Selling Out America

 Selling Out America

Over the years researchers and scholars have debated the issue of deindustrialization, regarding whether President Nixon’s “opening the door to China” led to the demise of American manufacturing. A 2015 article by Thomas Heffner on the site “Economy in Crisis” claims that America is “losing 14 factories a day, every day, and has been for decades. And it all started with Nixon.”  Thomas Hartman on AlterNet expounds on Heffner’s article to say that “it was a bad idea in 1972…and it’s a bad idea now. We’ve lost,” he says, “over 60,000 factory jobs since 2000.” He then reminds us of what Adam Smith, the man who wrote The Wealth of Nations, said in 1776; “what makes nations wealthy is manufacturing.”

   Hence the question for our study is, “did the industrialization of America begin with Nixon’s love affair with China,” or was it as many researchers claim, “a gradual decline that began after World War II when the so-called “arsenal of democracy” began to downsize. According to a chapter titled “The Unraveling” published in The American YAWP, a collaborative U.S. textbook published by Stanford University, American manufacturers began to downsize after the war, moving factories out of the cities and into the suburbs. 

   Consequently then, “manufacturing firms sought to reduce labor costs by automating, downsizing, and relocating to areas with business-friendly policies like low tax rates, anti-union right to work laws, and low wages.” And regarding automation, a statement by an automobile plant manager to (UAW) President Walther Reuther portended the social and economic consequences; “You are going to have trouble collecting union dues from all these machines.”

   Thus, in the 50s and 60s period of “industrial restructuring,” we see that “natural market forces” led to deindustrialization, a process that was accelerated when globalists began to anchor America to a global economy in the 1970s. Statistics published in “The Bicentennial Edition of Historical Statistics of the United States…” tells us that in 1970 trade with China was Z, meaning 0 or less than $500,000. Before 1970 America imported cheap products from allies such as Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia, but now our politicians have sold us out to our enemies, with China leading the way. The question then becomes, “why do we need cheap Chinese products in the first place?” Why can we not produce quality-made products in America, thereby putting America first? Is it a sin to put America first so that we are not taken advantage of by other countries? Or are we content to accept the reality of a “one-world government,” a Marxist utopia, where America is turned into a third-world cesspool? 

John Turner

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