David Sirota: Will We Choose a Chinese Future?

from truthdig:



Will We Choose a Chinese Future?

Posted on Feb 17, 2012
By David Sirota


For the last two decades, we’ve heard many myths purporting to explain the loss of American manufacturing jobs. CEOs, for instance, typically say they’ve sent jobs overseas because they can’t find skilled American workers. Conservative economists say the giant sucking sound is that of technology replacing obsolete workers. And conservative politicians say job loss is the result of high corporate tax rates, even though ours are among the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world.

All of these explanations are fables with a purpose: They are designed to deny the obvious by pretending that exploitation and policies that encourage exploitation aren’t the root cause of offshoring. More specifically, they ask us to ignore the fact that tariff-free trade agreements and tax loopholes incentivize companies to shift production to countries where slave wages, environmental degradation and human rights abuses are tolerated.

But now at least a few manufacturing jobs are suddenly coming back to America, and the same CEOs, economists and politicians who have tried to squelch any honest discussion of exploitation are inadvertently admitting that exploitation has always been the manufacturing economy’s invisible hand. They are admitting it when they concede that jobs are returning primarily because American wages are precipitously dropping at the same time Chinese minimum wages have slightly risen—from awful (in some places, $100 month) to a mere terrible (still just $240 a month).

This is not some fringe theory. It’s a widely acknowledged fact. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/will_we_choose_a_chinese_future_20120217/