I understand that China can't just take their ball and go home. But we can't either. It is the interdependency of the economies that makes me question your premise when you say: "Every time a leftie talks about saving our jobs, they're also saying "screw the poor Chinese" and of course the rest of the world's poor schmoes, unless they have a strategy to do both." Before I can follow the idea of a strategy that "does both", I need to understand what just saving jobs here looks like first. You say yourself that isolation would not bring it about. Therefore the choice you offer is not really one of choosing between two different possible outcomes.

What you have presented in your post is basically the model of neo-Liberalism espoused by Hayek, the Friedmans (Milton and Thomas) and Fukuyama . The general idea of the expansion of markets as a means of sharing prosperity is a well established idea. These gentlemen are not representitives of any Left that I am aware of.

When I think of a leftist point of view about trade, criticisms of NAFTA like this one come to mind: http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/commentary/data/000192, where the opening of Haiti's market destroyed their rice growing industry.

Ack, it's just that it seems to me one can often find a comment by you on an "esoteric" and unpopular thread, you're part of that whole scenery. 

Now ... I went and removed all the "this is total dribble" stuff from my reply. But yeah. This is some fluff-headed nonsense stacked on top of a bunch of mischaracterizations or flat out, dare I say demonstratively, wrong statements.

or they didn't realize I was Des 

well, I for one didn't.

I'm having trouble with this whole discussion. You must realize that at the same time we protected "Wall Street bankers" they were throwing tens of thousands of financial services WORKERS off the job. Maybe talk to someone from Manhattan about how all that worked out. It just feels like you don't even have the most basic understanding of deliniations between workers, management, executive officers and shareholders.

And where did you get this at "least 95%+" figure for China? You pulled it out of your ass. Truth is that Chinese people employed by places like Foxconn make less than $4 daily while being forced to labor 16 hours every day, live in barrack-stlye on site housing and eat jailhouse-quality food provided in mass cafaterias. That's their whole life. And they are increasingly choosing to END that by killing themselves rather than continue. And those are the ones who have it GOOD. Then there is the literal slavery ... people kidnapped from thier villages and forced to work in mines and shit - with the owners giving kickbacks to local party officials to keep the whole thing greased. If they ever get media attention the officials are often executed, but their crime is embarrasing the government not promoting slavery. So they are quickly replaced by another set of officials who keep the system rolling right along. Economic opportunity is such that acquiring one of these positions is well worth the minor risk of losing one's life if ever exposed to Western consumers. Those resources go into the products we buy and are a big reason they can be produced so inexpensively. All this is well documented if you bothered to do even the most rudimetary reasearch before posting.

I don't doubt that you are well meaning. But you are regurgitating the most superficial of meda propeganda and adding in a bunch of stuff you really believe, I don't doubt, but that is ultimately total bullshit. When you can actually articulate the critiques with Bush's record that you have "seen" then it might be more appropriate to revisit this subject from a position of actual knowledge.

And maybe learn a bit about me before lumping me in with the "ham-handed left" as a group.

Shit. sounds like we agree...

Like I said, my problem was more with the way you seemed to be framing it. As for reviving the manufacturing sector, I think a smarter industrial policy can do alot. I haven't dug into the details, but there are probably lessons to be learned from Germany's strong high-end manufacturing sector, and Denmark replacing their pig farms with windmill factories. I look at stuff like Mexican workers being as productive at half the cost, but no one mentions the fact that unit labor costs are a tiny fraction of what goes into overall production costs. All kinds of other factors will determine where to build your factory - infrastructure, incentives, regulatory environment, ... infrastructure!

Jesus man, when you just throw every goddamn thought you've got into the stew, some of it is just such shit it ruins the entire meal. "We're just as uptight about sharing the wealth as the conservatives." Really? REALLY? I read that and I get a bit upset, you know. As in, there's at least 20% SERIOUS goddamn unemployment wandering around out there, including all through my family. And they are cutting off and carving off the benefits a fast as they're damned well able. And a lot of people have drained everything they had. Health care ain't no walk in the park either. And not sure you've noticed but the shits that just arrived in town want to kill health care help, want to cut back on money for jobs, cut taxes for the rich, and kill all those other extra benefits. So I got suffering right across my family, and huge amounts of stress, and sure, maybe I can handle it, maybe you can handle it, but there's a lot of Joe Schmoe's out there, without education, without easy mobility, and they're damn sure not thriving.

So maybe try not to say stuff like "we" aren't into sharing the wealth, just like the Conservatives, lest I tell you that, personally, that's real hard for people to take right now. And... up yours. Because the people I'm seeing in hard times have zero net assets, zero net wealth, zero safety margin, zero employment. And any frigging Conservative I've heard bleating on about trade with China being important to help their starving millions is talking out their incredibly rich, greedy, gun-toting, God-swilling, scientice-hating ass. So yeah, like I said. This kind of statement is irritating, offensive, nonsense. IMHO.

*

Ok. Trade. I think the American political-level argument around this stuff is straight out asinine. Like watching idiots batter one another. FREE TRADEZ!!!1 PROTECTIONZ!!!!1+1 I mean, holy shit or what. Crap. And then this races off, as we often get here, into a lot of crap about who wants to save the world. SAVEZ THE PORE CHINESE FELLERS!!!!1+1+1!

But just for the moment, let's drop the grand talk about the American consumer or worker or corporation or trade saving the world, eh? And figure out how to save the US without dooming the world. 

I really find individual-firm-based talk to be almost useless, most particularly where we get highblown examples about some company that's doing X or Y. Much of it is Business School mumbo-jumbo, but hey, we all love them examples about entrepreneurial firms and go gettem kid and save the world through innovation and global, but... BLARG. Cause then we all have to listen to a whole new generation of equally cack-handed lefties to go out and discover child labour and double-dealing and hello Naomi Klein.

The other route seems to be the grand abstractions, where it's all about 150 year history and exchange rates and gains from trade and such, and how nice the world would be if we were all angels and had wings. I mean....BLARGX2? Who believes this stuff? Sorry kids, but if Governments don't do the right thing, or you miss a step, and don't have that road or university or capital or tax rate in place at the right time, and you miss a generation of local economic expansion, you really DO die and go to hell. Pittsburgh's success notwithstanding.

Where I'd rather look is, on the production end, at whole sectors. Which sectors can we grow. And how? And to recognize that most of the world's great trading nations have actually been built with MASSIVE PUBLIC-PRIVATE SUBSIDIES, INVESTMENTS & UMBRELLAS TO KEY SECTORS. And that means looking at the level in-between that of the individual magical CEO-led God-loving private firm and that of the grand national abstraction.

That's the only way I find I can really make sense of it, and also, I think it is - realistically, practically, actually and factually - how the world works. You can go in, short-term,, and distort policy for one company - hell, even send in gunboats to help em out - but you ned Industrial Strategy. And in the US right now, I don't see much of that. 

And I have no idea where sectoral-level industrial strategizing has gone, in this world of grand global statements about whether we have the Chinese by the balls or vice-versa, and who hates Chinese children more, us or them? The Dems need to be on this ground, and own it.

*

As for ME, I don't think any of this is enough. And yes, I DO think people that think the US can waddle and befuddle its way through this mess, with conventional policies, are deluded. There just is NOT any way the American consumer can somehow revive national consumption spending, pay down personal debt, handle rising health costs, oil price difficulties, put more aside for future retirement, handle the inevitable future Federal tax increases, plus knock down the trade deficit by increasing their production and tightening their consumption, all the time while facing absolute breathtaking waves of powerful and capable new foreign competitors AND while handling the enormous income and wealth differentials in the US today.

Sorry. It's not on. There is no magic math that makes this work. And so, this kindof debate bugs me, carried out as is. Debated as "China" versus "the US," it just makes me think of kids trading baseball cards, you know? For myself, I'm pondering ways to do the inevitable - enable the working and middle classes to build down wasteful consumption. So they can meet their needs, but with reduced debt, less vulnerability to global shifts, reduced imports, and increased employment, at least in the short-term. But for Dems - and our political debate today - that sort of thing gets very little grip. Politically, there's a consensus that we're not going to get into the business of shaping our consumption choices - which we've equated with "freedom." Which strikes me as hilarious, when we're up against CHINA - as though they've been shy about shaping consumption policies! Anyway, I'll just leave that there, as a debate we're not gonna have in advance, but rather, we're just gonna push enormous reductions in consumption and welfare on the weakest and hey, they shouldn't have been in whaling anyway. 

Let me just take the green/infrastructure stuff.

1. I'm not in any way convinced public transit does it for the U.S. Now, I've never owned a car, always used feet and transit, so I'm not kneejerk against it. But American housing and employment patterns make any significant shift of share to transit tough. As in, we're just not going to see more than 10% of trips shift in my lifetime - and that's way more than most aggressive plans call for. Nope, we're in cars.

And that's a desperate place to be. Because, for starters, as the US devalues, the cost of oil/gas is gonna rise, right? We're sneaking back up on $100/bbl. Obama had the right response, which is electric vehicles, and in particular, plug-in hybrids like the Volt or the Plug-In Prius. But with the failure of Washington-level policy and spending, the roll-out has just walked itself onto a huge patch of ice. Ultimately, it gets us OFF OIL though, so that's grand.

2. But the main problem, long-term? Ummmm, China, frankly. EVs and PHEVs can do the trick we need, in terms of getting us off oil and cutting carbon. That's clear. But EVs and PHEVs also quite effectively melt down traditional auto parts supply chains - the Japanese are stressing about this right now. Which means China no longer faces some of the barriers to entry it used to. The big part in the future is batteries baby, that's the show. And China can just ignore robots and automation in this and throw huge hand-assembly labour at it, dirt and dangers and pollution and all.

Now, if China's gearing up to export cars anyway, what will this do? Well... we've just removed a huge value and quality and supply chain advantage we had. And EVs and PHEVs are gonna face one consumer barrier - namely, the extra price of having a battery. So, we can get out of oil, away from those carbon emissions, and we WOULD make huge trade gains, except that China's gonna come eat our lunch on that front. Ouch. 

3. It's similar sets of problems on wind, and yeah, I guess it's begun to bug me. Cause we've all worked like crazy to develop wind, right? So we can get off oil,  cut carbon etc. And now? We can. It's damned cheap, for huge tranches of the country. However, because of Reagan and his idiocy, most of the technology wandered to Europe, especially Denmark. And as a complete fluke of history, GE ended up buying the major remaining US-based firm, because it got rubbled by Enron. And GE is fighting using every trade-related move it can, to keep global wind firms from locating plants in the US.

Anyhoo, so firms are now beginning to build the hardest-to-ship components in the US - the blades and the towers. Which is nice. Success right? But the guts of the turbine, the gears and such tucked up inside the nacelle, are still largely manufactured globally. And it's damned difficult to see us starting plants making these, and winning them back from the Germans.

4. Meanwhile, China is going berserk laying out wind. And feeling no qualms about taking other people's technology. So now, with state-subsidies that are somewhat beyond belief, they're growing firms that we have NO chance of beating, if and as they choose to pump up the export volumes on these finer parts. 

So what we're gonna be left with is towers and probably blades. Plus, we get the construction jobs (that move as teams across the continent, like grain harvesters.) And a small number of operations jobs.

Conclusion: This still makes wind better than coal, yes. Like the Volt is better than a Malibu. But. While I'm primarily a Green at heart, and this cheers me up, I've always worked the economic development, jobs and trade end of things. Mr Green Jobs, from 1990. And so, it's very very VERY hard to see how the US gains any major exports in EVs/PHEVs, Wind, Solar, etc. In fact, it's hard to see how it even makes it up to PAR in these fields, in terms of trade. The US runs a deficit on Green Products right now, and I'd say, it's actually going to INCREASE in the future.  It would be doable, to fight the Germans and Danes and Japanese - and I can go through this, firm by firm, Vestas and Mitsubishi and Honda and BMW and all - but with China coming IN just now, it's disheartening as hell. 

Great link, Miguel, and more succinct than the ones I'd found.  Jeez:

Now the Economic War experienced a great "surge" under those fightin' progressives, NAFTA-men Bill Clinton and Al Gore:

The broader effects of NAFTA and the reforms that accompanied it were more diffuse and far more destructive. A constitutional amendment passed as a precondition for the trade pact did away with the legislation that since the 1930s had forbidden the private sale of communally held farmland. Now cheap and highly subsidised American corn flooded the Mexican market. Local farmers were unable to compete: 1.1 million small farmers and 1.4 million others dependent on the agricultural sector lost their livelihoods. Campesinos left ancestral holdings, forced into the uncertainties of migrancy, both within Mexico and abroad. Villages were left almost abandoned. In a few short years, extraordinary wealth was concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority while the dream of an agrarian republic that had sustained the country for most of the 20th century collapsed. The anticipated shift to export-oriented manufacturing was a failure. Few of the promised jobs in the foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras materialised. The ones that did soon vanished as companies pursued still cheaper labour in China.

As a result of the "reforms" of the progressive duo, almost a third of the Mexican people have been forced into penurious, petty hustling and scrabbling to eke out an existence on the margins of modernity:

Nearly 30 per cent of the population now works in the informal economy – washing car windows on street corners, selling tacos, sodas, DVDs. Cuts to education have helped create a new class of young people: the 7.5 million so-called ninis who aren’t in school and don’t have jobs (‘ni estudian ni trabajan’). The minimum wage has lost two thirds of its buying power and nearly half the population lives in poverty. In his book on the epidemic of murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Huesos en el desierto (‘Bones in the Desert’, 2002), González Rodríguez wrote of the vast new class of the uprooted and excluded, poor migrants from the countryside who now find themselves wandering in a ‘vertiginous universe of technology and productivity, merchandise and calculation’.

In the 1990s, "neoliberals" -- i.e., ball-crushing boardroom Bolsheviks committed to the crony capitalism knownlaughingly as "free trade" -- took power in Mexico, with predictable 'shock doctrine' results: " and on into the nightmares...

Here's the Global Central Bank link; ususally war reporting stories get me linked to this site, so I don't know if it's legitimate site with legitimate opinion or not.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21504