Economy in Crisis - A study conducted by the Economic Studies revealed in 2014 that more U.S. businesses are closing than they are opening. “Business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in thirty-plus-yea history of our data,” states Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan. Looking closely at the data, all of this began in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, right around the era when “free trade” started becoming popular in America.
Businesses have been affected in all 50 states in the past three decades. Even the Business Dynamics Statistics, a part of the U.S. Census shows us this to be true...
Ever since we started so called “free trade” agreements with countries who have much lower labor costs, our businesses have been closing up shop in America. There are a couple reasons that have caused this. With free trade, an influx of cheap goods come through our borders. Countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, or even China have an average wage of $0.75 cents an hour. Their goods can be produced at much lower costs and then shipped here to the U.S. The wages in America are much higher than that thus it costs more to produce the same goods here at home. Many of our businesses simply can’t compete with their foreign competitors’ costs of goods and they go out of business...
The situation is only getting worse, especially since President Obama is negotiating three additional “free trade” agreements. These three deals have countries like Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and other countries whose wages are slim to non existent in comparison to ours. If we thought the North American Free Trade Agreement hurt our manufacturing industry, if we thought permanent trade relations with China hurt our jobs,
4 comments:
Notice that this trend started at the same time as the minimum wage began to lose ground to the raising cost of living.
The eurozone's free trade ideology let the gnomes of Berlin loose on Greece. In a race to the bottom, the first to reach the bottom are--surprise!--the closest to the bottom. The first loans were unsecured. The banksters of Germany are literally loan sharks. If Greece mortgages Piraeus and other "assets", the banksters will not just break legs, they will bite off pieces of the country until nothing of value remains. What they intend to do is to exchange property of value for bad debt. The banksters have every incentive to foreclose as soon as they can build more debt on it. The national survival of Greece depends utterly on their rejection of the ultimatum. No matter how much the exit hurts or for how long, sticking with the euro will hurt more and forever. Trust the banksters to be banksters. This is how free trade works. Always. Everywhere.
This is why economic growth in the old industrial world is dead except in places where the banksters operate or in places plundering with economies based on plundering the planet for short term gain and long term cliamte change.
Greece should nationalize their banks and start issuing credit within their own economy and tell the eugo zone to go pound sand. Sure worked for Iceland.
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