http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/83-83/3848-the-end-of-free-trade-globalizationUS corporations and banks remain free to move jobs and production whenever and wherever corporate strategy dictates, regardless of the consequences for the economy. Government can stop this by forcing them to serve the broader national interest. This is not as radical as it may sound. Every other leading industrial nation does it, one way or another. They impose limits on corporate strategy, either in formally binding ways or through political and cultural pressure, to ensure that good jobs and the best value-added production remains at home.
Washington can accomplish this only through unilateral action, not free-trade agreements. It has to rewrite trade law, tax law and policies on workforce development and subsidy. Resistance will be fierce, given the power and influence of big-name banks and corporations, but the public will surely support efforts to make the big guys serve the country's well-being.
If Washington doesn't make these broad structural changes, another popular idea will prove illusory—that US manufacturing can be rebuilt around green technologies. China is already doing this, and is far ahead. It has 35 percent of the global market in solar panels and is poised to dominate other green technologies. The United States, in fact, has swelling trade deficits in this sector. American companies work both sides of the competition, collecting subsidies on both ends.
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A more persuasive break from past dogma was expressed by Andrew Grove, former CEO, now senior adviser, of Intel and a revered figure in Silicon Valley. Grove wrote a blunt confessional essay for Bloomberg titled "How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late." The government, he urged, must intervene to end the offshoring game his semiconductor firm and other computer giants have played for many years. Tax the product of offshore labor, Grove proposed, and use the money to help other US companies scale up production at home. "If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win," he declared.
Grove took a shot at New York Times columnist and globalization cheerleader Thomas Friedman, who claims "innovation" will keep America on top. Not if US inventions do not lead to US production, Grove argued. Friedman and other free-traders, he said, don't seem to understand that the computer industry adheres to its own exit-to-China strategy for dumping US workers. When a start-up is in development, investors insist even before the product becomes a big seller that executives work out the timing for offshoring jobs.
The US computer industry, Grove observed, employs only 166,000—fewer than in 1975, when the first PC was assembled—while the industry in Asia employs 1.5 million workers, engineers and managers. The world's largest computer maker, China's Foxcon, employs 800,000. They make the products Americans know as Dell, Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.
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