"When Americans No Longer Own America" -- a very important collection of
information
Published on Monday, February 27, 2006 by
CommonDreams.org
When Americans No Longer Own America
by Thom Hartmann
The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a
painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat
world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their
own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off
America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority
pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade
deals involving "most favored nation status" for
dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into
NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the
principles of tariff-based trade that built American
industry and kept us strong for over 200 years.
The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth
of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and
somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there
may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes,
we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a
90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies
could choose to make their products here or overseas,
but the ultimate cost of labor would be the same.
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true
believers and promoted by multinational corporations.
Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they
"restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing.
The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming
into our nation, and the loss of millions of good
manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing
companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped
out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle
class. Our nation's largest employer has gone from
being the unionized General Motors to the
poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from
having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the
1970s to a minus .5 percent in 2005 - meaning that
they're going into debt or selling off their assets
just to maintain their lifestyle.
At the same time, federal policy has been to do the
same thing at a national level. Because our so-called
"free trade" policies have left us with an over $700
billion annual trade deficit, other countries are
sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to
buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost"
retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they
want to buy with those dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are
doing what we used to do with Third World nations -
they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In
particular, they want to buy things in America that
will continue to produce profits, and then to take
those profits overseas where they're invested to make
other nations strong. The "things" they're buying are,
by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural
resources.
Back in the pre-Reagan days, American companies made
profits that were distributed among Americans. They
used their profits to build more factories, or
diversify into other businesses. The profits stayed in
America.
Today, foreigners awash with our consumer dollars are
on a two-decades-long buying spree. The UK's BP bought
Amoco for $48 billion - now Amoco's profits go to
England. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream Wireless,
so their profits go to Germany, which is where most of
the profits from Random House, Allied Signal,
Chrysler, Doubleday, Cyprus Amax's US Coal Mining
Operations, GTE/Sylvania, and Westinghouse's Power
Generation profits go as well. Ralston Purina's
profits go to Switzerland, along with Gerber's;
TransAmerica's profits go to The Netherlands, while
John Hancock Insurance's profits go to Canada. Even
American Bankers Insurance Group is owned now by
Fortis AG in Belgium.
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our
power generating systems, our mines, and our few
remaining factories. All because "flat world"
so-called "free trade" policies have turned us from a
nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted
consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are
most easily used to buy off big chunks of America. As
www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government
statistics indicate the following percentages of
foreign ownership of American industry:
· Sound recording industries - 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
· Metal ore mining - 65%
· Motion picture and video industries - 64%
· Wineries and distilleries - 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
· Book publishers - 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment -
57%
· Rubber product - 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
· Plastics product - 51%
· Other insurance related activities - 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%
· Glass and glass product - 48%
· Coal mining - 48%
· Sugar and confectionery product - 48%
· Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%
· Advertising and related services - 41%
· Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%
· Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral
products - 40%
· Securities brokerage - 38%
· Other general purpose machinery - 37%
· Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing
magnetic and optical media - 36%
· Support activities for mining - 36%
· Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation -
32%
· Chemical manufacturing - 30%
· Industrial machinery - 30%
· Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial
investments and related activities - 30%
· Other food - 29%
· Motor vehicles and parts - 29%
· Machinery manufacturing - 28%
· Other electrical equipment and component - 28%
· Securities and commodity exchanges and other
financial investment activities - 27%
· Architectural, engineering, and related services -
26%
· Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%
· Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%
· Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control
instruments - 25%
· Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%
· Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%
· Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%
· Basic chemical - 24%
· Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%
· Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%
· Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%
· Printing and related support activities - 21%
· Chemical product and preparation - 20%
· Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%
· Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery -
20%
· Publishing industries - 20%
· Medical equipment and supplies - 20%
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold
off our ports as well, and will defend it to the
bitter end. They truly believe that a "New World
Order" with multinational corporations in charge
instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to
the problem of world instability. And therefore they
must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy
middle class, and, ultimately, democracy.
The "security" implications of turning our ports over
to the UAE are just the latest nail in what the cons
hope will be the coffin of American democracy and the
American middle class. Today's conservatives believe
in rule by inherited wealth and an internationalist
corporate elite, and things like a politically aroused
citizenry and a healthy democracy are pesky
distractions.
Everything today is driven by profits for
multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of
the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in
China, a country that last year threatened us with
nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that
birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14
Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade
buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the
Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to
use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in
America is being held down by over ten million illegal
workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five
years ago when unions were the first bulwark against
dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the
Declaration of Independence, "He has combined with
others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving
his assent to their acts of pretended legislation." he
just as easily could have been writing of the World
Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority
to force the United States to overturn laws passed at
both local, state, and federal levels with dictates
devised by tribunals made up of representatives of
multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the
American Congress, their next stop will almost
certainly be the WTO.
As Simon Romero and Heather Timmons noted in The New
York Times on 24 February 2006, "the international
shipping business has evolved in recent years to
include many more containers with consumer goods, in
addition to old-fashioned bulk commodities, and that
has helped lift profit margins to 30 percent, from the
single digits. These smartly managed foreign operators
now manage about 80 percent of port terminals in the
United States."
And those 30 percent profits from American port
operations now going to Great Britain will probably
soon go to the United Arab Emirates, a nation with
tight interconnections to both the Bush administration
and the Bush family.
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about
money. In the multinational corporatocracy's "flat
world," money trumps the national good, community
concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA,
CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do -
strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's
"Rights of Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's
"Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port
security to avoid disasters that may lead to war.
After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York
Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi
Arabia: "War is good for business."
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning
best-selling author of over a dozen books and the host
of a nationally syndicated noon-3pm ET daily
progressive talk show syndicated by Air America Radio.
www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "What
Would Jefferson Do?" and Ultimate Sacrifice
--
Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was
German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody
that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody
could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest
trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I
believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze. - Verbal
Kint
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