In perhaps the strongest (and strangest) endorsement of our latest axis of corporate lapdogs and lackeys, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg questioned the literacy of Congress members vis-a-vis tensions with China over currency, trade and labor when he sat down with the Wall Street Journal:
“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is.
Zing.
Needless to say that's a ringing endorsement in a provincial country that holds up ignorance as "common sense" and naked, arbitrary state violence as "national security."
Bloomberg's done an interesting transformation over the last decade, somewhat coming back towards progressives after the disasterously authoritarian RNC in 2004.
George Soros wrote a similar argument to Bloomberg's about currency and balance with China in the New York Review of Books. It's titled The Real Danger to the Economy:
The United States was pressing China to revalue the renminbi upward while China was blaming the turmoil in currency markets on the United States policy of providing cheap credit. When Brazil’s finance minister spoke of an imminent currency war he was not far off the mark. China and the US were talking past each other but it would have been better if they had listened to each other because both sides were making valid points. Both China and the US, and the global economy as a whole, would fare much better if both sides accepted the other side’s recommendation.
The rest of the world echoed the American viewpoint—that China has been undervaluing its currency to help its export-driven economy—with greater or lesser stridency. Faced with opposition from developing countries, China is likely to yield and the renminbi will appreciate; only the pace and extent of the move is in question. But China’s viewpoint is also valid: the US ought to apply fiscal stimulus—i.e., more government spending—rather than monetary stimulus. Unfortunately the Obama administration is not in a position to do so because it is under domestic political pressure to hold down the deficit.
...The right policy is to reduce the imbalances as quickly as possible. This can be done in a number of ways, but cutting the budget deficit in half by 2013 while the economy is operating far below capacity is not one of them. Investing in infrastructure and education makes more sense. So does engineering a moderate rate of inflation by depreciating the dollar against the renminbi. What stands in the way is the misconception that budget deficits must be reduced to help the economy recover, a notion that has been exploited for partisan political purposes. There is a real danger that the premature pursuit of fiscal rectitude may wreck the recovery.
Whoa, George. Lay off the reality juice. You mean a lot of these right-wingers and "populists" complaining that China took our jobs are just lazy horses' asses? You mean Washington's pretending fiscal spending doesn't work to use monetary policy to shower banks with QEII and blame China and latin immigrants when it doesn't work?
...And they could have created government jobs, probably lifted us out of a depression in two or 3 years, and still cut the deficit afterword? No kidding.
Zachary Karabell in Time agrees with Bloomberg's assessement:
When did we collectively go through the looking glass and end up in this distorted economic universe? The idea that the U.S. is not responsible for its own economic stagnation, housing bubble and unemployment is a black-is-white, up-is-down view that only insecurity can breed. It's not us; it's them and their cheap goods.
John Boehner's latest idea is to cut our congressmen's salaries. Why? Singapore has some of the highest paid officials in the world and functions okay. They don't have to be already rich to run. If you're the best, you work for the government there and they pay you accordingly. I don't want them to cut maybe a million dollars from Congress' salaries, I want them to do their freaking jobs and stop pointing fingers. Plus, maybe they'd use that money to vacation and be able to find China on Google Maps.