This diary started out as a response in a diary by stumo, Why is Obama against "Buy American" in stimulus, but I got a little crazy with the word count. I think it's a very good question stumo asks; worthy of a thoughtful response.
There is of course the trade war issue. Some say: Bring it on. But that is thinking based on limited understanding of the consequences of legislating the economy. Simply there should be rules of the road, but not rules of what to buy or from whom.
Anyway, below are my thoughts on it at the moment. For what it's worth:
I don't get the feeling that Pres. Obama is ...
... against "be American, buy American" rhetoric. But it's a lot more complicated than that.
We are at the point where business solutions have to be multi-national by very the nature of the crisis. This is a global crisis requiring global solutions. If we want, we can individually choose to reinvest and reinvigorate our domestic economy. But we can't insist on protectionist practices.
If American companies want to succeed - they have got to build a better mouse trap. From the looks of what's been going on, I think it's time to evolve into rat traps - if you know what I mean. If the market is to work properly, the cream has to be allowed to rise by the will of the people, not because the policy-makers have legislated it.
Right now we are in a global crisis, one that was exported from our business models and ideology epicenters out into the emerging global economies as well as decades/centuries old models. Obviously we were not sending out a lasting model. Fortunately, it was only allowed to go this long... better late than never, and better sooner than later.
It's kind of like when a teenage kid takes dad's car and gets it into a ditch and scrapes it all up, dad watching, giving him a chance to try his hand at getting it out of the ditch.
Well when the kid starts grinding gears and breaking windows and lights and mirrors in the process - dad (or mom or some adult) finally has got to step in and say:
Get out of the car child, you don't have the skills to solve this on your own.
We don't want to be the kid who says
"F- you!"
to dear old dad in that moment. Because you know what comes next - dad pulls him out by the shirt collar and tosses him on his ass on the lawn. Then the kid gets sent to his room and has to skip the junior prom. [Ok, the metaphor stretches, but it works.]
Ok - back to reality: We f'd up here in this country and exported that for the last 10 years. We're that kid in the ditch. Let's say we ended up not only damaging dad's car, but also the neighbors' cars, a few mailboxes and street sign, and killed a neighbor's cat. What's dad gonna do, then? Does he only fix his own car? Or does he go to the neighbors and make it right?
We don't want to be the stingy dad of the F-you son sitting with his ass on the grass. They're gonna get shunned by their neighbors - believe it. We have to see that we caused havoc to the world. Just like with the Geneva convention among war participants... there is a code among the true business titans of this world. You can't just shrug it under the rug. Protectionism is the worst form of F-You we can do at this time when we have caused so much damage already.
We can't start putting into legislation boundaries that will block the true corrections for this problem we are in. There are true corrections, you know? This isn't jungle ball. There are paths towards justice. Protectionism isn't one of them, and taking that path won't solve this crisis, even though it seems like it would. There are much bigger issues. The companies have to make what the people naturally want. Otherwise we set ourselves up for even worse manipulation later on.
Actually to think about it a bit longer... the point of the crisis seems to have been - distributing the selfish woes of the short-sighted and the gullible to concentrate the offset winnings into the hands of the crafty, the devious, and the slippery. Worse than crashing a car - this crisis was intentional, and entirely avoidable.