Market Chaos Clouds Underlying Issue Impeding Job Creation

This is not a chart of yesterday's stock market panic.

This is the number of manufacturing jobs available in the U.S. since 
President Clinton signed NAFTA.

Posted by: Noël Jones

Jobs, jobs, jobs. This recession is all about jobs for most Americans, not the stock market. The stock market is a luxury of half of the middle-class, and the wealthy, and when the bottom seems to fall out of the market, like yesterday, after Standard and Poor's downgrade of U.S. treasury bonds from a AAA rating to only a AA+ rating, those of us with that luxury panic as we watch our private retirement accounts dwindle, and consider yanking our money out and stuffing it in the mattress, or buying gold. But for the majority of American families, the poor and the middle-class employed who do not have the benefit of retirement accounts--or those who have already had to drain them to weather a three year recession--there is only one thing that matters right now, and that is the availability of jobs.

So believe it or not, all this market panic is a sideshow to the real problem, which Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC explains in very simple terms in these three short videos. Before any of my conservative readers go into a conniption at the mention of a channel as liberally biased as MSNBC, let me just say that Dylan Ratigan, in my opinion, is the only real Independent on the show, and has consistently criticized the administration's handling of the economy. Here, he explains that the reason that we have an 18.2% jobless rate in this country right now, is
that the chickens of Bill Clinton's North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, an imbalanced import tax structure with China, and a deregulated banking industry, have slowly and steadily been coming home to roost--with the ongoing support of George Bush, and now Barak Obama. Big corporations have not only been taking their manufacturing jobs overseas to fatten their profits with cheap labor, but also to fatten their profits by taking advantage of the different import tax structures in China and the United States. By making products in China, which has a 25% tax on foreign goods entering their country, American manufacturers can sell to Chinese consumers without paying a tax at all, and sell to consumers in America, which only charges a 2.5% import tax. If they were to make the products here, and sell them in China, not only would they be paying more for labor, but they would be paying a 25% tax on everything they sold to Chinese consumers. The math is clear now, and it was clear then (to those who had the information), which is why big American corporations (and the Chinese) were in favor of it at the time. What we should be asking ourselves is why our presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama were and are in favor of it as they have only perpetuated it over the last two decades. Giving the administration the benefit of the doubt--the best possible assessment of the scenario is to say that our current president is scared to stand up to the Chinese because we owe them so much money, and need to keep borrowing from them. The worst possible scenario is that these presidents are on the side of wealthy friends running these corporations and want to keep the situation going for them, while they give lip service about job creation to the American public.