[mbs] This assails my motives, which you have no way of knowing. Debates over motives are boring.
"You refuse to give any quantitative estimate of how much increased imports from the third world accounts for the growing percentage of low wage jobs in total employment in the US (see the Wood/Lawrence debate to which James Galbraith has made a contribution); thus, you play on the common psychological mechanism of all embattled workers to externalize the source of their problem on foreign ruling classes, thereby allowing alliance with its own ruling class (again the new common sense seems to be that foreign ruling classes are responsible for our real unemployment because they have forced 'our' companies to relocate by imposing trade barriers and using very cheap labor)."
[mbs] A wild extrapolation. I've said I think trade is over-emphasized, even at EPI. But I also think its importance is non-zero.
"Plus, you left econ type guys sense that deficit spending has come up against political and economic limits (see Mattick, Marx and Keynes: the limits of the mixed economy), so you are not left with any solution to real unemployment but aggressive national trade politics."
[mbs] In the context of what I have written and published for all the world to see about deficits, this is hilarious.
"And what do you hear about aircraft, that China wants some parts of the production process to be located in China in order to ease the transfer of tech and ensure the employment of some local labor? So you think these jobs rightfully belong to Americans who under the brave leadership of Sweeney should thus export all unemployment abroad. At any rate, you admit here that the chief concern is not the unemployment effect from cheap Chinese exports but maintainence of an international division of labor that maintains American centealisation over the highest technology while the rest of the world suffers ever worse terms of trade. Not social imperialism? Please."
[mbs] If workers are fighting to keep the better-paying jobs that they still have, I support them. Some things really shouldn't require justification on a left list.
"So, yes, you are not fighting to open up China but to export unemployment as your chief solution to the problems of American labor given the limits of your favored fiscal and monetary Keynesian solutions. Really you'll just end up walking in the footsteps of your hero, ending up in the dystopia of national populism which has another name, itself simply an advanced form of imperialism. Yours, Rakesh"
[mbs] Opposing job flight is not "exporting unemployment." Claiming that Keynesian policies are no longer feasible is exporting unemployment. It's the IMF line. There's your imperialism.
mbs