I posted Trade deficit moment of truth for President Obama in 2009 including a 2007 letter from then Senator Obama urging executive branch action on Chinese currency manipulation
Refusing to acknowledge the problem will not make it go away. As a result, I will work with colleagues in the Congress to force action and strengthen the ability of Americans losing out from Chinese currency manipulation to bring forward complaints for remedy through increased duties on Chinese goods.
Now the Chinese party leader is coming to visit and discussion of trade policy has flowered again. Offhand the stunning level of disconnect between current policy and the pace of change would seem irreconcilable. But watching Inception has given me the intellectual framework necessary for an explanation other than simple insanity.
In Inception the battle to implant an idea of trying something new in someone's mind is being conducted in dreams and these dreams have hierarchical levels - each hosted by a different dreamer:
At each descending level time flows faster so that minutes at the top level could be decades at the bottom level. And events at one level can effect all levels below so for instance a truck drives off a bridge in dream level one causes dream level two to lose gravity. Once the levels are fully established one can travel from one level to the level above only in a specific hard to achieve way. Now, though I don't feel like constructing a nice info graphic, let's imagine the levels of the trade regulation idea inception this way:
"Reality" - hosted by no one, think of as an American history book in which each President's whole administration might be a few pages. On this scale a President's whole term in office seems like minutes.
"Executive level" - hosted by Timothy Geithner. The few pages above turned into a chapter. The minutes above are now like hours.
"Senate level" - hosted by the Senate Committee on Finance. The executive level hours are here days.
"House level" - hosted by the House Ways and Means Committee. The senate level days are here weeks.
"Reserve level" - hosted by Ben Bernanke (whose printing of money puts pressure on China to reevaluate their currency). The house level weeks are here months.
"Limbo" - hosted by individual Americans. The minutes of the "reality" level are here translated into decades. In this case the few pages on American trade policy neo-liberalism have translated into decades of suffering since the mid '70s when the trade deficit first began. And as with the limbo in Inception this level is especially isolated.
So if you are following the dialog on the trade deficit from limbo as I am the answer has been screamingly obvious for a long, long time and nothing is happening. There is quantative easing at the reserve level and a bill passed at the house level and but the affect of these actions seem in slow and slower motion. And then there is President Obama who seemed concerned with the issue when he was at the senate level now moving comparatively glacially at the executive level.
One reason that the dream paradigm fits so well is that one man's conspiracy is another man's REM sleep reality
After NAFTA, the Clinton administration hammered through 200 additional trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the GATT. The WTO opened the world to corporate predators and further diluted environmental, labor and human rights. The Bretton Woods Agreement (1945), an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, ultimately led to the establishment of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the GATT, a global economic system that managed free trade with the dollar as the world’s basic currency. The elite designed the system to ensure British and U.S. hegemony over monetary and trade issues. The Federal Reserve, a private enterprise, became master of the economic system.
Another reason is that dreams allow impossible juxtapositions. As Cobb explains in building a real world home they would have to choose between the architecture of Mal's childhood home and the modern building - but not in dream.
The last of these is Mal’s childhood home, a forlorn little cottage which is vastly outmatched by a neighbouring skyscraper. In this urban plaza, it could be taken for a bizarre piece of corporate art. But, in fact, the cottage is there to make sense of the entire city. It exists as a token of nostalgia, a needle in the hay,³ a counterpoint to the indifferent metropolis, a signal that all is not right. You see, utopia depends on amnesia. The ideal city, like those of the Modernists, is destined to fail.
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So too can the dream architects of globalization make choices that are impossible in the real world.
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Finally, as with any dream, the question that haunts (literally) Cobb is does he get to wake up or not and this is what all of us in limbo are wondering. As important as global energy domination was to the corporate dynasty son, Fischer, he in the end is convinced to give it up by a man who just wants to go home. Typical Hollywood happy ending :-)