>If you look at the trade stats you will see that this year January thru
>October our trade deficit in manufactured trade goods has already reached
>about 225 billion dollars. Interestingly enough our agricultural trade
>surplus has shrunk to less than 10 billion dollars.
Tom, I ask you again: why no surge in US unemployment from that run up of the the American current account and trade deficits if globalization is stealing "American" jobs?
Two answers seem possible:
1. unemployment has indeed been rising due to the influx of mfg imports, though we have to measure it as a truly radical Keynesian Joan Robinson would have: the working poor in low productivity 'services', the discouraged, the incarcerated, the underemployed all cannot find a real job, and thus should be counted among the unemployed (the EPI reports do contain excellent evidence of the explosion in low wage and very low wage employment between 79 and 95).
But why blame real unemployment on 'trade' or 'other countries' barriers' rather than 'technological change', 'macroeconomic' policy, the workings of 'the general law of capital accumulation' on a world scale?
It seems possible here that the AFL-CIO is ready to revive the dark side of Keynesian national policy--beggar-thy-neighbor policies towards the export of global unemployment.
What Seattle marks the ensconcement of is simply the Buchananish view that foreign ruling classes due to their trade 'barriers' and use of child labor that force the relocation of 'our' corporations abroad are truly at the root of American labor's weakness so evident in the inability to take advantage of a tight labor market--though no labor movement can actually proclaim openly such a fundamentally nationalist outlook (but read between the lines). With this nationalism comes greater legitimacy for the revival of myths of a common American identity founded in a common history, the kind of crap that the Schlessingers, if not Buchanans, have been promulgating for some time.
2. the massive imports only represent the real surplus the US enjoys gratis at the expense of the rest of the world by simply printing and handing over greenbacks (or IOU's as Enrique would put it) for real goods and services (foreigners will continue to hold dollar denominated assets because they need dollars for oil, other commodities, intl transactions, weapons and military protection, etc). Indeed the supply side relief such fire sale imports have provided vis a vis profitability difficulties explains the American boom and therewith the low unemployment rate (Robt Gordon has suggested so much).
If the AFL-CIO's internationalism is for real, let them couple their call for the lowering of other countries' trade barriers with a demand for the US to dismantle its military state; withdraw from the Gulf and allow OPEC to accept a basket of currencies, instead of only the dollar; cancel foreign debt; allow inclusion of commodity stabilization mechanisms, nixed by the US Congress back in 1947; weaken intellectual property rights that allow US high tech exports to sell above value; and reverse deflationary IMF policy.
All this would indeed help American labor against the dislocations caused by distress exports meant and needed to secure dollars. American labor indeed does not benefit from American imperialism, and should instead spearhead the movement against it. But quite the opposite seems probable presently--I would not trust at all Sweeney and Hoffa (Carey was indeed a much more sympathetic figure).
At any rate, unless the AFL-CIO is willing to fight the burden its OWN govt imposes on the rest of the world and thereby via those distress exports on American labor itself, it is in no position to dictate to other govts what they are allowed to do in earning the dollars they must have to operate in a world hegemonized by the US.
By the way, I checked out the pen-l archives at csf.colorado.edu; there are posts there from around Dec 9 by Korea expert Martin Hart Landsberg that I think speak quite well to the same point I was trying to make in my earlier posts.
Yours, Rakesh