "deal" on trade policy, the Census Bureau announced a six-month high in the trade deficit, with exports outpacing imports by $64 billion. We don't make anything in this country anymore, and that's a national security issue as much as it is an economic one. The power of multinational corporations to write our trade policy has gotten completely out of control, and the public knows it. That's why so many populists and fair traders won last November. And yet corporate Dems continue to sell out the American worker.

There is no way that this latest trade deal should be allowed to pass without enforceable labor, environmental and human rights standards. We barely have any jobs left to hemhorrage.