New DVDs By Michael Snyder
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 Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s highly touted “Jobs Council”, is moving even more GE infrastructure to China. GE makes more medical-imaging machines than anyone else in the world, and now GE has announced that it “is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing“. Apparently, this is all part of a “plan to invest about $2 billion across China” over the next few years. But moving core pieces of its business overseas is nothing new for GE. Under Immelt, GE has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States. Perhaps GE should change its slogan to “Imagination At Work (In China)”. If the very people that have been entrusted with solving the unemployment crisis are shipping jobs out of the country, what hope is there that things are going to turn around any time soon?
Earlier this month, Immelt made the following statement to a jobs summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce….
“There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.”
Apparently Immelt’s idea of being part of the solution is to ship as many jobs overseas as he possibly can.
A recent article on the Huffington Post documented how GE has been sending tens of thousands of good jobs out of the country….
As the administration struggles to prod businesses to create jobs at home, GE has been busy sending them abroad. Since Immelt took over in 2001, GE has shed 34,000 jobs in the U.S., according to its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it’s added 25,000 jobs overseas.
At the end of 2009, GE employed 36,000 more people abroad than it did in the U.S. In 2000, it was nearly the opposite.
GE is supposed to be creating the “jobs of tomorrow”, but it seems that most of the “jobs of tomorrow” will not be located inside the United States.
The last GE factory in the U.S. that made light bulbs closed last September. The transition to the new CFL light bulbs was supposed to create a whole bunch of those “green jobs” that Barack Obama keeps talking about, but as an article in the Washington Post noted, that simply is not happening….
Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.
But GE is far from alone in shipping jobs and economic infrastructure out of the United States. For example, big automakers such as Ford are being very aggressive in China. Ford is currently “building three factories in Chongqing as part of $1.6 billion investment that also includes another plant in Nanchang”.
Today, China accounts for approximately one out of every four vehicles sold worldwide. The big automakers consider the future to be in China.
Just a few decades ago, China was an economic joke and the U.S. economy was absolutely unparalleled.
But disastrous trade policies have opened up the door for a mammoth transfer of jobs, factories and wealth from the United States to China.
China has become an absolute powerhouse and America is rapidly declining.
Beautiful new infrastructure is going up all over China even as U.S. infrastructure rots and decays right in front of our eyes.
You can see some amazing pictures of the stunning economic development that has been going on in China here, here, here and here.
America is being deindustrialized at lightning speed and very few of our politicians seem to care.
Back in 1979, there were 19.5 million manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Today, there are 11.6 million.
That represents a decline of 40 percent during a time period when our overall population experienced tremendous growth.
We used to have the greatest manufacturing cities on the entire globe. The rest of the world was in awe of us.
Today, most of those formerly great manufacturing cities are decaying, rotting hellholes.
The following is what one reporter from the UK saw during his visit to Detroit….
As you pass the city limits a blanket of gloom, neglect and cheapness descends. The buildings are shabbier, the paint is faded. The businesses, where they exist, are thrift shops and pawn shops or wretched groceries where the goods are old and tired. Finding somewhere to have breakfast, normally easy in any American city, involves a long hunt. ‘God bless Detroit’, says one billboard, just beside another offering the alternative solution: liquor.
You can see some really shocking images of the decline of Detroit right here.
Our politicians insisted that globalism would not result in a “giant sucking sound” as millions of jobs left America.
But that is exactly what has happened.
Sadly, most American families still don’t understand what has happened. Most of them are still waiting for things to get back to “normal”.
Millions of unemployed Americans are dealing with incredible amounts of stress right now as they wait for jobs to start opening up again. But the jobs that have been shipped overseas are not coming back. In a globalized economy, it doesn’t make sense to hire American workers when you can legally pay workers slave labor wages on the other side of the globe.
Millions of good middle class jobs have been replaced by low paying service jobs. Today there are huge numbers of Americans that are cutting hair or flipping burgers because that is all they can get right now.
Many others are only able to survive because of the safety net. One reader named David recently left a comment in which he shared his story. David did everything that the system asked him to do, but the promised rewards never materialized. Now David is broke, unemployed and he feels deeply frustrated….
A year ago I had a job, we were struggling, but bills were getting paid, and somehow we were getting by. Then I made the mistake of getting sick, one day before my company insurance kicked in. An auto-immune illness almost killed me, if it weren’t for the amazing efforts of my physicians and an emergency spleenectomy, I would not be here.
My wife would have been a single mother,raising two young sons, one of which is autistic. Instead, I pulled through. The disease damaged my liver, leaving me with a chronic condition, and even after a year, it is hard to get up and go some days. My “employer” dumped me as soon as I left the hospital, and I haven’t worked since. It isn’t for lack of looking. There just isn’t anything.
Oh, I get my government cheese money. Here I am college educated, unable to find something that can pay the bills better than the money that we get from the government. It sickens me to be this dependent on the system like this. But the system de-incentivizes work, and makes living on the dole make a perverse economic sense.
I used to have dreams, but I have given up on them. My wife and I have no savings, we have no life raft and if it weren’t for the generosity of her parents and mine, things would have ground to a halt a long time ago.
I believed every thing adults told me. Work hard, I did. Get an education, I did. Find a nice girl and settle down, I did. Two cars, a dog, a cat and couple of kids, a nice townhouse…the american dream. Yep.
I love my country. My heart is broken, broken because I have been betrayed. I did what you asked, I played by the rules. I did what you said to do; I submitted, I conformed, I stopped dreaming. Now what?
I am willing to pay for my faults and transgressions; my failures are my own, I get that. My children should not have to suffer for my failures, they did not do anything wrong. My youngest boy is autistic, we hope he will be able to integrate into society, but the fact is we may have to take care of him for the rest of his life. How do I do this with nothing, and no opportunity in the foreseeable future?
Depression, stress…yep, I’ve got all that. I used to be hopeful and optimistic about the future. Now all I am is afraid.
As the United States continues to bleed good jobs, stories like the one you just read are going to become much more common.
So what are our politicians doing about all of this?
They tell us that we need even more “free trade”!
Barack Obama says that we need more free trade.
The Republicans say that we need more free trade.
In Washington D.C. our politicians do not agree on much, but one thing they do agree on is that we need to keep shipping jobs out of the country.
Until the American people wake up and start demanding an end to the globalization of the U.S. economy, the job losses are just going to continue to get worse.
The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000. If this trend continues, millions more Americans will soon be surviving on food stamps or living in tent cities.
The American people are deeply concerned about the economy, but they still have not connected the dots on these issues. The mainstream media and most of our politicians keep telling them that the globalization of the economy is a wonderful thing.
It is so sad that people just do not understand what is going on right in front of their eyes.
Whether you are a conservative or a liberal or a libertarian, you should be against the deindustrialization of America.
Allowing our industrial base to be raped is not a good thing.
Allowing big corporations and foreign governments to pay slave labor wages to workers on the other side of the globe making things that will be sold inside the United States is not a good thing.
Allowing the destruction of our industrial capacity to threaten our national security is not a good thing.
Allowing millions of precious jobs to leave the country is not a good thing.
The biggest corporations are making some extra profits by exploiting cheap labor on the other side of the globe. Corporate executives love to shower themselves with larger and larger bonuses.
But our current trade policies are not working for American workers.
We need “fair trade”, not “free trade”.
The United States is being taken advantage of, and the Democrats and the Republicans are both laying down like doormats and letting it happen.
If you want to know where all the good jobs went, it is not a big mystery.
They have been shipped out of the country and they are not coming back.
Unless fundamental changes are made, things are going to get worse and worse and worse for American workers.
So what is going to happen next?
It is up to you America.
 Once upon a time in America, virtually anyone with a high school education and the willingness to work hard could get a good job. Fifty years ago a “good job” would enable someone to own a home, buy a car, take a couple of vacations a year and retire with a decent pension. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. Every single year the number of “good jobs” in the United States actually shrinks even as our population continues to grow. Where in the world did all of those good jobs go? Economists toss around terms such as “outsourcing” and “offshoring” to describe what is happening, but most ordinary Americans don’t really grasp what those terms mean. So what is outsourcing? Well, it essentially means sending work somewhere else. In the context of this article I will be using those terms to describe the thousands of manufacturing facilities and the millions of jobs that have been sent overseas. Over the past several decades, the U.S. economy has become increasingly merged into the emerging “one world economy”. Thanks to the WTO, NAFTA and a whole host of other “free trade” agreements, the internationalist dream of a truly “global marketplace” is closer than ever before.
But for American workers, a “global marketplace” is really bad news. In the United States, businesses are subject to a vast array of very complex laws, rules and regulations that make it very difficult to operate in this country. That makes it very tempting for corporations to simply move out of the U.S. in order to avoid all of the hassle.
In addition, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world. This also provides great motivation for corporations to move operations outside of the country.
The biggest thing affecting American workers, however, is the fact that labor has now become a global commodity. U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool. Americans must now directly compete for jobs with hundreds of millions of desperate people willing to work for slave labor wages on the other side of the globe.
So exactly how is an American worker supposed to compete with a highly motivated person on the other side of the planet that makes $1.50 an hour with essentially no benefits?
Just think about it.
If you were a big global corporation, would you want to hire American workers which would cost you 10 or 20 times more after everything is factored in?
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why millions of jobs have been leaving the United States.
Corporations love to make more money. Many of them will not hesitate for an instant to pay slave labor wages if they can get away with it. The bottom line for most corporations is to maximize shareholder wealth.
Slowly but surely the number of good jobs in the United States is shrinking and those jobs are being sent to places where labor is cheaper.
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. multinational corporations added 2.4 million new jobs overseas during the first decade of this century. But during that same time frame U.S. multinational corporations cut a total of 2.9 million jobs inside the United States.
So where are all of our jobs going?
They are going to places like China.
The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In addition, over 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed permanently during the past decade.
What do you think is eventually going to happen if the U.S. economy continues to bleed jobs and factories so badly?
As the U.S. has faltered, China has become an absolute economic powerhouse.
Ten years ago, the U.S. economy was three times as large as the Chinese economy. At the turn of the century the United States accounted for well over 20 percent of global GDP and China accounted for significantly less than 10 percent of global GDP. But since that time our share of global GDP has been steadily declining and China’s share has been steadily rising.
According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.
Should we all celebrate when that happens?
Should we all chant “We’re Number 2″?
Our economy is falling to pieces and the competition for the few remaining good jobs has become super intense.
The average American family is having a really tough time right now. Only 45.4% of Americans had a job during 2010. The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.
Not only that, only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
Just think about that.
33.2% of American men do not have jobs.
And that figure is going to continue to rise unless something is done about these economic trends.
Today, there are 10% fewer “middle class jobs” in the United States than there were a decade ago. Tens of millions of Americans have been forced to take “whatever they can get”. A lot of very hard working people are basically working for peanuts at this point. In fact, half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
Things have gotten so bad that tens of thousands of people showed up for the National Hiring Day that McDonald’s just held. With the economy such a mess, flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart are jobs that suddenly don’t look so bad.
Right now America is rapidly losing high paying jobs and they are being replaced by low paying jobs. According to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 percent of the job growth. Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 percent of the job growth.
Thanks to the emerging one world economy, the U.S. is “transitioning” from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.
But it certainly doesn’t help that China is using every trick in the book to steal our industries. China openly subsidizes domestic industries, they brazenly steal technology and they manipulate currency rates.
A recent article on Economy In Crisis described how the Chinese paper industry has been able to grow by threefold over the past decade while the U.S. paper industry has fallen apart….
From 2002 to 2009, the Chinese government poured $33.1 billion into what should be an unproductive industry. But, with the help of government subsidies, China was able to ride export-driven growth to become the world’s leading producer of paper products.
In the same time frame that China pumped $33 billion into its paper industry, U.S. employment in the industry fell 29 percent, from 557,000 workers to just 398,000.
So why should we be concerned about all of this?
Well, just open up your eyes. As I have written about previously, our formerly great cities are being transformed into post-apocalyptic hellholes.
In a comment to a recent article, Trucker Mark described what he has seen happen to the “rust belt” over the past several decades….
I am a product of Detroit’s northwest suburbs and the Cleveland, OH area, where together I lived almost 2/3rds of my 54 years. As a 30-year semi driver, I am intimately familiar with large areas of the industrial Midwest, the Northeast, and even much of central and southern California, and everything in-between. I am also college-educated, in Urban Planning and Economics. What has happened to not just Detroit, but to virtually every city in the southern half of Lower Michigan and northern Ohio is mind-boggling. When I was 18, it was quite common to head over to a car plant and get hired immediately into a middle-class job. At one time I had dozens of friends from school working at car plants, dozens more in other large factories, dozens more in major grocery warehousing and distribution, and me, I was a semi driver delivering to all of those places. Between 1979, when I started driving semis, and now, I must have seen 10s of thousands of factories across just the southern Great Lakes region close their doors. Some of them were small, and some of them employed 10,000 workers or more.
The former Packard plant from your photo closed in 1957, and at one time it employed 12,000 workers, and my roommate in 1982 in Birmingham, MI had been laid-off from the old Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, which once employed over 20,000 workers, which closed in 1981. In 1970 just Chrysler had over 40 plants in the Detroit-area, and now there are just 11 left open. The Willow Run plant, which at one time turned-out a brand-new B-29 bomber every 40 minutes, and employed 50,000 workers, is long dead too, as is the tank plant north of town too. Even fairly new car plants like Novi Assembly are closed, Pontiac’s ultra-modern robotic car assembly plant too. In Cleveland 100 or more huge old plants stand empty, car plants, steel mills, and machine tool builders, in Akron dozens of rubber plants are long gone, Sharon, Warren, and Youngstown have all lost huge numbers of industrial jobs, Canton and Massillon too, where the NFL started, have been reduced to mere shells of their former selves. Along with the plant closings have gone the hopes and dreams of many thousands of retail operators, restaurant owners, and thousands of other small businesses too. Hundreds of entire major shopping malls stand vacant, as seas of potholes consume local roads. The city of Hamtramck, MI a Detroit suburb of 40,000 people, is bankrupt and has had to layoff all but two employees, one of whom works part-time. The traffic lights are shut-off and stop signs now appear at those intersections instead, as the city can’t even pay its power bill. I could go on & on & on for days but I don’t have the time.
I haven’t driven a semi in almost 2 years as my eyesight has begun giving out early. My last 10 years in the industry was spent delivering fresh and frozen meat on a regular multi-stop route through the Chicago-area and throughout southern Michigan. Between 2001 and 2009, my boss lost 14 of 19 major weekly customers in Michigan to bankruptcy, including three major grocery chains, plus numerous less-frequent customers. The Detroit News reported before Christmas of 2007 a 29% unemployment rate within the city limits of Detroit, with an estimated 44% of the total adult population not working, and another news story reported a 1 in 200 chance of selling a house across the entire metropolitan area, which still has 4 million people total. Since 2003, home prices within the city limits of Detroit have fallen by 90%, and today there are thousands of houses in move-in condition on the market there for $5K to $10K. The suburbs are not immune either.
You know what? Detroit and Cleveland used to be two of the greatest cities in the entire world.
Today very few people would call them great. They are just shells of their former glory.
Sadly, this cruel economy is causing “ghost towns” to appear all across the United States. There are quite a few counties across the nation that now have home vacancy rates of over 50%.
Another reader, Flubadub, also remembers how things used to be….
I am also a product of that generation and remember well the opportunities that existed for anyone with even a high school diploma in those days. Just within a reasonable commute to where I grew up we had US Steel, 3M, General Motors Fisher Body, Nabisco, The Budd Co., Strick Trailer and others providing thousands of jobs that enabled you to provide a decent living for your family. There were also plenty of part time jobs to keep high school students busy enough to avoid the pratfalls of idle youth and afford the 28 cent/ gallon gas for their used cars. Most of it is gone now and I don’t blame the Mexicans or the Chinese for stealing it. I blame the greed of the globalists and their flunkies, the phony free trade advocates in office, who’ve spent the last twenty years giving it all away.
Our jobs are being shipped overseas so that greedy corporate executives can pad their bonuses and our politicians are allowing them to get away with it.
According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.
Life is great if you are a CEO.
Life is not so great if you are an average American worker trying to raise a family.
Another reader, Itsjustme, says that things are also quite depressing In New Jersey….
I live in northern NJ in a suburb a very short ride from NYC.
Our region was hit very hard — we once had a very prosperous and booming industrial area; mixed use with many warehouses and commercial buildings, hirise and lowrise.
The majority of companies that were in those buildings are gone. Long vacant; the signage is left and nobody is inside them.
One large commercical building with 15 floors now is home to 2 tenants: a law firm and a Korean shipping company.
It’s very sad what’s happened out here.
The only “companies” moving into these buildings are small change tenants that that are usually Chinese or Middle Eastern; you’ll see them subletting out 2 or 3 offices in these buildings and they operate out of those offices. They’re mostly importers of apparel or soft goods.
My guess is that they are there on very short term leases.
This will benefit our local and state economy not. These groups usually send the money home.
If this is the shape of things to come, we can hang it up right now. No viable companies are moving into our area; if anything new is being built it is retail and service industry garbage, like crummy fast food chain restaurants. No livable wage jobs are entering our local economy.
As I have written about previously, the standard of living of the middle class is being pushed down to third world levels. We have been merged into a “global labor pool”, and what that means is that the standard of living of all workers all over the world is going to be slowly equalized over time.
Our politicians never told us that all of these “free trade” agreements would mean that soon we would be living like the rest of the world.
America used to be the greatest economic machine on the planet. But now we are just another region of the one world economy that has workers that are too expensive to be useful.
In the end, there is not some great mystery as to why we are experiencing economic decline as a nation.
If millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas, it was basically inevitable that we were going to experience a housing crisis. Without good jobs the American people simply cannot afford high mortgage payments.
Today we consume far more wealth as a nation than we produce. We have tried to make up the difference by indulging in the greatest debt binge that the world has ever seen.
We have lived like kings and queens, but our debt-fueled prosperity is not sustainable. In fact, the collapse of our financial system is a lot closer than most people would like to believe.
Things did not have to turn out like this, but we bought into the lies and the propaganda that our leaders were feeding us.
Now our economy lies in tatters and our children have no economic future.
 Any economy that constantly consumes far more wealth than it produces is eventually going to be in for a very hard fall. Many point to relatively stable GDP numbers as evidence that the U.S. economy is doing okay, but the truth is that we have had to borrow increasingly massive amounts of money to keep GDP numbers up at that level. The U.S. government is going to run an all-time record deficit of about 1.65 trillion dollars this year and average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income. But borrowing endless amounts of money and consuming massive amounts of wealth with that borrowed money is a road that leads to economic oblivion. The only way to have a healthy economy in the long run is to create wealth. But how can America create wealth if our industrial base is being absolutely destroyed? According to Forbes, the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Hundreds of formerly thriving industries in the United States are being totally wiped out. China uses every trick in the book to win trade battles. They deeply subsidize their domestic industries, they openly steal technology, they blatantly manipulate currency rates and they allow their citizens to be paid slave labor wages. So yes, the products coming from China are cheaper, but in the process tens of thousands of factories in the U.S. are shutting down, millions of jobs are being lost and the ability of America to create wealth is being compromised.
In 2010, the U.S. trade deficit was just a whisker under $500 billion. Much of that trade deficit was with China.
During 2010, we spent $365 billion on goods from China while they only spent $92 billion on goods from us.
Does a 4 to 1 ratio sound like a “fair and balanced” trade relationship to anyone out there?
Our trade deficit with China in 2010 was the largest trade deficit that one country has ever had with another country in the history of the world.
In fact, the U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
Needless to say, that is not a good trend.
Our industrial base and our ability to create wealth is being wiped out so rapidly that it has now become a very serious threat to our national security.
According to Forbes, there is only one steel plant inside the United States that is still capable of producing steel of high enough quality to meet the needs of the U.S. military, and even that plant has been bought by a European company.
Meanwhile, China produced 11 times as much steel as America did last year.
Not only that, China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.
How in the world did we let that happen?
So what happens if we have a conflict with China someday?
But of more immediate concern is the loss of jobs that the destruction of our industrial base is causing.
For example, the Ivex Packaging Paper plant in Joliet, Illinois just announced that it is shutting down for good after 97 years in business. 79 good jobs will be lost. Meanwhile, China has become the number one producer of paper products in the entire world.
But China is not just wiping the floor with us when it comes to things like steel and paper.
The truth is that China has now become the world’s largest exporter of high technology products. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
So how is China doing it? Well, as noted above, they are pulling every trick that they can think of.
Most Americans think that we have “free trade” with nations such as China. That is a complete and total lie and anyone that believes that we have “free trade” with China does not know what they are talking about.
China subsidizes their domestic industries to such an extreme extent that many global industries no longer even come close to resembling “free markets” as a recent story in Forbes noted….
According to a story in the January 20, 2009 New York Times, government subsidies so thoroughly disrupted pricing in the global market for antibiotics that many western producers had to either move facilities to Asia or exit the business entirely. The reason this might matter to intelligence analysts is that the last U.S. source of key ingredients for antibiotics — a Bristol-Myers Squibb plant in East Syracuse, New York — has now closed, leaving the U.S. dependent on foreign sources in a future conflict.
Our politicians and our business leaders have pursued economic policies that are so self-destructive that it defies explanation.
How in the world could anyone be so stupid?
Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good. Millions of jobs have been lost. The ability of the once great American economic machine to create wealth has been neutered.
The business environment in America is completely and totally pathetic at this point. The number of small businesses that are being created is also way, way down.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 403,765 small businesses were created in the 12 months that ended in March 2009. That was down 17.3% from the previous year, and it was the smallest number of small businesses created since records began being kept in 1977.
The truth is that the U.S. economy is dying.
We continue to consume about the same amount of wealth that we always have, but our net worth is declining.
According to the Federal Reserve, more than two-thirds of Americans have seen their net worth decline during this economic downturn. In fact, the Fed says that between 2007 and 2009, the wealth of the average American family declined by 23%.
So if it seems like your family and everyone around you is getting poorer, that is because it really is happening.
We really are becoming poorer as a nation.
We can see evidence of this all around us. Just consider a few of the examples that have been in the news in recent days….
*One school district in the Chicago area is laying off 363 teachers.
*The U.S. Postal Service is offering $20,000 buyouts to thousands of workers as they attempt to slash 7,500 good paying jobs.
*The city of Detroit, once a shining example of middle class America, is now a rotting cesspool of economic decline and it saw its population decline by 25 percent over the decade that recently ended.
Americans are not feeling the full impact of America’s industrial decline yet because we have been filling the gap in wealth creation with massive amounts of debt.
In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world. That 7.5 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and U.S. workers, but instead it left the country and went into the hands of foreigners that do not pay taxes.
Therefore, the U.S. government, state governments and our local governments have had to borrow massive amounts of money to make up the difference.
Most people do not realize it, but the destruction of America’s industrial base has played a very significant role in the government debt crisis we are facing today.
In addition, the millions upon millions of workers that have lost their jobs as America’s industrial base has been destroyed are now a drain on the system. Instead of creating wealth and being involved in economically productive activity, millions of American workers are now totally dependent on the U.S. government for survival.
Do you think that it is just some sort of accident that we have 44 million Americans on food stamps?
Don’t you think that a large percentage of those people would actually like to have good jobs that would enable them to sufficiently feed their families?
If we continue on the path that we are currently on we are not going to have much of an economy left.
Not that all trade is bad. Certainly not. For example, trade with Canada is generally a very good thing.
However, the horribly unbalanced and unfair trade relationships that we have with nations such as China are ripping our industrial base apart. Our politicians have not been telling us the truth about what the “global economy” will mean for American workers. Most U.S. workers never realized that globalism would mean that they would be competing for jobs with workers willing to work for one-tenth the pay on the other side of the globe.
Those people that believe that we can indefinitely maintain an economy where we consume far more wealth than we create are completely and totally delusional.
Until the American people wake up and start demanding change from our politicians on these issues, 50,000 (or more) manufacturing jobs will continue to fly out the doors every single month and even more Americans will become dependent on government welfare.
Is that what you want?
 From now on, whenever you hear the term “the global economy” you should immediately equate it with the destruction of the U.S. middle class. Over the past several decades, the American economy has been slowly but surely merged into the emerging one world economic system. Unfortunately for the middle class, much of the rest of the world does not have the same minimum wage laws and worker protections that we do. Therefore, the massive global corporations that now dominate our economy are able to pay workers in other countries slave labor wages and import the products that they make into the United States to compete with products made by “expensive” American workers. This has resulted in a mass exodus of manufacturing facilities and jobs from the United States.
But without good, high paying jobs the U.S. middle class cannot continue to be the U.S middle class. The only thing that the vast majority of Americans have to offer in the economic marketplace is their labor. Sadly, that labor has now been dramatically devalued. American workers now must directly compete for jobs with millions upon millions of workers on the other side of the world that toil away for 15 hours a day at slave labor wages. This is causing jobs to leave the United States at an almost unbelievable rate, and it is putting tremendous downward pressure on the wages of millions of jobs that are still in the United States.
So when you hear terms such as “globalization” and “the global economy”, it is important to keep in mind that those are code words for the emerging one world economic system that is systematically wiping out the U.S. middle class.
A one world labor pool means that the standard of living for the U.S. middle class will continue falling toward the standard of living in the third world.
We keep hearing about how the U.S. economy is being transformed from a “manufacturing economy” into a “service economy”. But “service jobs” are generally much lower paying than “manufacturing jobs”. The number of good paying “middle class jobs” in the United States is rapidly decreasing. So how can the U.S. middle class survive in such an environment?
What makes things even worse for manufacturers in the United States is that other nations often impose a “value-added tax” of 20 percent or more on U.S. goods entering their shores and yet most of the time we do not reciprocate with similar taxes.
But whenever someone mentions how incredibly unfair and unbalanced our trade agreements with other nations are, they are immediately labeled as a “protectionist”.
Well, someone should be looking out for U.S. interests when it comes to trade, because the current state of the global economy is ripping the U.S. middle class to shreds.
Right now, the United States consumes far more wealth than it produces. This nation buys much, much more from the rest of the world than they buy from us. This is called a “trade deficit”, and it is one of the most important economic statistics. The U.S. runs a massive trade deficit every single year, and it is wiping out our national wealth, it is destroying our surviving industries and it is absolutely shredding middle class America.
We cannot allow tens of thousands of factories to continue to leave the United States. We cannot allow millions of jobs to continue to be “outsourced” and “offshored”. We cannot allow tens of billions of dollars of our national wealth to continue to be transferred into foreign hands every single month.
The truth is that the global economy is bad for America. The following are 23 facts which prove that globalism is pushing the standard of living of the middle class down to third world levels….
#1 From December 2000 to December 2010, the U.S. ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars.
#2 The U.S. trade deficit was about 33 percent larger in 2010 than it was in 2009.
#3 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#4 The U.S. economy is rapidly trading high wage jobs for low wage jobs. According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 percent of the job growth. Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 percent of the job growth.
#5 Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
#6 In Germany, exports account for approximately 40 percent of GDP. In China, exports account for approximately 30 percent of GDP. In the United States, exports account for approximately 13 percent of GDP.
#7 Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe? Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.
#8 In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.
#9 The U.S. economy now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.
#10 The United States currently has 7.7 million fewer payroll jobs than it did back in December 2007.
#11 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#12 In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in “advanced technology products” of $16 billion with the rest of the world. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.
#13 The United States now spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#14 In China, working conditions are so bad that large numbers of “employees” regularly try to commit suicide. One major employer, Foxconn, has even gone so far as to install “anti-suicide nets” in an attempt to keep their employees from jumping off of their buildings.
#15 Wages for workers in China are incredibly low. For example, one facility in the city of Longhua that makes iPods employs approximately 200,000 workers. These workers put in endless 15-hour days but they only make about $50 per month.
#16 In Bangladesh, manufacturing workers toil in absolutely horrific conditions and make an average of about $38 per month.
#17 In Vietnam, teenage workers often work seven days a week for as little as 6 cents an hour making promotional Disney toys for McDonald’s.
#18 Since 2001, over 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed.
#19 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
#20 In the United States today, 6.2 million Americans have been out of work for 6 months of longer.
#21 8.4 million Americans are currently working part-time jobs for “economic reasons”. These jobs are mostly very low paying service jobs.
#22 When you adjust wages for inflation, middle class workers in the United States make less money today than they did back in 1971.
#23 According to Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup, China will be the largest economy in the world by the year 2020, and India will surpass China by the year 2050.
Those that promote “free trade” can never explain how the U.S. middle class is going to continue to have plenty of jobs in the new global economy.
By merging our labor pool with the rest of the world, we have also merged our standard of living with the rest of the world. High unemployment is rapidly becoming “the new normal” in America, and wages are going to continue to decline in many, many industries.
Already, there are quite a few formerly great U.S. cities (such as Detroit) that are beginning to resemble third world hellholes. If something is not done about our massive trade imbalance, even more cities are going to follow Detroit into oblivion.
Unfortunately, most of our politicians continue to insist that globalism is good for our society. They continue to insist that we should not be worried that jobs formerly done by middle class American workers are now being done by slave laborers on the other side of the globe. They continue to insist that having 43 million Americans on food stamps is a temporary thing and that soon our economy will be better than ever.
Well, it is time to stop listening to the politicians that are promoting “the global economy”. They are lying to us.
Globalism is great for nations such as China and it is helping multinational corporations make huge profits, but for the U.S. middle class it is an economic death sentence.
If you want an America where there are less jobs, where more Americans are on food stamps and other anti-poverty programs and where our cities continue to be transformed into deindustrialized hellholes, then you should strongly support the emerging global economy.
But if you care about the standard of living of the U.S. middle class and you want for there to be some kind of viable economic future for your children and your grandchildren then you had better start caring about these issues and doing something about them.
Please wake up America.
 Once upon a time, the United States was the greatest industrial powerhouse that the world has ever seen. Our immense economic machinery was the envy of the rest of the globe and it provided the foundation for the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. But now the once great U.S. economic machine is being dismantled piece by piece. The U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized and very few of our leaders even seem to care. It was the United States that once showed the rest of the world how to mass produce televisions and automobiles and airplanes and computers, but now our industrial base is being ripped to shreds. Tens of thousands of our factories and millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas. Many of our proudest manufacturing cities have been transformed into “post-industrial” hellholes that nobody wants to live in anymore.
Meanwhile, wave after wave of shiny new factories is going up in nations such as China, India and Brazil. This is great for those countries, but for the millions of American workers that desperately needed the jobs that have been sent overseas it is not so great.
This is the legacy of globalism. Multinational corporations now have the choice whether to hire U.S. workers or to hire workers in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. The “great sucking sound” that Ross Perot warned us about so long ago is actually happening, and it has left tens of millions of Americans without good jobs.
So what is to become of a nation that consumes more than it ever has and yet continues to produce less and less?
Well, the greatest debt binge in the history of the world has enabled us to maintain (and even increase) our standard of living for several decades, but all of that debt is starting to really catch up with us.
The American people seem to be very confused about what is happening to us because most of them thought that the party was going to last forever. In fact, most of them still seem convinced that our brightest economic days are still ahead.
After all, every time we have had a “recession” in the past things have always turned around and we have gone on to even greater things, right?
Well, what most Americans simply fail to understand is that we are like a car that is having its insides ripped right out. Our industrial base is being gutted right in front of our eyes.
Most Americans don’t think much about our “trade deficit”, but it is absolutely central to what is happening to our economy. Every year, we buy far, far more from the rest of the world than they buy from us.
In 2010, the U.S. trade deficit was just a whisker under $500 billion. This is money that we could have all spent inside the United States that would have supported thousands of American factories and millions of American jobs.
Instead, we sent all of those hundreds of billions of dollars overseas in exchange for a big pile of stuff that we greedily consumed. Most of that stuff we probably didn’t need anyway.
Since we spent almost $500 billion more with the rest of the world than they spent with us, at the end of the year the rest of the world was $500 billion wealthier and the American people were collectively $500 billion poorer.
That means that the collective “economic pie” that we are all dividing up is now $500 billion smaller.
Are you starting to understand why times suddenly seem so “hard” in the United States?
Meanwhile, jobs and businesses continue to fly out of the United States at a blinding pace.
This is a national crisis.
We simply cannot expect to continue to have a “great economy” if we allow our economy to be deindustrialized.
A nation that consumes far more than it produces is not going to be wealthy for long.
The following are 21 signs that the once great U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized….
#1 The U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world rose to 497.8 billion dollars in 2010. That represented a 32.8% increase from 2009.
#2 The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to an all-time record of 273.1 billion dollars in 2010. This is the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#3 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#4 In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
#5 The United States spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#6 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent and it continues to fall.
#7 The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
#8 The Bureau of Labor Statistics originally predicted that the U.S. economy would create approximately 22 million jobs during the decade of the 2000s, but it turns out that the U.S. economy only produced about 7 million jobs during that time period.
#9 Japan now manufactures about 5 million more automobiles than the United States does.
#10 China has now become the world’s largest exporter of high technology products.
#11 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#12 The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.
#13 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
#14 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#15 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
#16 The number of Americans that have become so discouraged that they have given up searching for work completely now stands at an all-time high.
#17 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
#18 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#19 Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good.
#20 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#21 Ten years ago, the “employment rate” in the United States was about 64%. Since then it has been constantly declining and now the “employment rate” in the United States is only about 58%. So where did all of those jobs go?
The world is changing.
We are bleeding national wealth at a pace that is almost unimaginable.
We are literally being drained dry.
Did you know that China now has the world’s fastest train and the world’s largest high-speed rail network?
They were able to afford those things with all of the money that we have been sending them.
How do you think all of those oil barons in the Middle East became so wealthy and could build such opulent palaces?
They got rich off of all the money that we have been sending them.
Meanwhile, once great U.S. cities such as Detroit, Michigan now look like war zones.
Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was about 6 million dollars for the entire year.
As mentioned above, the U.S. trade deficit with China for 2010 was over 273 billion dollars.
What a difference 25 years can make, eh?
What do you find when you go into a Wal-Mart, a Target or a dollar store today?
You find row after row after row of stuff made in China and in other far away countries.
It can be more than a bit difficult to find things that are actually made inside the United States anymore. In fact, there are quite a few industries that have completely and totally left the United States. For certain product categories it is now literally impossible to buy something made in America.
So what are we going to do with our tens of millions of blue collar workers?
Should we just tell them that their jobs are not ever coming back so they better learn phrases such as “Welcome to Wal-Mart” and “Would you like fries with that”?
For quite a few years, the gigantic debt bubble that we were living in kind of insulated us from feeling the effects of the deindustrialization of America.
But now the pain is starting to kick in.
It has now become soul-crushingly difficult to find a job in America today.
According to Gallup, the U.S. unemployment rate is currently 10.1% and when you throw in “underemployed” workers that figure rises to 19.6%.
Competition for jobs has become incredibly fierce and it is going to stay that way.
The great U.S. economic machine is being ripped apart and dismantled right in full view of us all.
This is not a “conservative” issue or a “liberal” issue. This is an American issue.
The United States is rapidly being turned into a “post-industrial” wasteland.
It is time to wake up America.
 Barack Obama’s State of the Union address sure sounded good, didn’t it? There were lots of solemn promises, lots of stuff about America’s “bright future” and a line about how we are now facing this generation’s “Sputnik moment” that will surely make headlines all over the globe. But we all knew that Barack Obama could give a good speech. That has never been the issue. What the American people really need are some very real answers to some very real problems. So were there any real answers in Barack Obama’s State of the Union address? Well, Barack Obama promised that America will “out-innovate, out-educate and out-build” the rest of the world. He also pledged that America will become “the best place in the world to do business” and that the government must “take responsibility” for our deficit spending. But does all of this rhetoric mean anything or is all this just another batch of empty promises to add to the long list of empty promises that Barack Obama has already made and broken?
The American people certainly don’t need any more empty promises. Millions of American families have been pushed to the edge of desperation by this economy.
There has been a lot of talk that the economy is “turning around”, but in many areas of the country the employment situation continues to get even worse. Payrolls decreased in 35 U.S. states during the month of December.
The truth is that the number of “good jobs” produced by the U.S. economy continues to shrink. In fact, only 47 percent of working-age Americans have a full-time job at this point.
The American people are not going to buy this “economic recovery” as long as unemployment remains at epidemic levels in so many areas. Just consider some of the stunningly high unemployment rates in some of our most important states….
Nevada – 14.5%
California – 12.5%
Florida – 12.0%
So did Barack Obama propose anything substantial that will actually create real jobs?
No.
Instead, all he had to offer was just a bunch of empty promises. It is almost as if Obama believes that a really good inspirational speech will somehow make things better. The following are just a few of the empty promises Obama made during his address to the nation….
Empty Promise #1: America Will “Out-Innovate” The Rest Of The World And This Will Create More Jobs
During the State of the Union address, Barack Obama promised that the United States will “out-innovate” the rest of the world and that this will create more jobs.
Oh really?
Perhaps we could create some more cutting edge products like the Apple iPhone, right?
After all, Apple iPhones were one of the most wildly successful American technological innovations of the past decade. Surely this is the kind of innovation that Obama would like to see more of.
Well, do you know where Apple iPhones are made?
Apple iPhones are manufactured in China by workers making about 293 dollars a month (and that was after a big raise).
But it isn’t just the Apple iPhone that is made overseas. The truth is that almost all high technology products are made outside of the United States.
In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
Ouch.
Not only that, another fact to note is that manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
So exactly how is more “innovation” going to produce millions of U.S. jobs if all of the high tech manufacturing continues to be shipped out of the United States?
Empty Promise #2: America Will “Out-Educate” The Rest Of The World And This Will Create More Jobs
For decades, U.S. presidents have promised that “education” is the key to competing with the rest of the world.
Okay, if suddenly every single person in the United States had an extra college degree, would that mean that more jobs would suddenly start popping into existence?
Of course not.
Right now, we can’t produce enough nearly enough jobs for all of the college graduates that we already have.
Sadly, the truth is that we are already experiencing an epidemic of unemployment among our college graduates. According to the Project on Student Debt, unemployment for new college graduates stood at 8.7 percent in 2009, which was way up from 5.8 percent in 2008.
But that is not the whole story.
Millions of college graduates that have been able to find jobs have ended up taking jobs that they didn’t even need a college education for. The “underemployment rate” among college graduates is absolutely exploding.
In 1992, there were just 5.1 million “underemployed” college graduates in the United States, but by 2008 there were 17 million “underemployed” college graduates in the United States.
Many of our brightest young minds are now flipping burgers, waiting tables and welcoming people to Wal-Mart.
In fact, in the United States today 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.
Oh, but certainly the answer is to get more Americans to go to college, right?
It certainly sounds good in a speech for a politician to say that “more education” is the answer, but in the end all it amounts to is a hollow promise.
Getting more Americans to go to college will not create any more jobs, but it will create more debt. Americans now owe more than $884 billion on student loans, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.
Empty Promise #3: America Will “Out-Build” The Rest Of The World And This Will Create More Jobs
So Barack Obama says that we are going to “out-build” the rest of the world?
Well, that certainly sounds good.
But what exactly does that mean?
Does it mean that we are going to quit shutting down our factories and tearing down our economic infrastructure?
After all, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good since 2001.
So is Obama going to do something to stop the flood of jobs and factories that are leaving the United States?
No, in fact he intends to “increase” trade with countries such as China and India. That is going to mean that thousands more factories and millions more jobs are going to be “outsourced”.
Well, what about building up infrastructure such as roads, bridges, power grids, dams and ports?
That is certainly a very good idea.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to spend approximately $2.2 trillion on infrastructure repairs and upgrades just to bring our existing infrastructure up to “good condition”.
So we desperately need some investment in that area.
But there is a big problem.
We are flat broke.
As will be discussed below, the U.S. government is flat broke. Not only that, our state governments are flat broke and our local governments are flat broke.
So where will the trillions of dollars that we need for infrastructure come from?
Obama did not even come close to answering that question.
Empty Promise #4: America Will Become “The Best Place In The World To Do Business” And This Will Create More Jobs
It was incredible that Barack Obama could suggest that America is “the best place in the world to do business” with a straight face.
First of all, when you consider all forms of taxation, U.S. businesses face one of the most oppressive taxation regimes in the entire world.
But not only that, U.S. businesses also have to deal with one of the most horrific regulatory environments in the history of mankind.
As I have written about previously, the mountains of red tape that U.S. businesses have to wade through just continues to grow every single year.
The Federal Register is the main source of regulations for U.S. government agencies. In 1936, the number of pages in the Federal Register was about 2,600. Today, the Federal Register is over 80,000 pages long.
So is Barack Obama going to do anything about that?
Of course not.
In fact, Barack Obama and the Democrats have been really busy passing even more ridiculous regulations.
For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is projecting that the food service industry will have to spend an additional 14 million hours every single year just to comply with new federal regulations that mandate that all vending machine operators and chain restaurants must label all products that they sell with a calorie count in a location visible to the consumer.
Empty Promise #5: Barack Obama Pledges To “Take Responsibility” For Our Deficit Spending
During Barack Obama’s first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
In fact, since Barack Obama took office, the U.S. government has gotten us into so much new debt that it breaks down to $10,429.64 for each of the 308,745,538 people counted by the 2010 U.S. census.
So is that “taking responsibility” for our deficit spending?
When Barack Obama took office, the U.S. national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars.
Today it is over 14 trillion dollars.
Government debt is absolutely out of control. At this point, the U.S. national debt is increasing by roughly 4 billion dollars every single day.
If all of this debt is not brought under control, it will bring down the entire U.S. financial system. According to a recent U.S. Treasury report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will reach 19.6 trillion dollars in 2015.
Can you imagine being 20 trillion dollars in debt?
That is 20,000,000,000,000 dollars.
So it would be really great if Barack Obama could do something about all of this debt, but based on his track record perhaps we should not be holding our breath.
Not that Obama is to blame for all of this.
The sad reality is that both parties have been involved in a massive debt orgy for decades and decades. Now the day of reckoning is almost here and it is going to be incredibly painful.
We are in so much trouble that it is hard to even try to put it into words. None of our politicians are telling us the whole truth. We are headed for a complete and total disaster.
 Last year was an absolutely fascinating time for world currency markets. The yen, the dollar and the euro all took their turns in the spotlight. Each experienced wild swings at various times, but the overall theme that we saw was that faith in paper currencies is dying. The biggest reason for this is the horrific sovereign debt crisis that has swept the globe. The United States, Japan and a whole host of European nations are all drowning in debt. The U.S. and Japan are both steamrolling toward insolvency, and several European nations would have already defaulted on their debts if they had not been bailed out. So which of the major currencies of the world is going to crash first? Will one (or more) of the big currencies fall before the end of 2011? Once one major currency collapses will the rest start to fall like dominoes? The truth is that the world has never seen a sovereign debt crisis of this magnitude in all of human history. Almost the entire globe is drowning in a sea of red ink and it has brought us right to the brink of financial disaster.
So which of the currencies of the world is going to be the first to come crashing down? Well, let’s take a quick look at the yen, the euro and the dollar….
The Yen
Japan has the 3rd biggest economy in the world, but they are also deeply swamped in debt. At well over 200%, the Japanese government has the biggest debt to GDP ratio of all of the major industrialized nations. In fact, it is estimated that this massive pile of Japanese government debt amounts to approximately 7.5 million yen for every person living in the entire nation of Japan.
So why hasn’t Japan defaulted yet? Well, a big reason is because Japan has one of the highest personal savings rates on the entire globe, and Japanese citizens have been more than happy to gobble up huge amounts of Japanese government debt at very, very low interest rates.
However, Standard & Poor’s has warned that they may have to slash Japan’s credit rating if the debt gets much bigger, and once confidence starts to falter Japan is going to have to start paying higher interest rates.
At some point Japan is going to be facing a financial meltdown, but for the moment they are hanging in there.
The Euro
Several large European nations would have already defaulted on their debts if they had not been bailed out last year. Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Belgium and Spain are all on very shaky ground right now. Several of them have already had their credit ratings slashed.
Bond yields all over Europe have been absolutely soaring in recent months. It is getting really expensive for many of these nations to take on new debt. Interest rates on 10-year Greek bonds went from 6 percent up to 13 percent in just a single month at one point in 2010. In fact, even some of the nations that aren’t in the most danger are even feeling the pain. For example, the cost of insuring French debt hit a new record high on December 20th.
Right now there are all kinds of rumblings that more European nations are going to need bailouts very soon. Professor Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citibank, is warning that quite a few EU nations could financially collapse in the next few months if they are not rapidly bailed out….
“The market is not going to wait until March for the EU authorities to get their act together. We could have several sovereign states and banks going under. They are being far too casual.”
So where is all of this bailout money coming from? Well, a lot of it is coming from Germany and a significant amount of it is actually coming from the United States.
But will wealthy nations such as Germany be willing to pour hundreds of billions of euros into these financial black holes indefinitely?
Are the Germans going to accept a situation where they are permanently bailing out the “weak sisters” all over the rest of the continent?
Already some prominent politicians in Europe are calling for the European “bailout fund” to be doubled in size to about 2 trillion dollars. Other analysts believe that it is going to take at least 4 or 5 trillion dollars to properly bail out all of the European nations that need it.
In any event, the truth is that the situation is really, really bad. If at some point the bailouts stop, the defaults are going to begin.
The Dollar
The United States has the biggest national debt of all. The 14 trillion dollar threshold has just been crossed, and the national debt is now less than 300 billion dollars away from the 14.294 trillion dollar debt ceiling. If the U.S. Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. government will shortly begin to default on its debts. Of course everyone fully expects that the U.S. Congress will indeed raise the debt ceiling just like they have every time before.
However, U.S. politicians are not going to be able to keep kicking the can down the road forever. Today the U.S. national debt is more than 14 times larger than it was just 30 years ago. Everyone around the world is beginning to realize that this debt is not even close to sustainable. Investors are beginning to become more hesitant about loaning the United States money. The Federal Reserve has been forced to step in and “buy” more and more of the debt the U.S. government is issuing.
Yields on U.S. Treasuries have been moving up in recent months and this could eventually become a huge problem.
Why?
Well, the sad truth is that the U.S. government has been increasingly using short-term debt.
At this point, the average maturity of U.S. government bonds has fallen to 4.4 years. The is the lowest figure of all the major industrialized nations. That means that the U.S. government must constantly roll over massive amounts of debt.
As a point of comparison, UK government debt has an average maturity of approximately 13 years. That obviously gives them a lot more breathing room.
For the United States, the situation could become incredibly dire if interest rates start to go up.
If interest rates on U.S. government debt reach an average of 7 percent, interest payments on the debt would gobble up approximately 45 percent of the tax revenue that the U.S. government takes in each year.
Yes, at that point the game would be over.
But what the United States has going for it that the European nations do not is that the United States can just have the Federal Reserve keep printing currency. Unfortunately for the nations involved in the euro, they do not have that option.
That is why an increasing number of analysts believe that it will be the euro that will crash and burn first.
But only time will tell.
There are even many that believe that authorities at the highest level actually want the dollar, euro and yen to fail.
Why?
Well, many of the same individuals and groups that brought us NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, the OECD and the World Bank believe that it would be absolutely wonderful for humanity if we could all have a single, united global currency. The “chaos” produced by the fall of our existing global currencies could provide the perfect “opportunity” to provide the grand “solution” that they have been hoping to introduce all along.
All over the world top politicians and financiers have been very open about the fact that a world currency is coming. In fact, men like George Soros are openly talking about these things. The United Nations has been publicly calling for the U.S. dollar to be replaced with a new global currency for some time now. Just this week Chinese President Hu Jintao stated that “the current international currency system is the product of the past.”
So will the American people just sit back and accept it when their dollars are replaced with a new global currency?
Well, sadly, when things go badly most Americans seem to be willing to accept just about anything if it will mean that things will go back to “normal”. When the global economy falls to pieces, and there already lots of signs that we are on the verge of such a collapse, will the American people be willing to say goodbye to the dollar if politicians from both major political parties tell them that the new global currency is the “answer” to our problems?
Hopefully the American people will wake up and will realize that “globalism” is rapidly wiping away almost everything that it means to be an “American”. Now even many of our children and teens are primarily identifying themselves as “citizens of the world” rather than “citizens of the United States”.
Even if the U.S. dollar does collapse, it is absolutely imperative that we continue to have our own national currency. The U.S. Constitution does not make any provision for any sort of “world currency”. If we allow the globalists to push a truly global currency down our throats it will be another giant step towards the creation of a totalitarian one world system.
So what do you think about all of this? Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….
 Most Americans have no idea what an “economic war” is, and even fewer realize that economic warfare is being waged against the United States right now. For generations, it has been drummed into our heads that “free trade” is always a good thing and that truly free trade will always benefit both sides in the long run. None of our universities teach that trade can actually also be used as a brutally effective weapon of warfare and that economic warfare can bring down entire societies. Nowhere in the mainstream media will you even get a hint that other nations are purposely trying to damage the U.S. economy for their own benefit. But in a world where a “shooting war” with the United States is virtually unthinkable, those that wish to damage the U.S. must resort to other means to accomplish their goals.
The American people need to wake up and stop being so naive. The truth is that much of the rest of the world absolutely hates our guts. They resent our dominance and they are tired of us imposing our will on the rest of the globe. For generations, Americans have been taught to view themselves as “the good guys”, but the sad fact of the matter is that most of the rest of the world does not view us as “the good guys” anymore.
In fact, there are quite a few nations out there that would actively like to do us harm.
So if they can’t shoot at us, then how can they harm us?
Well, they can try to destroy us financially and economically.
Today, major exporting nations around the globe are draining the United States of wealth, they are stealing our industries and they are feeding our national debt addiction.
For some of these nations, they may not actively want to destroy our economy, but they sure do want to steal what we have got. They are more than happy to keep trading with us as long as they keep getting wealthier and their national economic infrastructure continues to get built up. The fact that their economies are getting stronger at the expense of the U.S. economy is not really a huge concern for nations in this category.
However, there are also quite a few nations that do actively wish to do harm to the United States. If trading with the United States will cause the U.S. to become poorer and to go into more debt, then that is a tool that they can use to reduce the power and influence of the Americans in the world.
Is this something that really happens? Yes. Do yourself a favor some time and read some economic articles and research papers from the other side of the world. In some of these countries they are not afraid to openly talk about economic war.
So what are some of the goals of economic warfare?
Well, when it comes to the United States, the goal is to induce big corporations (or even entire industries) to leave the U.S. and set up shop somewhere else. The idea is that the economic infrastructure of the United States will decline while the economic infrastructure of the “attacking nation” will be built up. The jobs and wealth creation that once were a benefit to America will now benefit someone else.
Another goal is to transfer wealth from the target country (the United States) to the attacking country. Each month the United States buys tens of billions of dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they buy from us. Each month we send them big chunks of our national wealth and they send us oil and cheap plastic trinkets which we greedily consume. As this continues month after month after month, the rest of the world is getting richer while the United States is becoming poorer.
In a desperate attempt to maintain our standard of living, our federal government, our state governments and even our local governments are going into insane amounts of debt. Debt is another tool of economic warfare. As we continue to borrow trillions of dollars from the rest of the world, the ability of the United States to exert power and control over those nations diminishes.
The eventual goal of waging economic warfare against the United States is to make us so impoverished and so far in debt that our entire financial system crashes. If the U.S. experiences a “financial armageddon”, it will greatly reduce America’s place in the world. It could ultimately lead to the collapse of the U.S. government. Other nations (or organizations) that wish to have more power would then be able to fill the void that would be created.
So what are the tools of economic warfare?
One is currency manipulation. By keeping national currencies at an artificially low level, major exporting nations make their own exports much more attractive, thus stimulating job growth and wealth creation in their own nations.
Another tool of economic war is government subsidization of industries. Virtually all governments do this to some degree these days, but some take it much farther than others.
For example, there are some governments in Asia that will openly pump huge piles of government money into industries that are considered to be of “national interest”. There is simply no way that western industries can compete on an equal footing against that kind of unfair advantage.
In the United States, companies face one of the highest overall tax rates in the world, they face mountains of ridiculous regulations and they have to provide health care and retirement benefits for their employees. But in other areas of the world the government takes care of health care for everyone, regulations are much less strict and corporate tax rates are much lower.
Is it any wonder why so many U.S. companies are having such a hard time today?
Another weapon of economic warfare is technology theft.
U.S. companies spend billions upon billions of dollars developing new technology that gets “stolen” one way or another by many foreign governments.
For example, there is one major Asian nation that offers huge tax incentives and kickbacks to big companies to get them to come over and set up shop there. But these companies are also required to train and hire local workers and they must agree to certain “technology disclosures”.
Well, after a time the host nation sets us their own “domestic competitors” using the technology that they have acquired from the foreign company. Then the “domestic competitors” are tremendously subsidized and are given huge advantages that the original foreign company simply cannot compete with. Eventually the “domestic competitors” become the dominant players in the market.
This is happening over and over and over. Companies are shutting down operations in the United States and are opening up facilities in other nations where the labor is much cheaper, where regulations are not nearly as suffocating and where taxes are much lower. However, once these other nations learn the technology and are able to set up “domestic competitors”, the original companies are learning that maybe it wasn’t such a sweet deal they were being offered after all.
As the U.S. is being stripped of industry and is being deindustrialized, the American middle class is being absolutely devastated. Since the year 2000, we have lost 10% of our middle class jobs. In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs. Sadly, the millions of jobs that have been sent overseas are never coming back.
Meanwhile, our national wealth is being drained from our bank accounts. Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with one particular Asian nation was just 6 million dollars for the entire year. But for this past August alone, the trade deficit with that same nation was over 28 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) dollars.
In other words, the U.S. trade deficit with that one Asian nation in August was more than 4,600 times larger than the U.S. trade deficit with that Asian nation was for the entire year of 1985.
So how are we maintaining our high standard of living if we are shipping all of our wealth overseas?
Well, what we are doing is going back to all those nations where we have sent our wealth and we are begging them to loan it back to us.
Our federal government now owes trillions of dollars to major exporting nations. Our state governments also owe insane amounts of money to major exporting nations. We are in debt up to our eyeballs and it gets worse every single year.
Meanwhile, our national economic infrastructure is being absolutely ripped to shreds….
*Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
*The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
*Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good.
*As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time that less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
*Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
The sad truth is that the U.S. is being dominated even in very high-tech industries. The major exporting nations are becoming rich by creating wealth and we are becoming poor by voraciously consuming wealth.
Unfortunately, some of the major exporting nations that we have a massively imbalanced trade relationship with are doing this to us on purpose. They see our weakness and the are taking advantage of it. They believe that it is in their own national interests to make the United States weaker.
Sadly, a very significant percentage of those that will read this article will not believe it. Most Americans have been so brainwashed when it comes to trade that they could never even conceive that it could possibly be used as a weapon of economic war.
But the truth is that there are even many prominent Americans that openly talk of weakening the U.S. economy and of reducing the standard of living of the U.S. middle class so that we can be more easily merged into the emerging global economic system.
It is time to wake up. The United States is under economic attack.
More jobs are going to leave the United States this month. More factories are going to leave the United States this month. Tens of billions more dollars of our national wealth is going to be transferred out of the country this month. Our federal, state and local governments are all going to go into more debt to foreigners this month.
Month after month after month this goes on. It is being done by design.
Perhaps when the entire U.S. financial system collapses the American people will finally begin to understand. The truth is that the greatest threats to our national security are not some impoverished goat herders hiding out in caves in Afghanistan. Rather, the cold, hard reality of the situation is that our national economic infrastructure is being ripped apart and stolen right in front of our eyes and we have become so dumbed-down that we don’t even understand what is happening.
If you want to see “the future of America”, just tour some of the formerly great industrial centers of the upper Midwest some time. Ask yourself why “the greatest economy on earth” has so many abandoned factories and boarded-up homes. There are many decaying communities across America right now that are so depressing that the moment you enter them you get the sense that all of the hope has been sucked right out of them.
The U.S. economy is under attack and it is dying. We are being looted and pillaged from coast to coast. This is really happening.
So what do you think about all of this? Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
 The financial collapse that so many of us have been anticipating is seemingly closer then ever. Over the past several weeks, there have been a host of ominous signs for the U.S. economy. Yields on U.S. Treasuries have moved up rapidly and Moody’s is publicly warning that it may have to cut the rating on U.S. government debt soon. Mortgage rates are also moving up aggressively. The euro and the U.S. dollar both look incredibly shaky. Jobs continue to be shipped out of the United States at a blistering pace as our politicians stand by and do nothing. Confidence in U.S. government debt around the globe continues to decline. State and local governments that are drowning in debt across the United States are savagely cutting back on even essential social services and are coming up with increasingly “creative” ways of getting more money out of all of us. Meanwhile, tremor after tremor continues to strike the world financial system. So does this mean that we have almost reached a tipping point? Is the world on the verge of a major financial collapse?
Let’s hope not, but with each passing week the financial news just seems to get eve worse. Not only is U.S. government debt spinning wildly toward a breaking point, but many U.S. states (such as California) are in such horrific financial condition that they are beginning to resemble banana republics.
But it is not just the United States that is in trouble. Nightmarish debt problems in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Belgium and several other European nations threaten to crash the euro at any time. In fact, many economists are now openly debating which will collapse first – the euro or the U.S. dollar.
Sadly, this is the inevitable result of constructing a global financial system on debt. All debt bubbles eventually collapse. Currently we are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and when this one bursts it is going to be a disaster of truly historic proportions.
So will we reach a tipping point soon? Well, the following are 25 signs that the financial collapse is rapidly getting closer….
#1 The official U.S. unemployment rate has not been beneath 9 percent since April 2009.
#2 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are currently 6.3 million vacant homes in the United States that are either for sale or for rent.
#3 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit with China could hit 270 billion dollars for the entire year of 2010.
#4 Back in 2000, 7.2 percent of blue collar workers were either unemployed or underemployed. Today that figure is up to 19.5 percent.
#5 The Chinese government has accumulated approximately $2.65 trillion in total foreign exchange reserves. They have drained this wealth from the economies of other nations (such as the United States) and instead of reinvesting all of it they are just sitting on much of it. This is creating tremendous imbalances in the global economy.
#6 Since the year 2000, we have lost 10% of our middle class jobs. In the year 2000 there were approximately 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs.
#7 The United States now employs about the same number of people in manufacturing as it did back in 1940. Considering the fact that we had 132 million people living in this country in 1940 and that we have well over 300 million people living in this country today, that is a very sobering statistic.
#8 According to CoreLogic, U.S. housing prices have now declined for three months in a row.
#9 The average rate on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage soared 11 basis points just this past week. As mortgage rates continue to push higher it is going to make it even more difficult for American families to afford homes.
#10 22.5 percent of all residential mortgages in the United States were in negative equity as of the end of the third quarter of 2010.
#11 The U.S. monetary base has more than doubled since the beginning of the most recent recession.
#12 U.S. Treasury yields have been rising steadily during the 4th quarter of 2010 and recently hit a six-month high.
#13 Incoming governor Jerry Brown is scrambling to find $29 billion more to cut from the California state budget. The following quote from Brown about the desperate condition of California state finances is not going to do much to inspire confidence in California’s financial situation around the globe….
“We’ve been living in fantasy land. It is much worse than I thought. I’m shocked.”
#14 24.3 percent of the residents of El Centro, California are currently unemployed.
#15 The average home in Merced, California has declined in value by 63 percent over the past four years.
#16 Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has come up with a new way to save money. He wants to cut 20 percent of Detroit off from essential social services such as road repairs, police patrols, functioning street lights and garbage collection.
#17 The second most dangerous city in the United States – Camden, New Jersey – is about to lay off about half its police in a desperate attempt to save money.
#18 In 2010, 55 percent of Americans between the ages of 60 and 64 were in the labor market. Ten years ago, that number was just 47 percent. More older Americans than ever find that they have to keep working just to survive.
#19 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
#20 The U.S. government budget deficit increased to a whopping $150.4 billion last month, which represented the biggest November budget deficit on record.
#21 The U.S. government is somehow going to have to roll over existing debt and finance new debt that is equivalent to 27.8 percent of GDP in 2011.
#22 The United States had been the leading consumer of energy on the globe for about 100 years, but this past summer China took over the number one spot.
#23 According to an absolutely stunning new poll, 40 percent of all U.S. doctors plan to bail out of the profession over the next three years.
#24 As 2007 began, there were just over 1 million Americans that had been unemployed for half a year or longer. Today, there are over 6 million Americans that have been unemployed for half a year or longer.
#25 All over the United States, local governments have begun instituting “police response fees”. For example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come up with a plan under which a fee of $365 would be charged if police are called to respond to an automobile accident where no injuries are involved. If there are injuries as a result of the crash that is going to cost extra.
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How Can America Create Wealth If Our Industrial Base Is Destroyed? 50,000 Manufacturing Jobs Have Been Lost Every Month Since 2001
In 2010, the U.S. trade deficit was just a whisker under $500 billion. Much of that trade deficit was with China.
During 2010, we spent $365 billion on goods from China while they only spent $92 billion on goods from us.
Does a 4 to 1 ratio sound like a “fair and balanced” trade relationship to anyone out there?
Our trade deficit with China in 2010 was the largest trade deficit that one country has ever had with another country in the history of the world.
In fact, the U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
Needless to say, that is not a good trend.
Our industrial base and our ability to create wealth is being wiped out so rapidly that it has now become a very serious threat to our national security.
According to Forbes, there is only one steel plant inside the United States that is still capable of producing steel of high enough quality to meet the needs of the U.S. military, and even that plant has been bought by a European company.
Meanwhile, China produced 11 times as much steel as America did last year.
Not only that, China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.
How in the world did we let that happen?
So what happens if we have a conflict with China someday?
But of more immediate concern is the loss of jobs that the destruction of our industrial base is causing.
For example, the Ivex Packaging Paper plant in Joliet, Illinois just announced that it is shutting down for good after 97 years in business. 79 good jobs will be lost. Meanwhile, China has become the number one producer of paper products in the entire world.
But China is not just wiping the floor with us when it comes to things like steel and paper.
The truth is that China has now become the world’s largest exporter of high technology products. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
So how is China doing it? Well, as noted above, they are pulling every trick that they can think of.
Most Americans think that we have “free trade” with nations such as China. That is a complete and total lie and anyone that believes that we have “free trade” with China does not know what they are talking about.
China subsidizes their domestic industries to such an extreme extent that many global industries no longer even come close to resembling “free markets” as a recent story in Forbes noted….
Our politicians and our business leaders have pursued economic policies that are so self-destructive that it defies explanation.
How in the world could anyone be so stupid?
Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good. Millions of jobs have been lost. The ability of the once great American economic machine to create wealth has been neutered.
The business environment in America is completely and totally pathetic at this point. The number of small businesses that are being created is also way, way down.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 403,765 small businesses were created in the 12 months that ended in March 2009. That was down 17.3% from the previous year, and it was the smallest number of small businesses created since records began being kept in 1977.
The truth is that the U.S. economy is dying.
We continue to consume about the same amount of wealth that we always have, but our net worth is declining.
According to the Federal Reserve, more than two-thirds of Americans have seen their net worth decline during this economic downturn. In fact, the Fed says that between 2007 and 2009, the wealth of the average American family declined by 23%.
So if it seems like your family and everyone around you is getting poorer, that is because it really is happening.
We really are becoming poorer as a nation.
We can see evidence of this all around us. Just consider a few of the examples that have been in the news in recent days….
*One school district in the Chicago area is laying off 363 teachers.
*The U.S. Postal Service is offering $20,000 buyouts to thousands of workers as they attempt to slash 7,500 good paying jobs.
*The city of Detroit, once a shining example of middle class America, is now a rotting cesspool of economic decline and it saw its population decline by 25 percent over the decade that recently ended.
Americans are not feeling the full impact of America’s industrial decline yet because we have been filling the gap in wealth creation with massive amounts of debt.
In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world. That 7.5 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and U.S. workers, but instead it left the country and went into the hands of foreigners that do not pay taxes.
Therefore, the U.S. government, state governments and our local governments have had to borrow massive amounts of money to make up the difference.
Most people do not realize it, but the destruction of America’s industrial base has played a very significant role in the government debt crisis we are facing today.
In addition, the millions upon millions of workers that have lost their jobs as America’s industrial base has been destroyed are now a drain on the system. Instead of creating wealth and being involved in economically productive activity, millions of American workers are now totally dependent on the U.S. government for survival.
Do you think that it is just some sort of accident that we have 44 million Americans on food stamps?
Don’t you think that a large percentage of those people would actually like to have good jobs that would enable them to sufficiently feed their families?
If we continue on the path that we are currently on we are not going to have much of an economy left.
Not that all trade is bad. Certainly not. For example, trade with Canada is generally a very good thing.
However, the horribly unbalanced and unfair trade relationships that we have with nations such as China are ripping our industrial base apart. Our politicians have not been telling us the truth about what the “global economy” will mean for American workers. Most U.S. workers never realized that globalism would mean that they would be competing for jobs with workers willing to work for one-tenth the pay on the other side of the globe.
Those people that believe that we can indefinitely maintain an economy where we consume far more wealth than we create are completely and totally delusional.
Until the American people wake up and start demanding change from our politicians on these issues, 50,000 (or more) manufacturing jobs will continue to fly out the doors every single month and even more Americans will become dependent on government welfare.
Is that what you want?