Made in America?

Here's something sad, maddening and a bit amusing:

Made in America: Corporate PR, Not Practice

Big Business wants it both ways: It wants to wrap itself in the ol’ red, white and blue while feeding the decline of the U.S. economy through its actual practices.

Here’s the latest example of such corporate hypocrisy. Over the Memorial Day weekend, J.C. Penney advertised a silkscreen T-shirt bearing the slogan, “American Made.” Yet when Joe Allen, a retired apparel manufacturer in the Dallas area, bought the T-shirt, he found it actually was made in Mexico—”of USA fabric.”

Allen didn’t just shrug off such a blatant sleight of hand. He took action, contacting Steve Capozzola at the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Capozzola sent an e-mail to J.C. Penney, saying that the ad was deceptive and asking why the shirt “was emblazoned with an ‘American Made’ slogan when it was in fact made in Mexico.”

Here’s what J.C. Penney spokesperson Kelly Sanchez had to say:

"You indicate that there was a shirt that depicted the slogan “American Made.” This type of slogan is referring to the actual person wearing the shirt and not to the manufacturing of the merchandise."

Full article at the AFL-CIO Blog.

Please fasten your seatbelts...the economy will be going through a little turbulence...

I remember being about 10 years old, flying with my family to South America. I was in the restroom when I heard over the loudspeaker, "Please fasten your seatbelts. We might be experiencing a little turbulence." I was standing there, doing my business, and I couldn't just stop. Suddenly, the plane fell violently and my head hit the ceiling. The plane shook up and down and back and forth for about a second or two. Then the plane leveled out. As I came out of the bathroom, I could see that several passengers had cuts and bruises but it appeared that everyone was okay.

I mention all this to say that our economy will be going through the same type of turbulence. I do not think that our economy will fall out of the sky. On the other hand, I don't believe that this $700 billion "rescue package" will fix everything immediately either.

After 28 years of bleeding the economy dry, we have some work to do to get it back on the right track. We have a deficit that has just exploded over $10 trillion. We have to convince foreign investors that we are serious in paying off our country's debt. We need balanced budgets, which means we'll need a tax increase to increase revenues. The tax increase can be levied on the upper five to 10% of wage earners since they make more than the bottom 50% of wage earners.

Consumers have to understand that the credit markets will tighten. For a while, banks are going to be reluctant to hand out loans of almost any kind. Small businesses are going to be in a vise grip for a while. It may be 12 to 18 months before credit loosens up significantly.

I suspect there will be more bank failures. The one extremely positive thing that has come out of this "rescue bill" is that the FDIC will cover deposits up to $250,000.

The underlying problem with our economy is not fixed by a $700 billion redistribution. There is a grave imbalance between wages and home values. This imbalance can be fixed by one of two methods -- increased wages or decreased home values. Floyd Norris writes an economic blog for the New York Times. A couple of days ago, he posted a solution that someone had sent to him:

Here is a simple idea that might help address part of this this very un-simple mess. Take $100B and buy 500,000 empty homes for an average of $200,000, and destroy the homes. A shortage of available housing will push the market value of existing homes up, building trades will boom, mortgages will start to happen again (with new terms that NEVER offer less than 15% down) and then we can go to work on how to split up A.I.G. and the three remaining banks in the country…

Having had nine straight months of job loss, it is hard to say that we're not sitting in a recession. It is going to take a while for us to extricate ourselves from this financial disaster. Black Monday, which was back in 1987, caused some economic hardship but because we made things in this country back then it was relatively easy to pull ourselves out. Now we don't make anything. Large portions of cars are made overseas. Computers are assembled in Malaysia and Singapore. The factories which produced all of the furniture and garments in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina have been shipped overseas. The making of appliances like washers and dryers has been shipped either to Mexico or to China. We have turned ourselves into a service country. We need to reinvent ourselves as a people who make things because things have value.

Barack Obama has rightly suggested that companies which ship their goods overseas to be made and then ship them back in the country need to have all of that merchandise taxed. Companies who stay in the United States and make a product from beginning to end here in the US need to be rewarded with tax breaks. This is what Barack Obama has proposed. He has also proposed that we invest in alternative energies. Through a combination of tax breaks, grants and tax incentives, we will begin to make things again in this country. Whether it is nuclear plants or solar panels or large wind turbines, we will make things of value in the US again.

We need to buckle our seat belts and prepare for a bumpy ride.

Hillary Can Run But Can't Hide from NAFTA

Clinton Claims That She Had Nothing To Do With Supporting NAFTA.

Oh Really?


Obama Responds to the Clinton Tirade on NAFTA


The Following Commentary From David Sirota at the Huffington Post

In response to Barack Obama's attack on NAFTA, the Hillary Clinton campaign has gone into meltdown mode. Here's Dow Jones' Marketwatch:

"Clinton's campaign fired back at Obama, charging the Illinois senator with misrepresenting Clinton's position on trade...'Recently [Obama] falsely claimed that Hillary said that NAFTA was a 'boon' to the economy. Now, Obama is resting his argument on a single paraphrase from an article written twelve years ago,' Clinton's campaign said in an emailed statement."

The Huffington Post has followed along with a laugh-out-loud piece in which the chief architects of NAFTA (many who are now wealthy corporate lawyers and lobbyists) are now saying, no, no, Hillary Clinton was really opposed to it. These are the same people, of course, who are looking for jobs in the Hillary Clinton White House.
What a total joke, really. This campaign clearly thinks we are all just a bunch of fools.

Hillary Clinton has made statements unequivocally trumpeting NAFTA as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The Buffalo News reports that back in 1998, Clinton attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and thanked praised corporations for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA." Yes, you read that right: She traveled to Davos to thank corporate interests for their campaign ramming NAFTA through Congress.

On November 1, 1996, United Press International reported that on a trip to Brownsville, Texas, Clinton "touted the president's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would reap widespread benefits in the region."

The Associated Press followed up the next day noting that Hillary Clinton touted the fact that "the president would continue to support economic growth in South Texas through initiatives such as the North American Free Trade Agreement."

In her memoir, Clinton wrote, "Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for president in 1996. He couldn't hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill's successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA."

Yes, we are all expected to just forget that, so that Hillary Clinton's campaign can manufacture supposed "outrage" that anyone would say she supported NAFTA - all at a time her chief strategist, Mark Penn, simultaneously heads a firm that is right now pushing to expand NAFTA into South America.

What a total insult to America's intelligence.


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Further Reading:

As of November 2007, Clinton's position has been that she will vote to expand NAFTA.

Obama's response to Clinton's claim that she had nothing to do with NAFTA...that she never supported the deal.

Details of Hillary's Public Support for NAFTA.... What She Said, and when she said it.


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Hillary On Record Supporting NAFTA


Hillary and NAFTA from Meet The Press