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Three Days In
And Trump Has Already Kept One Pledge
By Paul Craig
Roberts
January 24,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- On Trump’s third day Trump is one up on the
Establishment. Can this last?
I am not a
Trump booster. I am a scorekeeper.
On the third
day of his presidency Donald Trump signed an executive
order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacificic
Partnership (TPP). Based on this we must assume he will
also deep-six the Trans-Atlantic Partnership.
Trump and his
advisors regard the Pacific and Atlantic partnerships as
trade deals like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade
Agreement that sent American jobs to Mexico at the
expense of Americans.
However, the
most strategic part of these agreements is that they
make global corporations immune from the laws of the
countries in which they do business if those laws
adversely impact the profits of the global corporations.
Who decides the
question? Not the courts of the countries or a world
court.
The question is decided by a corporate tribunal staffed
only by corporations.
In other words,
the sovereign laws of sovereign countries, such as
France’s laws against GMOs, are subject to damage suits
decided by corporate tribunals, which means the end of
the legal sovereignty of countries.
The so-called
trade partnerships are weapons of American economic
imperialism.
Whether Trump
and his advisors are aware of this or not, Trump has on
his third day dealt a lethal blow to a power lusted
after by US global corporations.
How will this
formidable force respond to this blow inflicted upon
them by Trump?
That remains to
be seen if the blows that Trump has promised against the
interests of the elites continue.
Global
corporations are Fifth Columns in the countries in which
they are incorporated and also in the foreign countries
in which they do business. They have no loyalty to any
country, only to the profits that comprise their bottom
line. Anything that increases those profits they regard
as legitimate. Anything that diminishes those profits
they regard as illegitimate.
Modern
capitalism is a profit-driven world, in which
capitalists are devoid of the loyalty to their native
countries that Adam Smith and David Ricardo assumed them
to have. US global corporations have demonstrated their
disloyalty to the US by moving US jobs to Asia. Think
Apple, Nike, Levi, and all the rest. Jobs offshoring
separates consumers from the incomes associated with the
production of the goods that they consume, which leads
to penury.
The rewards for
the offshoring global corporations have been large
profits from reduced labor and regulatory costs,
resulting in executive “performance bonuses” and capital
gains to shareholders and to executives with stock
options or some similar income booster.
The costs have
been the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility
that made the US an “opportunity society.” High
productivity, high valued added manufacturing and
professional skill jobs, such as software engineering
jobs, have been moved offshore, and in the case of
software jobs also given to foreign H1B work visa
holders. The consequence is the collapse of the state,
local, and federal tax base, and the consequent assault
on Social Security, Medicare, and state and local
pensions.
A county like
the US that gives its GNP away to other countries is
locked into a transformation from First World to Third
World. This is what Trump has said he will reverse.
How can he do
it? Is this something that he can deliver by cutting
corporate tax rates and by imposing an import or border
tax?
The US is a
member of the World Trade Agreement, which prohibits
tarrifs or “border taxes.” If this is correct, Trump
would first have to pull the US out of the WTO,
something that might be difficult.
However, what
Trump can do is to offset the labor cost advantage to
corporate profits from offshoring their production for
US markets by changing how corporations are taxed.
If US
corporations add value to their product in the US, that
is, if they produce the products that they market to
Americans in the US with American labor, they would have
a lower tax rate than if they produce the products
abroad with foreign labor. The difference in the tax
rate can be calculated to offset, or more than offset,
the advantage of the lower labor and regulatory costs
abroad. This is a matter of domestic taxation and not a
matter of tarrifs on foreign-produced goods, and,
therefore, it is not subject to WTO rules.
Because of the
globalist propaganda, Americans have forgotten that the
strength of their economy was domestically-based. The
development of the US economy was never based on foreign
trade. It rested firmly in the rise of consumer spending
power from America labor receiving the bulk of the
productivity gains.
What jobs
offshoring did was to transfer the income gains from
productivity to corporate profits by underpaying Asian
labor.
It was easy to
pay Asian labor less than labor’s contribution to
profit, because of the immense excess supply of Chinese,
Indian, Indonesian, and other labor. When labor is
plentiful and jobs are scarce, labor goes begging.
Even today the
Chinese and Indian labor forces are under-employed. The
only way American labor can compete is to accept a wage
below the US standard of living.
Trump
understands this, just as did Ross Perot and Pat
Buchanan.
Ross Perot was
a billionaire; yet he stood up for ordinary working
Americans. Yet, the left says all billionaires are evil.
Pat Buchanan
was royalty in the Republican Establishment; yet he
deserted them and stood up for the ordinary working
American. And the left says he is a “Nixon-Reagan
fascist.”
Clearly, the
pathetic remnant of the American left has more hate for
those who stand up for the working class than they have
for those oppressing the working class and those
fomenting war. Why did the women so quick to march
against Trump not march against the Clinton,
Bush/Cheney, and Obama regimes for killing, maiming,
orphaning, widowing, and dislocating millions of peoples
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya,
and Syria?
That we see the
left aligned with the ruling elites against Trump is
proof that the left has abandoned the working class.
Chris Hedges
doesn’t know how desperately revolution is needed in the
US. If revolution occurs, it is more likely to be led by
Donald Trump than by the left.
Dr. Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week,
Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He
has had many university appointments. His internet
columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of
Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the
West,
How America Was
Lost,
and
The
Neoconservative Threat to World Order. |
