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? . . .
Irrelevant. Irrelevant. Irrelevant.
It's not the unemployment level. It's the quality of job -- losing better-paying ones that are replaced with lower- paying service jobs. This is basic to the entire debate. You're on some other planet.
As to your alternative explanations for what is not at issue:
technological change: this is the mainstream explanation, refutations of which are in the literature, including EPI research.
macroeconomic policy: is part of the anti-global discourse. Check the AFL statement again.
the general law of capital accumulation on a world scale: FYI, this is not the preferred explanation because the U.S. labor movement is not communist.
RK said: "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."
Most of this is in the mix, excepting the quaint notion that the U.S. working class should go to the mat for OPEC.
mbs
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