Friday's PBS Newhour:
http://www.pbs.org/...
This segment, once again, shows the fundamental disconnect in the conversation: these deals with China can be a good (short-term) deal for US companies while being a miserable deal for the USA. Our inability to parse out that distinction has left us unable to devise a rational trade and industrial development policy, and goes a long way towards explaining much of what we're struggling against today, from the loss of industrial supremacy to the growing wealth gap.
Globalization has been a great success, in some regards: the world is better off because of it. But it was never going to be the case that this was going to work to America's benefit: at our peak, with 5% of the world's population, we consumed 35% of the world's resources. To increase others' share, ours was always going to shrink. Whenever this was brought up by Americans, we were promised "inevitable" increases in various efficiencies. There have been some. But nowhere near enough, and it's hard to see any coming about in the near future.
The current desperate rationalization, as formulated by people like Thomas Friedman, is that the issue is one of skills matching: if only US workers retool, they will be poised to seize the wave of job creation brought about by global wealth growth. But this is never going to happen, for a couple of fairly simple reasons: growing wealth elsewhere will bring about a rise of skills in foreign labor forces, who will be competing for those self-same jobs. But, more importantly, new industries tend to be radically less labor-intensive than those we are losing. Software design does not require assembly lines like Detroit's.
In the meantime, nominally American corporations can thrive in this environment, by becoming, in essence, less American: less US-based production, growing foreign markets meaning decreasing focus and dependence on domestic consumers, and increasing wealth elsewhere eventually translating into diminishing US ownership.
But we continue to act as if what's good for corporate America is good for Americans. That's not been true for quite a while now, and it's going to become a whole lot less true going forward. We act as if Citizens United was the illness: it is not. Even Santa Clara is not, really. They're both reflections of an underlying ill: we as a nation have a desperate, wholly irrational pro-business, pro-capital bias. Unfortunately, business and capital do not seem to have a corresponding pro-us bias.
