JP Sottile writes: "That's right, folks. While we were busy playing partisan coochie-coochie-coo, the Chinese quietly killed off the great green hope. Last week, Evergreen Solar of Massachusetts announced that it is shutting down a solar panel factory, shipping 800 jobs and all that know-how to China. Although Evergreen received $43 million in state government subsidies, they couldn't justify staying here in the good ol' US of A when the Chinese simply offered them 'much higher government support.'"
Evergreen Solar plans to close its main factory in Devens, Massachusetts, and lay off 800 workers. (photo: Matthew Cavanaugh/NYT)
China's One Child Policy Comes to America
19 January 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
he great green hope.
Born out of the wreckage from the Great Recession and incubated by the fallout of our Oil and Gas Presidency.
Quickly instructed by resilient American know-how and graduating just in time to lead the economy of the 21st Century.
Our great green hope was alive. The future glowed with the emerald hue of manufacturing jobs and energy independence. America would once again lead the world in building something. President Obama delivered the birth announcement in 2008 and Congress sent along congratulatory gifts of stimulus money.
Alas, the baby has been strangled in the bassinet.
That's right, folks. While we were busy playing partisan coochie-coochie-coo, the Chinese quietly killed off the great green hope. Last week, Evergreen Solar of Massachusetts announced that it is shutting down a solar panel factory, shipping 800 jobs and all that know-how to China. Although Evergreen received $43 million in state government subsidies, they couldn't justify staying here in the good ol' US of A when the Chinese simply offered them "much higher government support."
Apparently, the Chinese policy is to allow only one child of this new, green economy - theirs.
The emerging green hope of the Red Chinese is growing by great leaps and bounds. In fact, China recently passed Denmark, Germany and the United States as the world's leading maker of wind turbines. Obviously, they are not content to fill the shelves of Wal-Mart and Target with petroleum-based plastic widgets, disposable holiday trinkets and mass-produced cookware. They are not content with taking over the steel industry, techno-gadget production and airplane construction. Yes, they are also out to out-build us in airplanes. You can thank GE for that. They've just announced a technology-transferring deal to help the Chinese catch us in airplane manufacturing.
Ain't free trade grand?
And that's the problem. The real freedom in free trade is the virtual screwdriver given by our trade policy to the hands of big corporations. They've used it to dislodge one factory after another, loosening the foundations of the Middle Class and shipping it overseas. Meanwhile, the Chinese leverage their massive surplus of labor and hands-on style of government intervention to transfer as much of our post-World War II wealth as humanly possible. But we shouldn't blame the Chinese. No, the people who have made this happen are the well-traveled, well-heeled denizens sitting on the boards of supposedly "American" corporations and the fishy financial institutions that feed them. We should blame their free market political puppets and the people who peddle us cheaper, cheaper and even cheaper stuff. They are rich uncles of China's economic One Child Policy.
You see, the fact behind the fiction of free trade is that "capital," i.e. incredibly rich people, should be "free" to go where profit margins are largest. And profit margins increase where labor is cheap and malleable. For instance, where the government, the army and the police function almost seamlessly, each vigilantly suppressing the political aspirations of working folks or any disputes they might have with management. That's a "good labor market."
It also helps to have government subsidies for just about everything. To have zero requirement to provide health care or pensions or to meet minimum safety standards. And if you don't have to deal with cleaning up any poisons you leave in the air, the water or the soil? Bingo! Now, that's a "good profit margin."
But that's not America.
So, what's the result of our almost religious belief in free trade fundamentalism?
We now find ourselves kowtowing to one of the world's most repressive regimes. To the people who brought you Tiananmen Square, the use of prisoners as unwilling organ donors and some blustery saber-rattling over Taiwan. Although, we don't really mind the saber-rattling. If nothing else, that keeps the defense industry in tax-payer clover. The green economy actually refers to the "green" they take on April 15th and give to weapons makers. Otherwise, there isn't going to be a "green economy."
Perhaps the problem is not that Americans cannot compete, or that China is too ruthless. No, the problem is that the High Prophets of Free Trade care far more about the high profits in their off-shore bank accounts than they do about the country and people who made it all possible in the first place. Their loyalty is to the bottom line. That makes them bottom feeders.
But they are not stupid. They see the future.
China's economy is global capital's favored child. It is growing and prospering. Eventually, the billion-plus consumers of China will make up for the stagnant consumption of a decrepit American marketplace. The pyramid scheme called "the credit card economy" is obviously over. The wealth of the Middle and Working Classes has been, by and large, transferred to the top 1%. And now that America's green economy is suffering from a miscarriage of economic justice, there is little left to keep GE and the rest of corporate America at home. Like the latch-key kids of the 70s and 80s, they will give us plenty of T.V. to watch, some sickly sweet snacks to eat and the promise that they will be home as soon as they get off work.
Unlike the actual parents of those kids in the 70s and 80s, these people are never coming home. They work abroad.
JP Sottile is a newsroom veteran. His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, Executive Producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington, and a two-time Washington Regional Emmy Award Winner. In addition, JP is a documentary filmmaker.
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Comments
China is beating us, but at an old game we really shouldn't want to play any more.
I humbly suggest if we really want to fix what is broken in our system, we ought to be opting for less competition and more cooperation. Less war, more peace. Satisfaction with sufficiency rather than perpetual pursuit of more. Focus on meeting needs, not trying to outproduce other economies. Putting people to work by sharing jobs, not by converting more resources into widgets.
Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth
www.growthbusters.org
1) He's presented a thoughtful assault on the myth that the "free-market economy" is being run by some huge (? divine) forces outside of us. Truth: it's manipulated at every turn.
2) He directs thoughtful reflection to the emergence of China. While his focus is on the sell-out of "American" business men, he seems to register that even as heads of "American" firms are passing the ball to China--which is ably receiving it--, the run-of-the-mill American is DROPPING the ball. These latch-key kids that Sottile says we are becoming are less and less "abled."
3) So a big truth that stares one in the face in this article is that China is on the cusp of "taking charge" to the extent any one nation can. This is something we need to prepare for.
Finally, since we have not been doing a very good job of taking charge, Dave Gardner's comment seems a propos: maybe it's time to learn to cooperate. While the Chinese government seems in some ways as bad as our own, one ought to trust in intelligence if one has any hope at all--and there are a great many intelligent Chinese.
And the government should not be crippling producers with endless rules and regulations that make it too expensive to operate here.
so you believe it's OK for business to dump their toxic waste into our water supplies, to not have sufficient bldg exits in case of fire or provide breathing masks/gloves, etc where workers are exposed to toxins? Those are the endless rules that cripple producers?
This is typical neocon blather justifying corporate greed amd contempt for fellow citizens. Do you really think that "government" (read "by the people") rules and regulations are more of a disincentive to invest in America than forced, cheap slave labor, zero concern for environmental harm, etc., etc. There is no way for average Americans to compete for opportunity when the economic elite have free reign to do whatever will get them richer and richer, and to hell with their fellow citizens.
Let's just dig our own graves, so we don't have to bother anyone with burying us, and die?
America is NOT dead! (Yet) Our Government has just decided that we can no longer pay them as much as their corporate masters can, and we should just bring our kids home from the sorry excuses that pass for schools, and send our last paychecks in to Peter Peterson and the Koch brothers.
The Constitution made allowances for the removal of a government that has become intolerable, and maybe what we should be exporting is our senators, congressmen, corporate leaders, the Fed and those idiots that have been paying them to print money that WE have to pay for.
I'm certainly not getting ready to quietly move to a FEMA camp, when they foreclose on those of us who were standing on the rug when it got pulled out from underneath, or have paid our Mortgages and now can't pay the taxes on the homestead.
These underemployed millions have not lost their income from their own machinations, but have had jobs outsourced for streamlining.
We the people are being declared redundant.
What are we going to do?
it's not that Americans are not "able," but there are things we are NOT "able" to do that the Chinese can ... we are not "able" to work and live as cheaply as they do ... and we don't WANT to live in the highly toxic environment to which they seem to have become accustomed ... the Chinese (and other immigrants) that come here put 10 or more people in an apartment that most Americans wouldn't put more than 2 bodies in ... how do you compete with "sensibilities" like THAT??
We "invest" in multi-trillion dollar wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
They win, we lose.
(PS: our human rights record, from Guantanamo to Bradley Manning, from American Indians to African Americans to Latinos to interned Japanese Americans, is not obviously better than China's. But that particular kind of evil is a side issue. They win because they don't go to war. We lose because we do.)
The amount of deeply prejudiced China-bashing is just unbelievable, I would have expected it to come from Fox News or some such.
Before you jump to conclusions, I am not infected with Chinese nationalism, even though I was born there (but now a US citizen). In fact I think China and the US are probably the two most nationalistic countries in the world, each wanting to be THE superpower of the globe. But knowing the Chinese culture and philosophies, I am quite confident that China's ambition for the superpower status is more out of a psychological need for healing injured national pride, than for any real desire of aggression. The injured national pride is deeply rooted in its painful colonial history going back to the cannon fires of the allied western countries's fleets (US included) that forcefully opened up her shores during the Opium War near the end of the 19th Century - a shameful history on the part of the western powers that is, like so many other US imperialist "interventions" and manipulations abroad, never taught in US textbooks!
Much of the US "post-World War II wealth"
Much of the US "post-World War II wealth" that Mr. Sottile accuses China of trying to transfer away came as a direct or indirect result of these "interventions" and manipulations over the decades, through exploitation of people and the (exhaustible) natural resources in third world countries (and in this country).
It is ironic that it is when the "Red China" is no longer red, but taken over by fierce capitalism, that its keen urge for winning capitalistic competitions in even the "green" industries gets criticized by the capitalist west, from both the right, and now, the left - or a publication that I had up to now associated with the left.
Had the American govt been using its tax dollars to subsidize green industries as opposed to fossil fuel industries, and the military-industrial complex, and the banks, then surely they would have been gotten the upper hand?
Not that I am even much of a fan of unchecked, unplanned growth of "green industries" - all industrial activity causes pollution, one way or another. Just one example: solar panel manufacturing emits NF3, wind farms apparently has been a source of SF6, both extremely potent greenhouse gases that last for thousands of years - information that the green industries will not volunteer to highlight. Of course other completely false solutions
Of course other completely false solutions have also been sold to us as "green", such as "clean coal" (a.k.a. CCS), and biofuels. I have been a full-time unpaid climate justice campaigner, and what I advocate most is conservation, contraction, and a complete change of the way humans live relative to our environment, which includes getting rid of the profit-driven capitalist system which is part of the root causes of all our problems.
So the "stagnant consumption of a decrepit American marketplace" is not cause for concern, but rapidly rising consumption of the Chinese consumers IS, as long as it is consumption along the lines of today's spectrum of junks and unnecessary, unsustainable "goods". (Even though, per capita, China still consumes far less than the US).
Mr. Sottile also buys right into
Mr. Sottile also buys right into the claims of "the use of prisoners as unwilling organ donors", and takes up US government and mainstream media talking points about "some blustery saber-rattling over Taiwan". Surely I believe in people's right to self-governance, and Taiwan should be no exception. But the Taiwan issue is clearly complicated by the US geopolitical dominance in the region, and China's fears of US military installations close to its borders. The prisoner organ charge simply has no credible source. Not saying there might not have been anecdotal criminal cases, but it's unfair to make a sweeping claim about a country from such cases. Nevertheless, I agree respecting human rights is a big issue in China, given that it never really had a democratic system. Still, we have to remember that US itself has come a long way from its days of killing Indians and from slavery, and even today its wars abroad are violating the human rights of millions of people every day.
Maggie Zhou, Ph.D.
ClimateSOS.org
And although Sottile does refer to prison labor and unwilling organ-donors, the focus of his article is, I think, far more on America--your adopted country I suppose!--than on China. That American business and political leaders are willing to sell out American in order to exploit some of the defects in the Chinese system is what really bothers Sottile. So I'd advise a deep breath, and a second run at the article in which you ponder whether YOU yourself are happy with what is happening to American jobs and American prospects.
Global corporation, not antagonism, is the only way humanity might narrowly escape the practically inevitable extinction staring us in the face already. My understanding about China does not worry me yet at this point that it will be the aggression initiator, although further transformation of its leadership structure by more transnational corporation influence could change things for the worse. The US military-industrial-banking complex is by far the world's largest terminator.
As for American jobs and prospects, my earlier comments already alluded to the urgent need for degrowth, conservation, and root-level transformation of the entire economic, production and political system. There are many, many jobs to be had in an economy not based on fossil fuels, and the exploitation of nature (and people). Without this revolutionary change, there is no prospect for any people, not even the wealthiest Americans.
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