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Spread this message with Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, or Stumbleupon, and subscribe to the RSS Feed to track articles We Need to Rescind Permanent Normal Trade Relations With ChinaE-mail - editor@economyincisis.org |
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There are many good examples that illustrate the failure of U.S. trade policy over the last two decades – but none is as significant as our trading relationship with China. Our country has short-sightedly embraced the following bargain. We get all kinds of cheap products from China, produced and exported under unfair conditions and sold at big-box retailers like Wal-Mart. In exchange, we allow our manufacturing base to be decimated and we assume a growing debt with the Chinese. The numbers tell the story. In 2000, when the United States granted permanent normal trade relations with China, our merchandise trade deficit with China stood at $83 billion. By the end of last year, that trade deficit had exploded to $233 billion. Today, for every six dollars of merchandise that we buy from China, the Chinese buy only one dollar of merchandise from us. That is a staggering indictment of the one-way trade that we have with China, and reflects a wide range of problems. These include vast intellectual property theft and piracy, currency manipulation, unfair barriers against U.S. exports, and an unfair playing field in which U.S. jobs go to China because of sweatshop conditions there. One could write at length about the currency manipulation that China is engaged in. Suffice it to say that after several years of raising this issue with the Chinese, the manipulation of the Chinese currency continues unabated. One could write at length about the issue of intellectual property violations, which USTR has described as reaching “epidemic levels,” and costs our producers an estimated $200 billion a year. One could describe countless other examples of ways in which China is not trading fairly. Everyone knows that China has not lived up to its promises when it obtained permanent normal trade relations. This is what the USTR report on Chinese trade barriers had to say last year: “. . . Agricultural trade with China remains among the least transparent and predictable of the world’s major markets. Capricious practices by Chinese customs and quarantine officials can delay or halt shipments of agricultural products into China, while sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards with questionable scientific bases and a generally opaque regulatory regime frequently bedevil traders in agricultural commodities.” The Chinese don’t take us seriously on trade issues. And a big reason is that China believes that it faces zero risk of losing their normal trade relations status. Why do we keep tolerating this from a county with which we have a $232 billion annual deficit? I agree with the sentiment that Senator Grassley echoed last year: ‘the Chinese have played us for suckers.’ And I think that we need to rescind permanent normal trade relations, and send a message to the Chinese that will be heard loud and clear. *The above is excerpted from an article Senator Byron L. Dorgan wrote for EconomyInCrisis.org. Byron L. Dorgan has served in the US Congress since 1981 has been a leading voice for change in America’s trade policies. His 2006 book, “Take This Job and Ship it: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America” exposed how America’s trading practices abroad are hurting US workers domestically.
Three Reasons Why Rescinding Normal Trading Relations with China Probably Won’t Happen
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guest says "Work reduces poverty" on 08/26/07
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guest says "Boycott China!" on 06/30/07
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Our free trade with China is one of the "Worst of all Worlds" policy.
Why? Every manufacturing job that leaves the USA puts hardship of employees who NEED work! America can and should be an Independent country. Will the Chinese ever send their best jobs over here? The more we rely on other countries to prop up our Treasury Bonds or produce goods and services for us the weaker and more dependent we are upon those nations. Folks, as has been proved numerous times just this year, Chinese do not care about either their own workers welfare and even less so for American health and well being.The poisons found in pet food and human food imported from China are no accident. The banned additive simply saved money at the expense of health and nutrition. China is the worl'd leader in contaminated and fradulent food. Food that is unclean and has banned substances has been in the news recently and we should not expect their whitewash job of fixing the poroblem will be genuine since similar promises were broken in the past. Do they care if we get sick and die? Of course not! They hardly care for or value their own people. Why should they care about foreigners? China has an absymal human rights against its own citizens and a very bad pollution record when it comes to industrial efficiency and carbon responsibility. Moving jobs to China Slaves does them no favor. The immmense old tech coal burning plants China continues building belch out large amounts of sulfer and mercury into our air. That pollution drifts over the Pacific sometimes raining into the ocean and elevating mercury contamination in fish, and some rains down on the US Mainland giving us a China's "gift" of cheap Walmart junk. China's unfair business practices continue to shred American jobs, disembowel the American Middle Class, and create millions of slave workers in Chinas factories while multimational corporations walk off (tax free often) with the profits as everyones expense. The best favor we can do for the USA and China is to halt trade and return to National Independence and self sufficiency. |
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guest says "We need to rescind normal trade relations with China" on 06/29/07
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What do the Chinese do with all those dollars that they are earning? They buy Treasury Bonds and make other investments in the American economy that lower interest rates. Senator Dorgan should come to the Bronx where he will find many of the goods that the Chinese ship in the $.99 stores where the inner city poor do their shopping. In fact, manufacturing has been dropping in all the advanced countries. Why would the senator push us back into a manufacturing age when we have for a long time entered the post-industrial future?
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The money for the item would not go to China, which rather than invest in U.S. Treasuries will spend it on their navy which is the biggest in the wrold. By 2010 the Chinese will have a 600 ship navy as compared our 150 ship navy. The Chinese have successfully knocked down some of our old satellites, tested the waters of economic warfare with rumors of changing their reserve currency, and they have a twenty year old "Manhattan Project" to develop 21st century nanoweapons that can defeat the detterent of mutual assured destruction. When Chuina strikes it will be on all fronts at once, or in a cascade, that will send our country reeling, if not knock it onto its knees or back.
To risk this for a $.99 trinket is idiocy.