Any protectionists here?

[IronLionZion]

I voiced my support for John Kerry's plan for fair trade rather than completely free trade. If you just let the market do its thing without any checks then greed will exploit workers, destroy the environment, put unsafe products in the market, corporate fat cats will just get fatter, and so on. Then some freeper called me a protectionist democrat.

pro·tec·tion·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-tksh-nzm)
n.

The advocacy, system, or theory of protecting domestic producers by impeding or limiting, as by tariffs or quotas, the importation of foreign goods and services.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.


You can view Kerry's plan here:

http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/economy/

[brokensymmetry]

1. Yes!

I'm with you! We desperately need to start protecting our working men and women. Presently, they (we!) compete with people who labor in the most awful conditions, without rights, without benefits, and without dignity.

A race to the bottom is not the best course for America, nor for the world.

Besides which, * likes free trade. Which tells us all we really need to know.

[IronLionZion]

4. yes but not completely protectionist

Tariffs are the only reason that lcd monitors and laptops cost so damn much. If you think about it, they don't cost that much to make. Tariffs were protecting the the US LCD display industry for many years against cheaper imports. Today, there are NO LCD displays made in the US but the tariffs remain. These products should really be $300 cheaper. So they are not protecting anybody.

Completely free trade blows too, so somewhere in between would be best.

Clinton was all about free trade.

[brokensymmetry]

16. True enough.

The middle path is generally the best.

[Hubert Flottz]

20. Is the government causing the prices to remain high, or

is it the greedy producers of these items, who boost their profit margin by using cheap offshore labor, but who go right on charging the high prices as if those items were still being made in union shops here in the US? The CEOs might discount those items enough to cut out anyone still producing in the US, but once those US companies go under the CEOs raise the prices even higher! These outsourcing greedy companies will tell any lie it takes to cover their asses, as they rip us off due to lack of government regulation! It's called "Making Hay While The Sun Shines"! It's the same reason our oil companies are gouging us right now, DEREGULATION!

[IronLionZion]

23. It's the government

but I get what you're saying. I wouldn't put it past Gateway and Dell to collude to keep the prices high when the tariffs are removed. They may even get Sony and Samsung in on it. But if just one company cheats, then the deal is off and they will have the glorius cutthroat competition we have in the PC industry meaning rock bottom prices for everyone.

You can't have every LCD company in the world to play the game fairly so the US government keeps the stupid tarriff and rakes it in. Americans love LCD's and we love money.

I believe something similar but more sinister is going on in the pharmaceutical industry. US companies make obscene profit margins and imports are banned outright. bastards! They know that they can charge insane prices for drugs because people need them and will pay whatever. Most people outside the US buy their AIDS drugs from India and Brazil because you'd be fucking retarded to get it from the US. African countries can give their whole GDP to the US and still not get enough drugs. Companies justify their R & D costs after just a few years, yet they keep the patents for like 20!

[sadiesworld]

2. Absolutely.

Actually, I think most freepers are opposed to the job drain, but they have to be good little Bushbots and pretend they like it.

[Zorra]

3. Me.

[w4rma]

5. I absolutely think the U.S. government should protect our own buisnesses.

I am beginning to think that non-protectionist policies are anti-American, as in they weaken America and strengthen our foreign competitors.

[IronLionZion]

6. Kerry has said many times that his plan is not protectionist

that it is fair trade over free trade. Even though he is protecting domestic workers while punishing companies that outsource or buy a mailbox in Bermuda to avoid taxes. He's not completely blocking imports or anything.

[w4rma]

8. What about protecting domestic buisnesses, in addition to workers? (nt)

[Mattforclark]

7. Fair trade yes, protectionism no

[bigbillhaywood]

9. Labor internationalist, trade protectionist

I'd be all in favor of free trade as soon as an effective international labor movement exists, same with an effective international environmetal movement. If we can establish the same high standards for labor and environmental sustainablity everywhere, then it won't be a race to the bottom. Until then, I'm a protectionist.

But I think the global/free trade economy is an unstoppable force, therefore I think it makes more sense to concentrate on building an international labor and environmental movement to contain its excesses than it does to fight for outdated protectionist policies. But if protectionism can slow it, I'm all for it-- I just don't expect it to last.

[IronLionZion]

11. good luck with that

Gephardt had a plan for an international minimum wage, but who would follow that? Certainly not the cheap labor countries like China and India.

Complete protectionism is outdated, there is no way we can produce a lot of the stuff we now import. It's better to specialize in what we are good at. The problem arizes when other countries can produce everything better, and we are reduced to importing everything. Then we are done for sure.

[bigbillhaywood]

15. Didn't say it would be easy, just that it's necessary.

It will take a lot more than some piss-in-the wind idea from a Washington politician like Gephardt to build an international labor movement. It will have to be built on the ground. It will be very difficult, but it can be done, and must be done or the power of global capital will swamp us. Imagine if everytime GE tried to smash Mexican labor, the US and European workers struck GE. Imagine if Westinghouse and Electrolux workers went on sympathy strike. Difficult to imagine, yes. Impossible, no. Don't forget ports were shut down all over Europe, South Africa, the US and many other parts of the world for 24 hours to protest the trial of 5 US Longshoreman just a few years ago. The charges were dropped less than 2 weeks later. Didn't read about it in the corporate news, but that's what you call global labor power.

[aquart]

18. Why? Is polluted water making us stupid?

Were we born without arms and brains?

Specialize in what we're good at? This is America. WE are good at everything. We taught the world how.

American knowhow.

Losing that means putting ourselves at everyone else's mercy.

Does greed dominate market forces? YES. Will greed eventually BREAK every market in which it is allowed to dominate? YES. That's what legislation is for, to put a necessary break on rapacious, locust-like greed.

Republicans still believe Greed is Good. It ain't. It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and you go to Hell for it.

[aquart]

14. Unstoppable force? EU meet Microsoft.

LOTSA ways to stop an unstoppable force. First, stop believing it's unstoppable.

[bigbillhaywood]

17. You can't stop it with the mechanisms of a corrupt nation-state

which is more beholden to the corporations than the people. It can be stopped (or at least mitigated) with international labor power.

[Hubert Flottz]

10. Yes 100%!

You're either with us or against us Bush!

[aquart]

12. What is the purpose of this nation?

To transfer all our wealth to others? Or to make sure that every American who is able can have a job and earn a decent living in decent conditions?

Any plan that does not account for that FIRST, doesn't really interest me. I consider it a prime directive.

[Warpy]

13. China, Japan, Korea, and India are all protectionist.

This is one of the things those free traders won't tell you. Not everybody plays by the same rules.

I'm for highly targeted, nearly confiscatory tariffs on any goods and services outsourced to foreign workers but which depend on the US as the major market for them.

Imported goods and services should always be more expensive than those produced domestically. One of the reasons this is not the case is the strong dollar policy, which causes a wage that will support life expressed in bhat or rupee to translate into a dollar amount which will not, not in the US.

The free trade doctrine has benefited the third world considerably, allowing them to industrialize on our nickel. I have no problem with corporations opening third world operations to produce goods and services to sell within the third world. In fact, I applaud the effort.

Using the US worker to milk for cash as they use artificially cheap third world labor to produce what the US worker used to be paid to produce is a system that simply cannot be sustained. The only people to benefit from such a system are the owning and investing classes. Add to this the insult of charging prices that reflect being produced in the US by union labor (Nike comes to mind), and you further stress the system.

Some protectionism is going to be absolutely vital. How much will be detemined by the behavior of the US corporation.

[Elwood P Dowd]

19. NAFTA and GATT are not really free trade.

They are investment schemes. I don't believe David Ricardo would embrace them as "free trade".

What we have is similar to a giant poker game, and the guys at the top have the game rigged. If we continue on this course, in 20 years the top 1% of the income earners will own 95% of the wealth in this country. The vast majority of our citizens will be serfs earning Wal Mart wages. That's when, as Pat Buchanan says, the peasants pick up the pitchforks and attack the castles.

[benburch]

21. Yes.

If we CAN make it here, we OUGHT to make it here. 350 million people is plenty for a self-sufficient economy, and I want to see tariffs and subsidies increased in stages until unemployment is nearly zero.

[gpandas]

22. we have protectionism now, we protect the coporate

thugs from having to pay living wages, we protect the sugar industry, which is basically two companies, from competition, we protect agribusiness with subsidies, we protect many businesses from paying taxes. as a retired autoworker, i remember americans scoffing at our unions for saying "buy american". the japs did it the same way as the chinese, cheap labor. i find it amusing to see yuppies developing a social conscience, now that their jobs are on the cheap labor track. where were all the protectionists when the shoe, textile, and garment workers were losing their jobs? they were out buying cheaper shoes, clothes and autos that probably were a bit better because they were, and still are, being built by people whose only alternative to the horrid working conditions, and low wages is death. god bless wal-mart