globalization

Trade With China Has Cost the U.S. 2.7 Million Jobs

So says the Economic Policy Institute in an updated study. Over the last decade, from 2001 to 2011, the United States has lost a whopping 2.7 million jobs to China alone and this estimate is conservative. The China PNTR trade agreement was signed by President Clinton on October 10th, 2000 and China entered the WTO in 2001.

The more than 2.7 million jobs lost or displaced in all sectors include 662,100 jobs from 2008 to 2011 alone—even though imports from China and the rest of the world plunged in 2009.

Below is EPI's map showing China unfair trade's job losses as a percentage of total state employment. These are not just a few minor localized pockets of jobs. We're talking significant payroll percentages per state being lost just due to China trade.

china job loss epi

Multinational Corporations Are Hiring....Abroad That Is

U.S. multinational corporations are hiring. The problem is most of that hiring is happening abroad. In an updated BEA summary on sales, investment and employment by Multinational Corporations for 2010, we have a 0.1% increase in hiring for jobs in the United States while MNCs increased their hiring abroad by 1.5%.

us mnc employ

Worldwide employment by U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) increased 0.5 percent in 2010, to 34.0 million workers, with increases in both the United States and abroad. Employment in the United States by U.S. parent companies increased 0.1 percent, to 23.0 million workers, which contrasted with a 0.6 percent decrease in total private-industry employment in the United States. The employment by U.S. parents accounted for roughly one-fifth of total U.S. employment in private industries. Abroad, employment by the majority-owned foreign affiliates of U.S. MNCs increased 1.5 percent, to 11.0 million workers.

U.S. multinationals account for 20% of U.S. hires in the private sector. Yet from 1999 to 2009, U.S. MNCs decreased U.S. employment by 1 million workers while expanding employment abroad by 2.9 million. The U.S. share of employment by MNCs went from 75.2% in 1999 to 67.7% by 2010.

China and India Really Are Cheap Labor in Manufacturing

Everybody has heard the reason manufacturing goes to China and services jobs are offshore outsourced to India is cheap labor. Well, there appears to be more than a grain of truth to this claim. The BLS maintains an international labor comparison statistics site. Manufacturing labor costs in China and India are 4% of the United States for 2009.

manufacturing costs region 2009

At the same time though, European labor costs are much more than the United States and one of the reasons Germany's economy is so strong, is their exports and manufacturing sector. Germany clearly has bucked the trend, yet the below percent change for 2009-2010 in manufacturing unit labor costs graph, shows other nations are lowering wages. The great labor arbitrage race to the bottom looks full on.

Can Financial Globalism Reverse?

Originally published in a collection of opinions on the question Is Financial Globalization Beginning A Process of Reversal? (pdf) The collection notes The European Banking Sector is 65% of all global banking.

Globalism is a conspiracy against First World jobs. It is the process by which capital extracts surplus and appropriates the earnings of labor. By moving offshore the production of goods and services for the home market, corporations benefit from labor arbitrage. Because of large excess supplies of labor, corporations can hire employees in China, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere at wages below the value of the marginal product of labor, thus raising the returns to capital.

 

cross capital flows gdp advanced emerging 2009
Source: OECD, Economic Outlook 2011

 

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Originally published on OpEdNews

The United States Government and its presstitute media have wasted time and energy creating hysteria over a non-existent debt ceiling crisis. After reading the news in the Ministry of Propaganda and witnessing the stupidity of the US government, the rest of the world is struck dumbfounded by the immaturity of the world's only superpower.
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What kind of superpower is it, the world wonders, that is willing to go to the eleventh hour to convince the world, which holds its banking reserves in US Treasury debt, that the US government will default on the debt?

Every country in the world now worries about the judgment and sanity of the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

This is the achievement of the Republicans, who took an ordinary commonplace increase in the debt-ceiling limit, an event that has occurred routinely many times over the course of my life, and turned it into a crisis threatening the world financial system.

To be clear, there was never any risk whatsoever of US default, as President Obama has power established by President George W. Bush's Presidential Directive 51 to declare default a National Emergency and to set aside the debt-ceiling limit and Congress' power of the purse, and to continue to issue the debt necessary to fund the US government and its wars.

That the American press ever took this highly-hyped "crisis" seriously merely demonstrates their prostitute status.

Wal-Mart the Latest Victim of Global Labor Arbitrage

Originally published on The Agonist

As we enter another round of quarterly earnings “surprises” on the upside for American corporations, one company continues to stand out from the crowd – Wal-Mart. The distinction is not one that Sam Walton would ever have wanted or expected: Wal-Mart has endured eight straight quarters of declining sales in stores opened for at least one year. This is the most important measure of success in retailing, because it strips out the distortions in revenue that come from adding new stores. Consider in particular how difficult it is for a retailer like Wal-Mart to achieve even one quarter of declining same-store sales; Wal-Mart’s two high-volume products are gasoline and food, both of which have experienced percentage price increases in the double digits. It should be easy for the company to achieve substantial revenue growth just on inflation alone, which means something has gone seriously wrong with the business model of the company that is a poster child for globalization.

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