rebuttal to Bush's watery SOTU Tuesday night

[Guest guest]

" Leigh Saavedra " <saavedra1979

Wed, 1 Feb 2006 22:59:26 -0800 (PST)

[GranniesAgainstGeorge] an excellent rebuttal to Bush's

watery SOTU Tuesday night

 

 

 

Many good papers are already floating, filling the net

with statistics to back up our knowledge that Bush's

State of the Union Tuesday night was packed with

inaccuracies, exaggerations, and disinformation.

Among them is one especially ripe for being passed on

to fence-sitters and those clinging on to their

blinders, those who might listen to Paul Craig Roberts

on the basis of his having served under the Reagan

administration and written for the Wall Street Journal

and the National Review. There are those who would

say that one who cut his teeth on experience far to

the right of " moderate " by any standard must surely be

capable of looking a speech in the eye and know what

he's talking about when he thumps at the speech's

framework bit by bit until you hear the sound of

falling dominoes. Thus, a good one to pass on. There

may be no better deed for the day than just quietly

sipping your coffee while your spouse or co-worker or

friend reads the copy you have printed of this, just

for them. Maybe a few will be dragged kicking and

screaming from the comfortable but frightening coma

that moves ever closer to suffocating our nation.

 

Leigh, quoting Paul Craig Roberts:

 

February 1, 2006, Counterpunch

http://counterpunch.org/

 

The True State of the Union

More Deception from the Bush White House

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

Gentle reader, if you prefer comforting lies to harsh

truths, don't read this column.

 

The state of the union is disastrous. By its naked

aggression, bullying, illegal spying on Americans, and

illegal torture and detentions, the Bush

administration has demonstrated American contempt for

the Geneva Convention, for human life and dignity, and

for the civil liberties of its own citizens.

Increasingly, the US is isolated in the world, having

to resort to bribery and threats to impose its

diktats. No country any longer looks to America for

moral leadership. The US has become a rogue nation.

 

Least of all did President Bush tell any truth about

the economy. He talked about economic growth rates

without acknowledging that they result from eating the

seed corn and do not produce jobs with a living wage

for Americans. He touted a low rate of unemployment

and did not admit that the figure is false because it

does not count millions of discouraged workers who

have dropped out of the work force.

 

Americans did not hear from Bush that a new Wal-Mart

just opened on Chicago's city boundary and 25,000

people applied for 325 jobs (Chicago Sun-Times, Jan.

26), or that 11,000 people applied for a few Wal-Mart

jobs in Oakland, California. Obviously, employment is

far from full.

 

Neither did Bush tell Americans any of the dire facts

reported by economist Charles McMillion in the January

19 issue of Manufacturing & Technology News:

 

During Bush's presidency the US has experienced the

slowest job creation on record (going back to 1939).

During the past five years private business has added

only 958,000 net new jobs to the economy, while the

government sector has added 1.1 million jobs.

Moreover, as many of the jobs are not for a full work

week, " the country ended 2005 with fewer private

sector hours worked than it had in January 2001. "

 

McMillion reports that the largest sources of private

sector jobs have been health care and waitresses and

bartenders. Other areas of the private sector lost so

many jobs, including supervisory/managerial jobs, that

had health care not added 1.4 million new jobs, the

private sector would have experienced a net loss of

467,000 jobs between January 2001 and December 2005

despite an " economic recovery. " Without the new jobs

waiting tables and serving drinks, the US economy in

the past five years would have eked out a measly

64,000 jobs. In other words, there is a job depression

in the US.

 

McMillion reports that during the past five years of

Bush's presidency the US has lost 16.5% of its

manufacturing jobs. The hardest hit are clothes

manufacturers, textile mills, communications

equipment, and semiconductors. Workforces in these

industries shrunk by 37 to 46 percent. These are

amazing job losses. Major industries have shriveled to

insignificance in half a decade.

 

Free trade, offshore production for US markets, and

the outsourcing of US jobs are the culprits. McMillion

writes that " every industry that faces foreign

outsourcing or import competition is losing jobs, "

including both Ford and General Motors, both of which

recently announced new job losses of 30,000 each. The

parts supplier, Delphi, is on the ropes and cutting

thousands of jobs, wages, benefits, and pensions.

 

If the free trade/outsourcing propaganda were true,

would not at least some US export industries be

experiencing a growth in employment? If free trade and

outsourcing benefit the US economy, how did America

run up $2.85 trillion in trade deficits over the last

five years? This means Americans consumed almost $3

trillion dollars more in goods and services than they

produced and turned over $3 trillion of their existing

assets to foreigners to pay for their consumption.

Consuming accumulated wealth makes a country poorer,

not richer.

 

Americans are constantly reassured that America is the

leader in advanced technology and intellectual

property and doesn't need jobs making clothes or even

semiconductors. McMillion puts the lie to this

reassurance. During Bush's presidency, the US has lost

its trade surplus in manufactured Advanced Technology

Products (ATP). The US trade deficit in ATP now

exceeds the US surplus in Intellectual Property

licenses and fees. The US no longer earns enough from

high tech to cover any part of its import bill for

oil, autos, or clothing.

 

This is an astonishing development. The US

" superpower " is dependent on China for advanced

technology products and is dependent on Asia to

finance its massive deficits and foreign wars. In view

of the rapid collapse of US economic potential, my

prediction in January 2004 that the US would be a

third world economy in 20 years was optimistic.

Another five years like the last, and little will be

left. America's capacity to export manufactured goods

has been so reduced that some economists say that

there is no exchange rate at which the US can balance

its trade.

 

McMillion reports that median household income has

fallen for a record fifth year in succession. Growth

in consumer spending has resulted from households

spending their savings and equity in their homes. In

2005 for the first time since the Great Depression in

the 1930s, American consumers spent more than they

earned, and the government budget deficit was larger

than all business savings combined. American

households are paying a record share of their

disposable income to service their debts.

 

With America hemorrhaging red ink in every direction,

how much longer can the dollar hold on to its role as

world reserve currency?

 

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the

cradle of the propaganda that globalization is win-win

for all concerned. Free trader Stephen Roach of Morgan

Stanley reports that the mood at the recently

concluded Davos meeting was different, because the

predicted " wins " for the industrialized world have not

made an appearance.

 

Roach writes that " job creation and real wages in the

mature, industrialized economies have seriously lagged

historical norms. It is now commonplace for recoveries

in the developed world to be either jobless or

wageless--or both. "

 

Roach is the first free trade economist to admit that

the disruptive technology of the Internet has dashed

the globalization hopes. It was supposed to work like

this: The first world would lose market share in

tradable manufactured goods and make up the job and

economic loss with highly-educated knowledge workers.

The " win-win " was supposed to be cheaper manufactured

goods for the first world and more and better jobs for

the third world.

 

It did not work out this way, Roach writes, because

the Internet allowed job outsourcing to quickly

migrate from call centers and data processing to the

upper end of the value chain, displacing first world

employees in " software programming, engineering,

design, and the medical profession, as well as a broad

array of professionals in the legal, accounting,

actuarial, consulting, and financial services

industries. "

 

This is what I have been writing for years, while the

economics profession adopted a position of total

denial. The first world gainers from globalization are

the corporate executives, who gain millions of dollars

in bonuses by arbitraging labor and substituting

cheaper foreign labor for first world labor. For the

past decade free market economists have served as

apologists for corporate interests that are

dismantling the ladders of upward mobility in the US

and creating what McMillion writes is the worst income

inequality on record.

 

Globalization is wiping out the American middle class

and terminating jobs for university graduates, who now

serve as temps, waitresses and bartenders. But the

whores among economists and the evil men and women in

the Bush administration still sing globalization's

praises.

 

The state of the nation has never been worse. The

Great Depression was an accident caused by the

incompetence of the Federal Reserve, which was still

new at its job. The new American job depression is the

result of free trade ideology. The new job depression

is creating a reserve army of the unemployed to serve

as desperate recruits for neoconservative military

adventures. Perhaps that explains the Bush

administration's enthusiasm for globalization.

 

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the

Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was

Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial

page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is

coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be

reached at: paulcraigroberts

 

 

 

 

NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security

Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice.

They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You

have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of

the current President.

 

 

" The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty

to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will

preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has

been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national

morality, and the family as the basis of national life. "

 

Adolph Hitler (My New World Order, Proclamation to the German Nation

at Berlin, February 1, 1933)

 

 

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