>The crowd went aghast when an ethnic studies graduate
>student excoriated them for their selfishness. "How
>dare you deprive your Mexican brethren of their right
>to benefit from an improved international division of
>labor!" he ejaculated. The workers hung their heads
>in shame. But there was more to come.
Max, I guess this is the kind of argument Barkley was waiting for. But this is your nasty little response to the long list of challenges I sent you. Wow! I hope at the least the whiskey that put you to sleep at your computer was as good as what I drank last night.
First, we need to know how many such mfg jobs have been lost due to such relocation, instead of rationalisation. The workers should not hang their heads in shame; they should have a fairly accurate sense of what the underlying determinants of their plight is. But it is interesting how far you have swerved off your empiricist path after the dogs of nationalism have been released. In fact you have gone from being a positivist economist (not very good for making his case for the stimulus of deficits even with your own econometric tools) and a relatively harmless delusional who thinks he has some window on the heart and soul of the American people to one of those dogs of nationalism. At any rate, you have yet to even suggest an estimate about how much such relocation explains the loss of good mfg jobs (from which you would have to minus how much globalisation has increased such good jobs).
Secondly, you have already suggested (weakly) that the main battle is not ban on imports from relocated factories but to prevent other countries from demanding local employment, tech transfer as condition of purchase of, say, aircraft, mainframes, etc to be used domestically. Or to prevent other countries from using trade barriers to build high tech industries of their own, e.g., Brazil's attempt to build a domestic computer industry. You may remember that with the threat of vers, trigger price mechanisms, etc. the US has forced Japan in particular to relocate factories in the US, i.e., forced employment of US labor either directly or through local content laws, if Japanese companies were to penetrate the American market.American labor seems to have been happy with such pressure even if Japanese corps often located in right to work states.
This seems to be what Sweeney is fighting to prevent other countries, viz. China, from doing. (Add to this the hypocricy of saying nothing about obscenely skewed capital flows.) And if you call for a ban on FDI in countries with retrograde labor laws, what are you proposing to ensure that tech is transferred and that the US does not use super 301 to prevent any semi colonial country from building up some capital goods in order to be free of the need to buy them on the world market as the terms of trade collpase and the advanced capitalist countries impose myriad restrictions of their own?
Yours, Rakesh Bhandari Ph.D. Candidate Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley
ps I am off for the break. There is a new book out Howard Strong, What Every Credit Card User Needs to Know: How To Protect Yourself and Your Money (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). Perhaps this will prove helpful.
Doug is probably correct that I have overspoken on H and S. But I'll have to respond later.