The Following Article should be read in
conjunction with TPPG’s Federal Oversight Committee’s Report for November 2011
(Page 2-3, Section 3, which covers the economics of trade beginning to shift
from China’s favor to the United States.
China Is Not The Source Of Our Jobs Problem
Republicans and Democrats, liberals as well as conservatives, have bought into anti-Chinese trade demagoguery.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that tariffs against China are a "key part of our 'Make It in America' agenda."
During his 2010 campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called his Tea Party-backed Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, "a foreign worker's best friend."
In a recent news conference, President Obama gave his support to the anti-China campaign, declaring that China "has been very aggressive in gaming the trading system to its advantage," adding that "we can and should take action against countries that are keeping their currencies undervalued ... (and) that, above all, means China."
Republican 2012 presidential candidates have also jumped on the anti-China bandwagon.
Mitt Romney wrote: "If I am fortunate enough to be elected president, I will work to fundamentally alter our economic relationship with China. ... I will begin on Day One by designating China as the currency manipulator it is."
Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was even more challenging, saying, "I want to go to war with China."
Let's look at the magnitude of our trade with China. An excellent place to start is a recent publication (8/8/2011) by Galina Hale and Bart Hobijn, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, titled "The U.S. Content of 'Made in China.'"
One of the several questions they ask is:What is the fraction of U.S. consumer spending for goods made in China? Their data sources are the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Hale and Hobijn find that the vast majority of goods and services sold in the United States are produced here.
In 2010, total imports were about 16 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, and of that, 2.5% came from China.
A total of 88.5% of U.S. consumer spending is on items made in the United States, the bulk of which are domestically produced services — such as medical care, housing, transportation, etc. — which make up about two-thirds of spending.
Chinese goods account for 2.7% of U.S. personal consumption expenditures, about one-quarter of the 11.5% foreign share.
Chinese imported goods consist mainly of furniture and household equipment; other durables; and clothing and shoes.
In the clothing and shoes category, 35.6% of U.S. consumer purchases in 2010 were items with the "Made in China" label.
Much of what China sells us has considerable "local content." Hale and Hobijn give the example of sneakers that might sell for $70.
They point out that most of that price goes for transportation in the U.S., rent for the store where they are sold, profits for shareholders of the U.S. retailer, and marketing costs, which include the salaries, wages and benefits paid to the U.S. workers and managers responsible for getting sneakers to consumers.
On average, 55 cents of every dollar spent on goods made in China goes for marketing services produced in the U.S.
Going hand in hand with today's trade demagoguery is talk about decline in U.S. manufacturing.
For the year 2008, the Federal Reserve estimated that the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion. If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy — with its own GDP — it would be tied with Germany as the world's fourth-richest economy.
Today's manufacturing worker is so productive that the value of his average output is $234,220, three times higher than it was in 1980 and twice as high as it was in 1990.
That means more can be produced with fewer workers, resulting in a precipitous fall in manufacturing jobs, from 19.5 million jobs in 1979 to a little more than 10 million today.
The bottom line is that we Americans are allowing ourselves to be suckered into believing that China is the source of our unemployment problems when the true culprit is Congress and the White House. (TPPG Comment: If the tax code was changed where corporations domiciled in the U.S. paid NO FIT, the Capital Gains and Estate Taxes were eliminated and the onerous regulations on corporations were repealed, trillions of dollars of capital would be created/find its way into the U.S. economy [as foreign corporations opened up new plants/business operations in this country] and well over 10 million new well paying jobs (in line with productivity) would be created. However, don’t hold your breath for our politicians are terrified of the blowback from the left by doing what is necessary to create an economic environment that would be the world magnet for capital investments)
Walter Williams is a distinguished Economics Professor for George Mason University
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Why U.S. military in Uganda?Soros fingerprints all over it
Obama's billionaire friend has interests in African country's oil
Posted: October 15, 2011
4:30 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
After President Barack Obama announced earlier this week that he would be sending American troops into Uganda, WND uncovered billionaire activist George Soros' ties both to the political pressure behind the decision and to the African nation's fledgling oil industry.
Soros sits on the executive board of an influential "crisis management organization" that recently recommended the U.S. deploy a special advisory military team to Uganda to help with operations and run an intelligence platform, a recommendation Obama's action seems to fulfill.
The president emeritus of that organization, the International Crisis Group, is also the principal author of "Responsibility to Protect," the military doctrine used by Obama to justify the U.S.-led NATO campaign in Libya.
Soros' own Open Society Institute is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, a doctrine that has been cited many times by activists urging intervention in Uganda.
Authors and advisers of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, including a center founded and led by Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, also helped to found the International Criminal Court.
Several of the doctrine's main founders also sit on boards with Soros, who is a major proponent of the doctrine.
Soros also maintains close ties to oil interests in Uganda. His organizations have been leading efforts purportedly to facilitate more transparency in Uganda's oil industry, which is being tightly controlled by the country's leadership.
Soros' hand in Ugandan oil industry
Oil exploration began in Uganda's northwestern Lake Albert basin nearly a decade ago, with initial strikes being made in 2006.
Uganda's Energy Ministry estimates the country has over 2 billion barrels of oil, with some estimates going as high as 6 billion barrels. Production is set to begin in 2015, delayed from 2013 in part because the country has not put in place a regulatory framework for the oil industry.
A 2008 national oil and gas policy, proposed with aid from a Soros-funded group, was supposed to be a general road map for the handling and use of the oil. However, the policy's recommendations have been largely ignored, with critics accusing Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni of corruption and of tightening his grip on the African country's emerging oil sector.
Soros himself has been closely tied to oil and other interests in Uganda.
In 2008, the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute brought together stakeholders from Uganda and other East African countries to discuss critical governance issues, including the formation of what became Uganda's national oil and gas policy.
Also in 2008, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a grantee of the Soros-funded Revenue Watch, helped established the Publish What You Pay Coalition of Uganda, or PWYP, which was purportedly launched to coordinate and streamline the efforts of the government in promoting transparency and accountability in the oil sector.
Also, a steering committee was formed for PWYP Uganda to develop an agenda for implementing the oil advocacy initiatives and a constitution to guide PWYP's oil work.
PWYP has since 2006 hosted a number of training workshops in Uganda purportedly to promote contract transparency in Uganda's oil sector.
PWYP is directly funded by Soros' Open Society as well as the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute. PWYP international is actually hosted by the Open Society Foundation in London.
The billionaire's Open Society Institute, meanwhile, runs numerous offices in Uganda. It maintains a country manager in Uganda, as well as the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, which supports work in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
The Open Society Institute runs a Ugandan Youth Action Fund, which states its mission is to "identify, inspire, and support small groups of dedicated young people who can mobilize and influence large numbers of their peers to promote open society ideals."
U.S. troops to Uganda
Obama yesterday notified House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that he plans to send about 100 military personnel, mostly Special Operations Forces, to central Africa. The first troops reportedly arrived in Uganda on Wednesday.
The U.S. mission will be to advise forces seeking to kill or capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA. Kony is accused of major human rights atrocities. He is on the U.S. terrorist list and is wanted by the International Criminal Court.
In a letter on Friday, Obama announced the initial team of U.S. military personnel "with appropriate combat equipment" deployed to Uganda on Wednesday. Other forces deploying include "a second combat-equipped team and associated headquarters, communications and logistics personnel."
"Our forces will provide information, advice and assistance to select partner nation forces," he said.
Both conservatives and liberals have raised questions about whether military involvement in Uganda advances U.S. interests.
Writing in The Atlantic yesterday, Max Fisher noted the Obama administration last year approved special forces bases and operations across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia.
"But those operations, large and small, target terrorist groups and rogue states that threaten the U.S. – something the Lord's Resistance Army could not possibly do," he wrote.
"It's difficult to find a U.S. interest at stake in the Lord's Resistance Army's campaign of violence," continued Fisher. "It's possible that there's some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can't obviously see."
Bill Roggio, the managing editor of The Long War Journal, referred to the Obama administration's stated rationale for sending troops "puzzling," claiming the LRA does not present a national security threat to the U.S. – "despite what President Obama said."
Tea-party-backed presidential candidate Michele Bachmann also questioned the wisdom of Obama's move to send U.S. troops to Uganda.
"When it comes to sending our brave men and women into foreign nations, we have to first demonstrate a vital American national interest before we send our troops in," she said at a campaign stop yesterday in Iowa.
Soros group: Send military advisors to Uganda
In April 2010 Soros' International Crisis Group, or ICG, released a report sent to the White House and key lawmakers advising the U.S. military run special operations in Uganda to seek Kony's capture.
The report states, "To the U.S. government: Deploy a team to the theatre of operations to run an intelligence platform that centralizes all operational information from the Ugandan and other armies, as well as the U.N. and civilian networks, and provides analysis to the Ugandans to better target military operations."
Since 2008, the U.S. has been providing financial aid in the form of military equipment to Uganda and the other regional countries to fight Kony's LRA, but Obama's new deployment escalates the direct U.S. involvement.
Soros sits in the ICG's executive board along with Samuel Berger, Bill Clinton's former national security advisor; George J. Mitchell, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader who served as a Mideast envoy to both Obama and President Bush; and Javier Solana, a socialist activist who is NATO's former secretary-general as well as the former foreign affairs minister of Spain.
Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is the ICG's senior advisor.
The ICG's president emeritus is Gareth Evans, who, together with activist Ramesh Thakur, is the original founder of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, with the duo even coining the term "responsibility to protect."
Both Evans and Thakur serve as advisory board members of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, the main group pushing the doctrine.
As WND first exposed, Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect.
Soros' Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.
Samantha Power, Arafat deputy
Meanwhile, a closer look at the Soros-funded Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect is telling.
Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.
WND was first to report the committee that devised the Responsibility to Protect doctrine included Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.
Also, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has a seat on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that originally founded Responsibility to Protect. The commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term "responsibility to protect" while defining its guidelines.
The Carr Center is a research center concerned with human rights located at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, was Carr's founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect.
With Power's center on the advisory board, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty first defined the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.
Power reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya, widely regarded as test of Responsibility to Protect in action.
In his address to the nation in April explaining the NATO campaign in Libya, Obama cited the doctrine as the main justification for U.S. and international air strikes against Libya.
Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of "war crimes," "genocide," "crimes against humanity" or "ethnic cleansing."
The term "war crimes" has at times been indiscriminately used by various United Nations-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops who commit alleged "war crimes" overseas.
Soros: Right to 'penetrate nation-states'
Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article titled "The People's Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World's Most Vulnerable Populations."
In the article Soros said, "True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments."
"If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified," Soros wrote. "By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states' borders to protect the rights of citizens.
"In particular," he continued, "the principle of the people's sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict."
'One World Order'
The Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, meanwhile, works in partnership with the World Federalist Movement, a group that promotes democratized global institutions with plenary constitutional power. The Movement is a main coordinator and member of Responsibility to Protect Center.
WND reported that Responsibility doctrine founder Thakur recently advocated for a "global rebalancing" and "international redistribution" to create a "New World Order."
In a piece last March in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, "Toward a new world order," Thakur wrote, "Westerners must change lifestyles and support international redistribution."
He was referring to a United Nations-brokered international climate treaty in which he argued, "Developing countries must reorient growth in cleaner and greener directions."
In the opinion piece, Thakur then discussed recent military engagements and how the financial crisis has impacted the U.S.
"The West's bullying approach to developing nations won't work anymore – global power is shifting to Asia," he wrote. "A much-needed global moral rebalancing is in train."
Thakur continued: "Westerners have lost their previous capacity to set standards and rules of behavior for the world. Unless they recognize this reality, there is little prospect of making significant progress in deadlocked international negotiations."
Thakur contended "the demonstration of the limits to U.S. and NATO power in Iraq and Afghanistan has left many less fearful of 'superior' Western power."
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IBD Editorials
Canada Throws Its Own Tea Party
Posted 05/03/2011 06:49 PM ET
Elections: Canada's conservatives roll to victory on a platform of lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoiding climate-change legislation, promoting Arctic sovereignty and upping military spending. It the GOP listening?
There are more than a few timid Republicans who could take a leadership lesson from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose Torie swept to a crushing victory over the Liberal Party in elections. No one will follow an uncertain trumpet, but if you fight openly for what's right and necessary, they will follow in droves.
Harper, first elected in 2006, has never had a majority in Parliament until now. So he's had to, as they say in Washington, reach across the aisle. Yet he and his Tories never compromised their principles and made this election a referendum on them. Hopefully the GOP will heed this lesson now and for 2012.
The Conservatives now have some 164 seats out of 308 as the Liberal Party fell from 77 seats to a meager 35. The Liberals, who were always either first or second, now fall to third behind the even more leftist New Democratic Party (NDP).
Harper's victory means that planned corporate income-tax cuts will move ahead. Canada reduced the federal rate by 1.5 percentage points to 16.5% on Jan. 1, and it will fall to 15% in 2012 under legislation passed in 2007.
Both the NDP and the Liberals pledged to raise corporate taxes to fund new social programs. Sound familiar? While the Obama administration rails against the evil rich, Canada has chosen to encourage real investment and not the bloated spending Washington labels as "investment".
Another telling point is that while President Obama and Senate Democrats want to eliminate "tax breaks" for American energy companies, the Conservative victory came after the Liberals and the NDP pledged to eliminate tax breaks and subsidies for Canada's oil industry.
Harper, who comes from the conservative and energy-rich western province of Alberta, campaigned on making Canada an "energy superpower." He wasn't talking about wind turbines and solar panels, but about Alberta's oil-rich tar sands. According to Bloomberg, Canada "sits on the largest pool of oil reserves outside the Middle East." Note: Bloomberg is totally wrong for the largest reserves are in the U.S.
The Obama administration, by contrast, has imposed a seven-year moratorium on most offshore drilling, placed Alaska off-limits and locked up immense reserves of shale oil and gas in the continental U.S. Harper won in part by saying to Canadians, "Drill, baby, drill."
The big one that was at stake was the energy industry, where the Liberals and the NDP were quite willing to throw Alberta under the bus," observed James Cole, a money manager at a leading Canadian investment firm. Alaska and states bordering the Gulf of Mexico know the feeling.
Tax cuts and energy development - what a concept! As Bloomberg also reports, energy has fueled Canada's economic growth, allowing it to grow at a faster pace in the fourth quarter of 2010 than any other G-7 country. Canada has the lowest deficit and strongest currency of the group.
Harper also advocated a strong military, not only to participate in helping the war on terror in Afghanistan but also to protect the Canadian Arctic and its energy riches. While we are content to let Prudhoe Bay dry up after three decades of production and have placed ANWR and the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska off-limits, Canada is eager to develop these riches and protect them from encroachment from Russia and other Arctic powers.
"Canadians can now turn the page on the uncertainties and repeat elections of the past seven years and focus on building a great future for all of us," Harper told supporters during a victory rally in Calgary Monday night.
Maybe America can follow Canada's lead and turn a page of its own in 2012.
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