"Free Trade results in giving our money, our manufacturers, and our markets, to other nations." - William Mckinnley, 1892 (from Day of Reckoning, by Patrick Buchanan)
"No
site better captures yesterday's America than Detroit, forge and
furnace of America's democracy. Detroit is the burned out case of
American cities. The Empire of the Sun has its revenge. Japanese imports
helped kill the city that built the weapons that destroyed the empire.
Now grandsons of the soldiers of the imperial army work at high paying
manufacturing jobs once held by the fathers of ten-dollar-an-hour
retail clerks in Macomb County.
"But why blame the
Japanese? We did it to ourselves. We Americans created a post war
trading regime, in which, over 25 years, Japan bought 400,000 American
cars while selling us 40 million Japanese cars, a ratio of 100:1. One
president after another sat still while a third of America's greatest
industry was shipped off to Japan...
"Americans no
longer make their own cameras, shoes, radios, TVs, toys. A fifth of our
steal, a third of our autos, half our machine tools, and two-thirds of
our textiles are made abroad...
"The decline and fall of Middle America was neither preordained nor inevitable. It was engineered in Washington D.C. Wages
have fallen and the standard of living of American families has
stagnated because of a basic law: the law of supply and demand. The
price of labor has been dropping because the supply of labor has
exploded...
"Having declared free trade and
open borders to be American policy, why are we surprised that corporate
executives padlocked their plants in the Rust Belt and moved over seas?
Why keep your plants here when you can manufacture at a fraction of
the cost abroad, ship your goods back, and pocket the windfall profits
that come from firing $20 an hour Americans and hiring
fifty-cent-an-hour Asians? A
pair of Nikes that sells for $150 in the United States costs $5 in
wages to make in Indonesia. Any wonder that Nike president Philip
Knight is the fifth richest man in America, with $5.2 billion, while
his Indonesian workers make 31 cents an hour?" (Emphasis mine)
(From The Great Betrayal: How American Soverignty and Social Justice are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, by Patrrick Buchanan)
