Who are the world’s top 100 global thinkers?

Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s December issue publishes its list of the world’s top 100 global thinkers for 2010. It honors President Obama as No. 3 “for charting a course through criticism.”

I for one would not rate Mr. Obama quite that high in what FP calls “this very smart crowd.” He lacks the necessary policy understanding of the 21st century global economy, as seems clear from his wobbly course on global trade and investment issues.

Missing from the FP list is a bold thinker and quiet doer, John Ruggie, a professor whom a 2005 FP survey called one of the most influential academics in the field of international relations. Since 2005, his main occupation has been as UN Special Representative for Business and Human Rights. During three years of work, he developed a new “Framework” on the duty of the State to protect against human rights abuses, on the Corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and on the need to provide remedies for violations – all toward better managing 21st century business and human rights challenges.

As a self-styled “principled pragmatist,” Ruggie establishes a “foundational principle” that corporate responsibility includes respecting the ILO’s eight core conventions,” but doesn’t leave it there. That commitment, he adds, belongs in the corporation’s own human rights policy statement to show it is exercising human rights “due diligence” in-house but also in relationships with partners, suppliers, and other entities.

In 2008 the Human Rights Council unanimously approved that “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework. But how apply its principles in a world of 192 UN member states, 80,000 multinational enterprises, 800,000 subsidiaries, and countless millions of national firms, most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises.

Ruggie has now posted a 27-page-long set of Guiding Principles for implementing the framework. To gather feedback, he has created a special website, http://www.srsgconsultation.org/, which remains open until January 31. After that, the document will undergo final editing and translating in time for the June meeting of the Human Rights Council.

Wide acceptance of the new paradigm would mean a historic change in the culture of globalization. Just reading a brief summary like this one will not convert skeptics. A careful reading of the Framework and key supporting documents, however. will be instructive even to those who already support what constitutes the beginning of a social movement.
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Goobye to EPI's ‘State of Working America’ in book form

The State of Working America, published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in book form since 1988, is going all-electronic. The full Website will begin in early January 2011.

Like its predecessor publication, the new one will present comprehensive data from eight broad issue areas -- income, mobility, wages, jobs, wealth, poverty, health, and international comparisons – all designed to give readers a deep understanding of the effect of the economy on low- and middle-income American workers and their families.

The 2008-2009 edition, a book of 460 pages, is still available from EPI and still useful for its trenchant analysis.

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Root Canals and the Roots of Human Rights

What is the basis for human rights? I've been wondering. The question is especially timely now that, on December 10, we are celebrating the 62nd anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I had the chance to think about its roots one day this month during an hour-and-a-half session in a dentist's chair. I was there for two root canal procedures.

Between waiting for the Novocain to take hold, X-rays to be developed, and drillings to be refined, I jotted down some ideas in the Notes & Memo pages of my July Day-Timer booklet. Here's a transcription of my scribblings:

* God creates human beings in his own image and likeness, thus bestowing on humankind a unique kind of dignity.
* From early on in human history, humans violate that dignity.
* Laws, regulations, and rules of various types (ranging from the Ten Commandments to corporate codes of conduct) are written to counter the wrong-doings committed by humans.
* People gradually expand their recognition of the wrongs committed against human dignity (e.g., eventual recognition of the moral evil of slavery and compulsory racial segregation).
* Human ingenuity, however, is ever at work in devising new forms of evil (sweatshops, e.g., and causing people to be "disappeared," which is not listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
* Globalization adds a vast new dimension to human existence, one which expands opportunities both for violating human dignity and for respecting it.

In a real sense, everyone favors human rights, at least within a limited scope: for yourself and those close to you. Controversies flare up when you go beyond that: to your responsibilities for respecting the human rights of others, especially the weakest members of the human family.

Any fuzziness here I blame on the Novocain.

(Adapted from an article I published in the July 1998 issue of my website, Human Rights for Workers.)

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Labor report on labor in Hong Kong

Hong Kong took “a “significant step forward” in July by adopting its first minimum wage legislation, but the hourly rate of US$3.60, set in November, “is still insufficient to cover basic living costs.”

So says the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) in a report on core labor standards in Hong Kong that the ITUC, at its own initiative, prepared, for the World Trade Organization’s General Council review of trade policies. Hong Kong, a founding member of the World Trade Organization, lost its independent status when sovereignty was transferred to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.

Here is how the ITUC summarizes the current status of fundamental worker rights in the former British colony:

" Hong Kong law allows workers to join unions, but provides little protection for those who do. The government refuses to bargain collectively with its own employees or to create a legal framework for collective bargaining in the private sector. In practice, employers have wide latitude to dismiss striking workers."

Although about 21 percent of the city-region’s wage workers are unionized, less than one percent are covered by collective bargaining agreements, and these are not legally binding, according to the ITUC’s report.

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U.S. advised to reject 'free trade.' but not the policy

Ban the label “free trade” from public discourse – that’s the advice that Pollster Bill McInturff gave Wall Street Journal’s CEO council November 16.

Recent polls, including one conducted jointly by the Journal and NBC News in late September, show that people oppose free trade deals by a margin of two to one, according to McInturff, because of a “growing sense that other countries are taking advantage of us” in free trade deals.

He did not explain why changing the label would change the mercantilism of countries like China. But a language change in U.S. legislation -- from Most Favored Nations (MFN) to Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) -- did help pave the way for China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) ten years ago.

Still, renaming “free trade” makes sense. It is easier to do if the policy behind a new label makes sense, and if it also makes sense to U.S. trading partners.

My own formulation of such a policy is this: that it is work and worker friendly. Present trade policy is investor and investment friendly, and unfriendly to work and workers. Just look at the results: our extreme troubled global economy.

America’s bipartisan OK to China’s entry into the WTO “looks especially imprudent” now, writes Richard A. McCormack, editor of “Manufacturing & Technology News.” The results have not turned out to be what was promised by President Clinton, the country’s most ardent booster of opening trade with the People’s Republic.

In the June 25 issue of his publication, McCormack quotes Clinton ar length. At a March 29, 2000, press conference, for example, he said: “This is a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences,” among other things by increasing U.S. jobs and reducing our trade deficit.

See http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0615/WTO.html for a sampling of promises not kept.

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“The Global Battle For Good Jobs: Is the U.S. Even Fighting?”

-- American companies are hiring, but mostly abroad, most of all in the People’s Republic of China.

-- With more than 5,000,000 unemployed Americans for any job vacancy, employers have the leverage to skip any wage increase, and sometimes to cut wages and benefits even while enjoying record profits.

-- The gap between the fortunes of business firms and workers is widening, to the continuing decline of the middle class.

-- Companies are buying back their own stock at unprecedented levels, in large part because this is the surest way to meet the targets that will trigger higher executive compensation.

Those are highlights of trends that Dean David L. Finegold of Rutgers has identified by assembling dozens of bits of information and connecting the dots. He published his insights in the first issue of his new blog under the title “The Global Battle for Good Jobs: Is the U.S. Even Fighting? on September 15.

Two months have not made his analysis out of date. Illustrative of his prescience is that in the latest fiscal year “Paychecks for CEOs Climb,” as announced by a front page headline of the November 15 Wall Street Journal.

Finegold, who heads Rutgers’School of Management and Labor Relations, emphasizes a fundamental element in the transformation of key sectors of the 21sr century economy. It is the contrast in the very mindset of the two competing giants in the global battle:

Rather, I draw attention to the less discussed factor that firms themselves are pursuing different objectives. While US executives are focused on maximizing short-term profitability and “shareholder value,” Chinese firms are seeking to grow long-term market share and expand the amount of high-end work being performed in China.

This is particularly true of the approximately 130 large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that dominate strategic sectors of the economy. These are not the old SOEs that existed to provide employment, with little concern for product quality or global competitiveness. Instead, these SOEs have been reinvented to work in tandem with China’s foreign policy of economic nationalism to win share in global markets. As Financial Timesreporter Richard McGregor describes in a fascinating new book, The Party, while these firms operate predominantly according to market principles, the Communist Party retains ultimate control over key decisions through selection of key executives….

In sum, it is difficult to see how the crisis facing current and future U.S. workers will be reversed so long as both US and Chinese companies can optimize their own measures of success by moving jobs to China.

For details, read Finegold’s blog, which Rutgers houses at http://core-training.rutgers.edu/schools/smlr/content/global-battle-good-jobs-us-even-fighting




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On a treadmill at $10 a week: garment workers and Bangladesh

Bangladesh is the prime example of the durability of sweatshops in a booming industry. On November 1 workers in the country’s ready- made garment industry got a raise in their minimum wage to $43 a month. As in other Asian countries, the official minimum wage generally is the actual wage paid to most workers.

Before November 1 Bangladesh’s 3,400,000 garment workers, mostly women, were the worst paid garment workers in the world. After months of struggles for a living wage, they are still the worst paid garment workers in the world.

Meanwhile, the latest annual export earnings of the industry came to $12,600,000,000. The industry is also a vehicle for capital flight, chiefly through over-invoicing,

Garment factory owners in Bangladesh claimed they could not afford a wage increase larger than finally imposed. But a new report, quoting a Dhaka-based World Bank economist, said that labor costs “typically constitute one to three percent for garments produced in the developing world,” indicating that the new minimum could be absorbed without a price increase.

The plight of the country’s garment workers is described at length in that report, the work of the International Labor Rights Forum and Sweatfree Communities. So have dozens of reports over the past two decades by the AFL-CIO, the International Trade Union Congress, the International Labor Organizations, Human Rights Watch, human rights groups in Bangladesh itself, and various other groups.

But Bangladesh remains on a treadmill. The 2010 report of the UN Development Program ranks Bangladesh low on its human development index – 129th out of 169 countries.


I’ve written countless articles about Bangladesh over the years. One, from the May 4, 2005, issue of my Website, is titled “Greed Kills, and Greed Pays” at http://www.senser.com/05-05-04.htm.

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U.S. lagging behind – way behind – in child care funding

Most nations in the developed world do very much better than the United States in funding formal childcare for boys and girls under the age of three.

According to data gathered by the Economic Policy Institute, Denmark ranked highest in such expenditures, and the United States ranked 13th\, among 14 developed nations in comparisons computed using Purchasing Power Parity.

EPI released this information on November 10 as a “preview” from its forthcoming “State of Working America” Website, which will be published online in early January. Read more!

Tax evasion by multinationals in developing countries

Poor countries lose more money to tax evasion by multinational corporations than they get from official development aid. The Business & Human Rights Center cited that fact as one reason for launching a special Website section on business and tax avoidance.

In introducing the new section, the London-based center explained:

“NGOs are increasingly reporting on companies that avoid paying a fair share of taxes and royalties to developing countries, thus depriving governments of essential revenues that they need to deliver to their people on development, health, education, housing, access to water, and other human rights.”

Christian Aid, for example, noted that “the lives of 1,000 young children a day are being lost to disease and poverty in poor countries because of illegal trade-related tax evasion.”

Also tracked are positive initiatives taken by companies and company responses and non-responses to negative reports.
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A kind word for taxes

As a reporter on a small town newspaper many years ago, l met a farmer who believed strongly in self-reliance as the way to slash taxes. Each family, he insisted, should drill its own well for water, surface the road in front of its own property, and dispose of sewage in its own outhouse or septic tank instead of depending on government.

He was angry and frustrated because his ideas didn’t become public policy. The 21st century has many people of the same mind and with same emotions. Their cause is anti-tax, and their reaction is anger, because their ideas are not implemented.

At my youngest son’s graduation ceremonies in the vast Coliseum in Richmond, I got a taste of popular feeling against taxes. Each group of black-clad graduates of Virginia Commonwealth University got our warm acclaim even when we could hardly fathom their achievement. Then, amid the successful candidates from the School of Business, a lone male stood up to receive the degree of master of taxation.

Master of taxation! The words triggered a deep and prolonged booooo. Afterward, I recounted the incident in a column that appeared in the U.S. News & World Report under the heading “A Kind Word for Taxes.” I quoted the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

“A reversal of values is in order,” I added. ‘Those of us – individuals and corporations – who have benefited much from the freedom of our land ought to be proud to pay taxes. To wipe out or huge federal deficit, we need to address a deficit of another sort – one of wisdom, unselfishness, and, yes, sacrifice.”

Nowadays, when so many believe our taxes are much too high, we should at least be open to the facts. Charles R. Philips, in a Commonweal article (October 22 issue), points to one widely unrecognized fact: we’re not as heavily taxed as are citizens of most other industrial nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Counting all taxes – sales, income, property, whatever, imposed by all levels of government – as a percentage of GDP, the United States ranks 27th out 30 countries in the total taxes paid by its citizens. Only the people of South Korea, Turkey, and Mexico carried a heavier burden.
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Feeble signs of press concern about free trade policies

Could it be that the press is becoming aware of the perils posed by U.S. trade policies? Maybe, but don’t count on any follow-up.

“Six Reasons for U.S. to Abandon Free-Trade Myth” is the title of a column by Ian Fletcher published in the October 25 issue of Bloomberg Business Week. Fletcher, author of “Free Trade Doesn’t Work” and an adjunct fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, advocates imposing U.S. compensatory tariffs on imports subsidized by currency manipulation, a move recently passed by the House of Representation.

The conservative business writer, Robert J. Samuelson, is especially troubled by our one-sided trade relations with China. The title of his September 27 op-ed column in the Washington Post summarizes his position; “Standing up to China: A trade war may be the lesser of two evils.” He charges that China “has never genuinely accepted the basic rules governing the world economy.”

Even the New York Times, that staunch defender of free trade, is sounding an alarm, as in an August 16 editorial, “Return of the Killer Trade Deficit.” It describes the “very dangerous habits” of China, as well as Germany, but limits itself to lecturing them to spend more at home and abroad. America should slow national spending and save more. The Times fears a trade war, as if China hasn’t been waging one for years.

So the press mood may be shifting, but not enough to help prevent the United States from committing economic suicide.

For some background, read my blog item of January 2, “Economic suicide is not an option.”

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Gloomy jobs picture for U.S.

They are not on the U.S. payrolls of American multinationals, but they are employed in other countries by subsidiaries and affiliates of U.S. multinationals operating in China and elsewhere abroad.

In 2008 that employment stood at 11,900,000 -- an increase of 729,000 in two years – according to the August report of the U.S. Commerce Department, which tracks such employment data.

Our de facto global labor force is likely to increase, meaning that more and more U.S. jobs will continue to go “off shore.” A preview of that trend is evident from the number of Americans who get federal assistance because off-shoring cost them their jobs.

As I learned from an article by Don Lee of the Los Angeles Times:

“For the six months that ended September 30, workers at about 1,200 offices and plants nationwide were approved for federal Adjustment Assistance. That’s about 20% more approvals than in the same six-month period last year, according to the U.S. Labor Department.”

In an analysis of a Bureau of Labor Statistics September report on U.S. employment and unemployment, the Economic Policy Institute wrote: “The labor market is now 1l,500,000 jobs below the level needed to restore the pre-recession unemployment rate (5.0% in December 2007)."

The September jobless rate was 9.6%. See
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/september_jobs_picture
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Apple, iPad, China, and Me

I was just about to buy Apple’s latest electronic wonder, the iPad. It tempted me most of all because I could use it to replace some newspapers to which I subscribe. They are becoming fatter and fatter and thus heavier and heavier to carry from the curb every day and then back for the weekly pickup.

But I hesitated. Should I also order any accessory beyond the thin case to protect the $499 i-Pad? What else?

Meantime, I read the latest news about Foxconn, the multinational that manufactures gadgets for Apple and other multinationals that outsource their production to China. I wrote a blog item about the news, titled “Silicon sweatshops in China exposed by academics in China.” (See my blog of Tuesday, October 12.)

I tussled with myself.

Deal or no deal? No deal. And no great sacrifice either. I can get electronic versions of those newspapers through other, cleaner sources. I’ll have to write a letter to Apple and another to President Obama. My little protest won’t trouble Apple.

Since free trade in its present form limits our choices, I have compromised my principles many times before, and may do so again. But not this time.

With the mid-term elections looming, I’ve gotten appeals signed by the President telling me, “Robert, I need you.” I emailed back; “Mr. President, we need you.”
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Silicon sweatshops in China exposed by academics in China

The serious labor abuses that this spring led to 11 worker suicides at two Foxconn plants in Shenzhen, China, are continuing at other Foxconn electronic factories in China, according to a study by academics and students at universities in China.

Foxconn, based in Taiwan, is the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics. Its nearly 1,000,000 workers in China alone produce best-selling gadgets for the world’s top multinationals, including Apple, Sony, HP, and Nokia.

The 90-page report was first released October 11 to China’s media and a new commercial Website based in Boston, GlobalPost, http://www.global.post.com. Its correspondent, Kathleen E. McLaughlin, has been following the Foxconn story as part of an on-going Globalpost investigation of the complex supply chains that produce many of our most precious, high-tech gadgets.

The report makes a litany of charges, including treating people as interns and students and hiring them through third-part employment agencies, thus avoiding insurance and other benefits required under Chinese law. In several of the 12 Foxconn facilities visited in a two-month-long study, interns were found to constitute the majority of workers, and expected to work unlimited overtime, contrary to law.

“Under the labor and dormitory conditions, there is great physical, spiritual, and special repression,” the report charged. “A worker can easily be forced to the edge of collapse. Many workers use words like ‘cage’ and ‘prison’ to describe Foxconn.”

In a statement, “Foxconn Technology Group strongly and categorically rejects…alleging worker abuse, illegal practices and unsafe working conditions at our operations in China.” The company insisted that it follows all Chinese laws, including the one on hiring interns through vocational schools. It said that interns numbered 7.8 percent of its Chinese work force.

A question left unanswered: how was it possible for a group to conduct and publicize this study in Communist China?

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People now more ‘soured’ than ever on trade and off-shoring

Almost all managers and professionals believe that outsourcing of production and manufacturing work to foreign countries is a reason the U.S. economy is struggling and few are being hired. That’s a surprising finding of the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll.

The exact percentage of managers and professionals who hold that view is 95%. The lowest figure is 75% for retired people.

Another surprising finding published in the October 4 Journal: 90% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats take the negative position on outsourcing and its stifling effect on the U.S. economy.

The Journal’s page one story, headlined “Americans Sour on Trade,” also dealt with another question: “Do you think free-trade agreements have helped or hurt the U.S.?”

Hurt the U.S., according to more than half (53%) of those surveyed, up from 46% three years ago and 32% in 1999, according to the Journal.

In analyzing the total results of the survey, the Journal added:

“Even Americans most likely to be winners from trade – upper income, well-educated professionals, whose jobs are less likely to go overseas and whose industries are often buoyed by demand from international markets – are increasingly skeptical.”

What if Congress were to pass legislation in response to the U.S. multi-billion dollar trade deficit with China now that public opinion is increasingly “sour”?

In the October 4 issue the Journal did not comment on that possibility, which it would normally denounce as triggering a “trade war.” But in the September 27 Washington Post column, economics writer Robert J. Samuelson deals with a possible trade war were the U.S. to adopt a policy of “Standing up to China,” as his article is titled. His answer, as expressed in its subtitle: “A trade war may be the lesser of two evils.”

The basic problem with China, Samuelson points out, is that it has never genuinely accepted the rules governing the world trading system, Its major victim is the United States, at a crippling cost in American jobs and to U.S.-based companies.

China benefits from a trading system subordinate to its needs, which Samuelson says includes ample export markets to support the jobs necessary to keep the Communist party in power.

“The collision,” he writes, “is between two concepts of the world order…The United States faces a dreadful choice: resist China’s ambitions and risk a trade war in which everyone loses; or do nothing and let China remake the trading system. The first would be dangerous; the second, potentially disastrous.”
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College for all: its disappointments

Is it wise for the vast majority of high school students to plan to attend college? No, say experts in the fall issue of American Eductor, a professional quarterly published by the American Federation of Teachers.

For one thing, fewer than half of high school seniors who seek a bachelor’s degree succeed in their goal.

“We must find a way of being honest with our youth without crushing their dreams,” say the experts in a long critique of what they call the “college-for-all movement.”

They charge the movement with “idealizing” the four-year bachelor of arts (BA) degree by promoting false assumptions, chiefly that a BA guarantees higher earnings and that higher earnings guarantee better jobs. Consequently, many students do not consider non-BA options, plentifully offered by community colleges and even regular colleges with certificates and applied associate (AA) degrees that can lead to well paying and satisfying careers.

“We all know that many people with jobs that require a BA (e.g., teachers social workers, etc.) are paid less than some people with jobs that require an AA (e.g., computer specialists, engineering technicians, mechanics, heating/air conditioning repairers, dental and medical assistants, insurance appraisers, and funeral directors,” write the authors of one article, James E. Rosenbaum, Jennifer L. Stephan, and Janet E. Rosenbaum.

“As a nation, “ writes Chris Myers Asch in another article, “we need young people to become skilled carpenters, electricians, lab technicians, nurse practitioners, and drill sergeants. By pushing college to the exclusion of other options, we indulge in what might be called the inadvertent bigotry of inappropriate expectations.”

For practical guidance to hundreds of different jobs, order the Bureau of Labor Statistics' “Occupational Outlook Handbook” at http://www.bls.OCO.
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Sssshhh! China is a Communist Country

The greatest innovation of China’s Communist Party is building a hybrid market economy, a pragmatic and profitable blend of capitalism and socialism that keeps the Party’s own dominant role “off the front stage of public life in China and out of sight of the rest of the world.” In his fascinating new book, “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers.” Richard McGregor describes how the Party achieved this remarkable success in organized duplicity.

As a journalist in the People’s Republic for more than a decade, he observes: “Foreigners in China can be forgiven for thinking they are not in a Communist state.” Yet a Communist state it is indeed.

“Like communism in its heyday elsewhere,” he writes, “the Party in China has eradicated or emasculated political rivals; eliminated the autonomy of the courts and press; restricted religion and civil society; denigrated rival versions of nationhood; centralized political power; established extensive networks of security police; and dispatched dissidents to labor camps.”

Nowadays, the Party has deliberately relaxed its hold on the daily lives of ordinary people, the better to keep “a lock hold on the state and three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda, and the People’s Liberation Army.” Vladimir Lenin, who devised the prototype, would recognize it immediately in the People’s Republic, McGregor shows, because the necessary Leninist institutional and behavior patterns have endured, “generally masked or dressed up in other guises.”

Foreigners have helped. Before, during, and after his historic trip to China in 1972, Richard Nixon made sure that “Communist” did not embarrass him with his base at home. Mao Zedong was simply the Chairman, not the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. The State Department’s record of the trip, including the speeches, toasts, and press conferences did not mention the word “Communist” even once.

Although most Westerners are well informed about the growth of China’s economy, they know much less about the Party’s powerful role in that economy. At all major state enterprises, for example. Party meetings are held regularly before board meetings, which leave personnel matters in the hands of the Party.

One day in November 2004 the Central Organization Department announced without warning that the top executives of three big state-owned telecom companies had been reshuffled. McGregor makes this striking comparison: “It was the equivalent of the CEO of AT&T being moved without notice to head its domestic U.S. competitor, Verizon, to run Sprint, at a time when the three companies are locked in a bruising battle on pricing and industry standards….The deliberate element of surprise…serves the Party’s purposes perfectly, by reminding them who’s boss.”

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Viewing the trade deficit with China as a form of subversion

Entitled “Chinese Water Torture: Subversion Through Development,” the Heritage Foundation in 1992 published a lecture on how open trade would open up the Peoples Republic of China and bring the downfall of its Communist regime.

Because the Heritage paper was so certain about how “subversive” trade can be, I saved it. I found it only the other day.

The author, Andrew B. Brick, then Heritage’s Senior Policy Analyst for Chinese studies, first delivered the lecture at Florida State University on January 22, 1992, He described how his strategy would work – using outside influences such as trade to “open up a Communist society” would create “political grievances that undermine the extant regime.”

Eighteen-plus years seems like enough time to assess the consequence of Brick’s formula, especially because the United States followed it in a bipartisan way supported by people who had never read his lecture.

The biggest clue for an assessment is found in the U.S. Commerce Department data on U.S. merchandise trade. All last year the United States

-- Imported $296,373,900,000,000 in goods from China
-- Exported $ 69,496,700,000,000 in goods to China, a deficit of $226,877,300,000,000, compared to $18,309,000,000,000 the year when Brick was delivering his lecture.

The U.S. trade deficit since 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, has caused direct pain especially to American workers. Between 2001 and 2008, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the deficit with China caused a loss of 2,400,000 U.S. jobs.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are putting pressure (i.e., getting down on their knees) for China to stop manipulating its currency in a way that bolsters China’s trade advantage and puts a dent in the U.S. GNP. Moreover, Washington has repeatedly declined to name China a currency manipulator out of fear that China would take retaliatory action.

So who is applying Chinese water torture against whom? Who is subverting whom?

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Obama ‘weak, cautious’ on trade

In an article titled “Obama’s Big Failure,” Susan Ariel Aaronson, associate research professor of George Washington University, criticizes the President’s trade policy as “cautious and vague.”

“Because they have not put forward an alternative model,” she writes in International Economy magazine, “by default, Obama Administration officials have accepted the Bush paradigm for trade liberalization.”

Dr. Aaronson identifies the chief mark of this “timidity” as going along with the Bush switch of trade negotiations from the multilateral forum to the bilateral and regional, which pursue “preferential” rather than free trade agreements. This reorientation “undermines both the effectiveness of the World Trade Organization and its fundamental principle of most favored nation (nondiscrimination among nations).”

“The result has been a mish-mash of global trade governance,” she points out, as the various preferential agreements include differences in some key rules. She strongly recommends returning the focus of trade policy to the WTO.

To gain public support for such a move (and trade generally, I would add), Dr. Aaronson urges policymakers to publicize the links between trade and employment., with the UN International Labor Organization having a role in this assessment.

Dr. Aaronson latest book is “Trade Imbalance: the Struggle to Weigh Human Rights in Trade Policy Making.”

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Blaming us, the victims, for our crippling trade deficit

“Economic growth slowed by trade gap” was a page one headline in the August 27 Washington Post. The article so irked me that I sounded off in a letter to the editor the same day. Here’s what I wrote.

Yes, our nation’s huge trade deficits are continuing to take their toll. I’m delighted that, at long last, the Washington Post is awakened to a grim reality of economic life.

But you repeat an old mistake. Although you put the blame on several factors, the only one you mention is “overconsumption.” You think, for example, that we, the consumers, are the villains for our trade deficit with China. Really.

Have you ever tried to buy anything made in the U.S.A.? If so, you see how we have been deprived of choice – by a trading system credited, wrongly, for increasing consumer choice.

The continuing total merchandise trade deficit – nearly $50,000,000,000 for June alone -- is basically a mechanism to redistribute the wealth and income of the American middle class to further enrich the upper 10 percent of Americans and Asians. Your story failed to mention that the deficit with China was $26,200,000,000 for June alone.

What is really an overlooked “factor” in this tragedy? Take a look at corporations based in the U.S., American and foreign, and examine the volume of their intra-firm trade – that is, trade between two arms of the same company, also called related-party trade. As the Census Bureau reported on May 12, last year related-party trade accounted for $740,500,000,000 in U.S. goods imports – nearly 48 percent.

* * *
As I expected, the free-trade-obsessed Post did not print my letter.

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