So, Dodd will be Upton Sinclair. The Chinese are the Lithuanians, and China is the meatpacking industry….

Does that mean we all get to be people who were famous a century ago? Can I be Honus Wagner?

Ok, clearly there’s a problem but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to assert that the only options available are “Suspending all imports of food and toys from china” and “unfettered corporatist laissez-faire I-don’t-know-all-the-words”.

Shouldn’t smart people working in good faith be able to come up with some kind of better solution? And if there are no smart people of good faith then what’s the point of even trying?

I’m not saying we should ignore the problem, quite the contrary. I’m just very suspicious of imposed binary solutions. If you had the opportunity to propose a real solution, HTML, and the only constraint was you couldn’t act against an entire nation, only against specific producers, don’t you think you could come up with a viable framwork? I’m betting you could…

mikey

Go Man Go!

Moloch!!!

mikey, he proposed a solution in the post. Trade agreements requiring adherence to American labor, environmental, and health standards for all imported goods.

It’s time for a true conservative movement in this country, one which reclaims the wisdom of our ancestors…starting with our beloved forefather, Upton Sinclair.

Now step back, watch who gives him shit for this perfectly reasonable demand, and know your political enemy.

I’ve got no problem with giving up on China’s goods, but I’ll bet China does. Dodd wouldn’t actually make this call when in office because facing down China in a battle of economic powers could sink the country. It’d be essentially Bush-like, not in intent but in political acumen.

As a campaign strategy…eh, I dunno. I’m for protectionism but it’d be nicer to see it portrayed as a spur to your own economy than as boogeyman repellent.

I think the proposal is political grandstanding and yes, stupid. And simply using clever epiphets about the people who would actually point that out, and some of the less than kosher motives for it, yes xenophobia and the P word apply here, isn’t actually a rebuttal. Safety standards are of course one thing (and the people hiding their real ‘keep commie products out of the good ol’ US of A’ motivations behind feigned concern for ‘safety standards’ is another) but harping on labor and environmental standards shows the true motivation behind this chest thumping.

Which isn’t even saying anything about the merits of that particular position. By all means MAKE an ‘America First’ argument. Make the argument that we just can’t trust imported food from foreigny nations when American safety is potentially at stake! Make the case that Americans are too dignified a race to have to actually with workers in still developing nations. Make the case that every single company is actually vital to American infrastructure, and protectionism is neccessary in the unsettling event that China declares war on us and has access to all our vital cheap hand held American flag and Mcdonald’s happy meal toy technology over there. I think it would be stupid, chauvinist and undignified (and one no politician except one under the misguided delusion he still has a shot at the Dem nomination would actually support, thank god) but there is SOME merit to it.

But please, please, please don’t trick yourself into thinking you’d be doing the Chinese, with it’s huge export driven growth over the last 10-12 years and the rising real incomes of chinese workers in that sector, any favors by banning Chinese imports. There’s no need to cite the platitudes of 100 neoliberal economists and others spouting econ 101 (even though in this particular case they are entirely correct) There are a number of lefty oriented and Heterodox economists, men and women who have made careers out of challenging economic orthodoxy and shitting on the ‘Washington Consensus’ who would tell you the exact same thing, Jamie Galbraith, Dani Rodrik, Barkley Rosser, Daniel Davies etc.

DDR is a frequent commenter and Kool-Aid server in DeLong threads, where he typically stakes out a position even to DeLong’s right, far into batshit Tom Friedman territory. I think his “Blarg, You’re Pat Buchanan!!!” style trolling here has potential to top even grampaw’s best efforts.

Translation: I couldn’t think of a very clever reply.

And no I am not a particularly frequent commenter of DeLong’s (and you thinking I’m to the right of him really shows how out of your league you are when judging these issues) anymore so than any other prominent economics blogger. Really. There’s a whole host of them out there, Brad DeLong even links to a few of them. I mentioned a few by name in my earlier post. Check them out some time, you may actually learn something. Well maybe not. I don’t think you’ll ever really progress beyond clever epiphets for people you dislike but can’t actually debate with mixed with a healthy dose of ‘progressiver than thou’ posturing. But you might reach the point that your feelings of intellectual inadequacy when discussing these issues subsist to the extent that you can call them poopieheads and pseudo-rightwingers in the appropriate comment threads where the issues are actually being discussed by adults, but I suppose here is good too, as you have more time to think about what you’d really like to say to them and I can tell you feel edgier here.

A few years ago, back in my protest days, we set up a “Peace Table” at the local farmers’ market. One week, I decided to get a bunch of war toys for the display, naively hoping to get people talking about the message we are giving our kids, etc. The toys included a little toy soldier who, when you pressed a button, would play “We Will Rock You” and a little tank with with gun firing sounds that had “World Peace is Our Mission” on the side of it. I got them at a Wal-Mart, the only time I’ve been to a Wal-Mart. All the toys were made in China and I put up a sign pointing that fact out. Not only was the irony of that lost on the passers by, but the only people who wanted to check out our display were little kids wanting to play with the toys. Eventually, their parents would pull them away from the dirty hippy.

Sorry, I think the irony is lost on me too (I’m slow) what exactly iss the irony of the fact that the toys were made in china?

I dunno. I freely admit that whatever expertise I have is in other areas. I just reacted mostly to the assertion that “immediately suspending all imports of toys and food from China” is a “perfectly reasonable demand”.

All actions have consequences, not all of them intended. Typically the most extreme action available tends to have the most extreme consequences. And how about enforcement? What would prevent china from merely trans-shipping through singapore or indonesia?

If something is not realistically doable in real life, to trot it out as a solution is grandstanding. Now I don’t know, maybe there are methods in place to prevent specific classes of goods from a single source country from arriving on our shores. And maybe the multinational producers, angry about being deprived of their cheapest source, wouldn’t take the opportunity to significantly raise food prices, which would have a disproportionate impact on the poor. And maybe China would choose not to retaliate economically.

But I’ve just got to feel that a real solution lies somewhere in the middle ground.

On the other hand, my training runs more to eating dirt and dancing, so I’m gonna leave this one to you guys…

mikey

You could fairly easily target specific goods like say Beef and toys and slap a high protective tariff or additional duties on them and that would stop those imports fairly quckly provided a grace period. Whether you can just apply it selectively to one countries beef and tinker toys but not generally I don’t know (as in how difficult it would be and whether it’s allowed under current WTO rules) but I don’t doubt it.

I love being called out of league by someone whose first best instinct in these arguments is to build the ‘America First’ strawman.

Also, it’s precious to be lectured on what is left and right by idiots who still base their understanding of the dialectic on that which prevailed in Peel’s era.

A clue: demanding higher standards with regard to labor rights, the environment, and consumer protection *can never be* conservative or reactionary positions. If nuts like you, who oppose such standards, aren’t rightwing, then neither were the Robber Barons (whose descendents in Corporate America, in loving collusion with the authoritarian Chinese government, you are such a whore for.)

I guess if I have to explain the irony of patriotic war toys being made in China, then either I’m mistaken about it being ironic or it isn’t ironic enough to warrant explanation. How about an American Flag made in China? Would you give me irony on that? How about an American missile made in China? What does it take to get a little irony?

Look, the American consumer has never given a damn that their t-shirts and sneakers are being made by 12-year-old kids living in near-slavery. We like it that way. Every time a kid loses a finger in an industrial sheet metal press, the WalMart happy face rolls back prices a little bit more.

The only reason it’s become an issue now is that suddenly it could endanger us or our pets. Up till now, if our pet food and toothpaste was made from the ground-up bones of rural Asian children we (by and large) wouldn’t give a shit as long as it was cheap. But suddenly Fido gets irritable bowel syndrome and it’s a big fucking deal.

What will happen next is painfully obvious. Of the three areas that HTML calls out … environmental, labor, and safety standards … the Asian manufacturers will suddenly discover a heretofore undiscovered concern for health standards. Not for their employees, of course, but for us. Foods will be inspected, toys will be tested, certificates will be issued, imports to the US will resume, China will continue to loan us money to buy cheap crap with, and we’ll all go back to thinking that this crap is made by happy, smiling elves.

Once the manufacturers can assure that their products are not dangerous to us, we will gladly go back to ignoring the labor and environmental conditions.

The Asians are going to have to insist on improving their own labor conditions. The American consumer is not going to help.

First of all, I’m a little concerned by that picture. I don’t like the idea of scooter gang hooligans running wild in American cities and making a ruckus in our lovely American Chinesey-food restaurants. That said…

Until recently, I was employed in manufacturing, and my employer had lost some business to Chinese manufacturers. Many of our customers returned to us because the quality of the Chinese parts didn’t meet their specifications. Obviously, the Chinese are just as capable of producing parts that meet very strict quality guidelines and precise measurements – but they weren’t meeting the specs. Why? Profit, and the profit-above-all-else attitude. American companies are just as guilty of this, of course.

I’m not xenophobic or terribly isolationist. I welcome immigrants and foreign visitors (as long as they’re not trying to kill us) but I’m concerned about the Cheaper, Cheaper! business practices we’ve adopted. Why can’t we support American workers by strengthening American manufacturing? I’m not particularly ‘pro-union’, but I think we could do better by encouraging American companies to invest in a local manufacturing base.

Give potential employers a break on health benefits costs, or whatever it takes, and encourage them to get some plants running again. Encourage companies to take a fucking chance, and give ‘Made in America’ a chance, and see if we don’t find better products on the shelves.

Hell, look at the current Toyota ad: “See that house? I built that house.” “See that truck? I built that truck.”

Hell, the damned Japanese have more pride in American manufacturing than so-called American companies.

I’m not an Economist, but Hell’s sake… come on…

zsa, why do you hate Asians?!?! Your loathing is obvious! Your reforms of working conditions in Asian countries, if enacted, would destroy their economies! How do you know teenage girls do not want to huff glue fumes all day building shoes for several pennies of wages? How do you know that textile workers don’t want their fingers chopped off? Who are you to say that the Chinese prison worker with the gun in the back of his head isn’t happy? How do you know that the average Chinese isn’t grateful for the smog? After all, it has the aesthetic effect of shrouding all that ugly new construction! How dare you! Everyone knows that these people are so much happier doing such things than they were when they lived back on the farm. After all, now they might be able to afford to eat at KFC maybe once a month. And who the hell are you to deny them this dream?

That all this is to the first benefit of transnational corporations exploiting the Asian labor pool is entirely besides the point. Entirely! As is another benefit: the illusory Wal-Mart effect of cheap Asian imports allowing the working classes of America to appear more affluent than they really are, thus forestalling needed political changes in America for benefit of the poor.

Signed,
Free Trader

Make the case that Americans are too dignified a race to have to actually with workers in still developing nations.

I think you left out your Magical-C-Word here, DDR. (Is it one of your religious beliefs, where the economically pious use hyphens or asterisks to avoid profaning the sacred word ‘compete’? Or should that be c*mp*t*?)

But how about we phrase it like this: Make the case that the Chinese are too dignified a race to be reduced to factory-bound slavery just so the Bentonville Billionaires have enough money to buy enough politicians to ensure that their fellow Americans can also be reduced to peonage.

Because, in actual real-world history, paying a decent wage, providing minimal safety standards, enforcing child labor laws, and even not befouling the environment the next generation will inherit isn’t really “uncompetitive”. That kind of nanny-state coddling is what turned America and Europe into the “First World”, remember. On the other hand, letting a tiny kleptocracy steal their nations’ wealth with impunity is what leads to economic basket cases in so many sub-Saharan and South American nations, according to the Conventional Economic Wisdom.

Insisting that the Chinese “princelings” meet minimal labor, health, and safety standards is good for 98.6% of the Chinese population and 99.99% of us undignified Americans. It’s only a “burden” for the tiny minority of very rich, powerful elites who don’t want to carry their fair share of the economic load. Why is that so hard to understand?

It’s utterly simple to understand. But when all the political and economic power likes it that way, is it realistically accomplishing anything to shout into the void?

Let me repeat. The power structures like the status quo. An opening has been provided by the product recalls.

Now. Is it the best strategy to demand everything you ever wanted in a trade agreement, a veritable christmas morning where they simply play by our rules ot they take their game on the road? Or is it time to exploit the opportunity and begin to get real, incremental change in the process.

Do we care about a noisome purity, or seizing the opportunity and using it to make the most progress possible?

Pragmatism vs. ideology.

Can’t wait to see how this turns out.

But if we’ve learned anything, we’ll ask for too much, get ridiculed, get nothing and have another shit sandwich and go to bed.

Maybe these neo-whatevers have a couple good ideas in amongst all the stupid?

mikey

And while we’re at it, let’s double Gitmo!

I mean, seriously — it’s a pretty good analogy, if I say so myself. Because just like the Mittster’s super amazing plan, it sounds like the awesomest thing ever while simultaneously being completely nonsensical. Our trade deficit with China is 200 billion. The U.S. switched to a service economy 30 years ago, so who’s going to make up that difference? And your plan to deal with the immediate shortfall is, what, have Americans conserve? Good one. I bet you’ll be greeted as a liberator. (Also, your plan for the various U.S. investment in China? I’m the first to say screw that, normally, but in the short-term again this will cause real people real pain.) That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better standards from China on everything from labor to quality and beyond, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start finding other trade partners or, better yet, ways to bring manufacturing jobs back here sooner rather than later. But it won’t happen overnight.

And dropping the sensible liberal label on anyone who disagrees with you on this is cheap. You’re probably right that Dodd is not motivated by xenophobia here. But he is a failing presidential candidate at the end of his political career, desperate for an issue. So he may not be a xenophobe, and what he’s saying may not be xenophobic, but he knows he’s gonna get the xenophobes by saying it, conservative and liberal. The conservatives are guaranteed, but this is one of the issues on which some liberals will feel comfortable going to those bubbling xenophobic feelings that we all know feel nice and warm and cuddly, because this time they sure do sound like protecting consumers and rebuilding unions and stable manufacturing jobs and higher wages for everyone. And hey, if you can’t admit it, fine, but trying to hide it behind an insult intended to shut down debate only makes you look silly.

I love the special irony that, by totally ignoring all the bad things the Democrats have done — or, hell, not done, since really what they’ve not done is anything good — on food regulations, what you’re really doing on this is arguing from the right. Our food imports from China are a small part of the total; for the problems with our food system you’ve got the wrong country and the wrong federal agency. It’s not just the FDA that matters — the USDA’s grading system for meat, for example, is essentially a smell test. The Clinton administration had years to deal with it, they didn’t. Congress could mandate more comprehensive tests, and actually fund them, they won’t. Actually, the Democrats are practically guaranteed not to touch the issue. And even if they do by some miracle lift a finger, long experience with both parties shows that any regulation they do is bound to make at best incremental changes that mostly help the big companies further dominate their industries by making regulation the equivalent of a regressive tax. Or look at e. coli — China didn’t give us that, we basically invented the stuff. But good luck getting the Democrats to move on the feed lots and corn subsidies; the Republicans may get their campaign donations from poultry farms, but the Dems get theirs from meatpackers, and they’re not going to give that up just because your kid’s gonna die. Much easier to blame it on China.

Right, Mikey, because I’m the only ideologue here. Those neoliberals who vehemently attack *anything* other than Free Trade? They aren’t ideologues at all! And even if they were, don’t they have the right? After all, it’s my side that should be first to compromise.

So, to recap, they aren’t ideologues. But if they were, it’s not like they are being dickheads for that. No, the only possible dickhead is the guy who decides to fight ideological fire with fire *so that the monopoly on opinion can be broken and discussion of middle ground can occur*. Great strategy!

Um, dude, did you not see the irony quotes in reference to the best Clintonoid FDA? Did you not see where I said our labor, environmental and consumer protection standards are crappy thanks to bullshit liberals (which is the same as bullshit Democrats)? I’m exactly *not* trying to get the shitty Dems off the hook here. But Dodd is not being a shitty Dem this time. So good for him, sincere or not sincere, whatever. He said something that needed to be said.

And dropping the sensible liberal label on anyone who disagrees with you on this is cheap.

As opposed to dropping the xenophobia label on *leftwingers*, which is, like, totally fair.

Goodness, usually I’m a lot clearer. I wasn’t IDENTIFYING ideologs, I was SUGGESTING that a policy of pragmatism RATHER than a policy of ideology MIGHT be a better solution.

I’m sorry you took it personally…

mikey

Thanks for this post. The chickens appear to be coming home to roost. Too bad it took freaking lead in baby bibs for everyone to wake up and wonder if a $19.99 DVD player is too good to be true.

Well, I was way more snarky than I meant to be. Of course we should be pragmatic. But until the monopoly opinion of Free Traders is broken, pragmatic policies will not happen. I’m trying in my own little way to expose the moral poverty of the Free Trade position and therefore erode the monopoly of pro-Free Trade pundits.

Hey, res, thanks. BTW, you guys are about to get a lot of links from us real soon.

Zsa, Anne Laurie, Mikey and HTML all make good points. But there’s a coupla other things you may not have thought about.

One thing that strikes me most, as a non-American, is the supreme irony inherent in the US, the country known for hammering its own trade terms on every other country on earth, being bitten by a trade issue. Really, it’s worth a chuckle, at least from here. Thousands upon thousands of activists all over the world (yes, including America) have struggled for years to try and make the WTO, and mainly the US, stop screwing the rest, and to include environmental, health and safety, and labour concerns in trade deals.

It wouldn’t surprise me if China referred it to the WTO and the WTO ruled against the US. It’s happened before, because the WTO doesn’t give one single shit about humans, animals, or any ecosystem: it just cares about trade and money.

The second thing is that China really does hold the US’ balls in its grip. That trade deficit and that budget deficit are all financed by China, in the main. Remember the story a few days ago, with China hinting maybe it might diversify its holdings a tad? Someone here pointed out that it wouldn’t be long before some trade bans were suggested. And here they are.

So what happens next? I’m assuming that all here, indeed all sensible people, agree that trade deals should contain standards for health and safety, environmental safeguards, and labour protections. I’m also assuming that politicians, and the general public, will resolutely refuse to recognise either the hypocrisy inherent in their position (“well, it’s different when they do it to us“), and will also refuse to admit that China’s in a much stronger position.

What do the rest of you think: what will happen next?

Looking forward to it, HTML.

What I’m waiting for is congress to immunize Toys R Us and the rest of the retailers selling this crap from the inevitable lawsuits that will flow from all of this contamination.

They’ll figure out a way to do it. They always do.

I’m not an economist so I would appreciate someone here interpreting this Economist cartoon (from the current issue) for me.

What is the result of China releasing that $1.33TT in reserves into its money supply?

Taiwan

“Um, dude, did you not see the irony quotes in reference to the best Clintonoid FDA?”

I did, but I also saw that they were in relation to food imports, not food produced here, and that they weren’t with the agency I think the Clinton admin and Dems in general do the worst job on, which was the point I went on to make, and neither were they in relation to food supply issues generally. My point about the problems with our food supply being of our own making you haven’t touched, and that’s really what this all comes down to.

“Did you not see where I said our labor, environmental and consumer protection standards are crappy thanks to bullshit liberals (which is the same as bullshit Democrats)?”

I did, but again, you were talking about imports (and focusing on your strawman, not the almighty campaign dollar and Iowa vote,, and though I know you modified it by calling them corporate whores this time, isn’t the sensible liberal label really about “Third Way” Democrats?), not about what we produce locally, which is what matters, and it’s what we produce locally where the Dems really have issues.

Beyond that, again, it’s the doubling Gitmo analogy — talking only about imports when it comes to food is really nice and awesome sounding, but the problem is one at home.

“As opposed to dropping the xenophobia label on *leftwingers*, which is, like, totally fair.”

I’m not dropping it on leftwingers, though. I’m just saying that everyone has base xenophobic instincts that appeal to our nature to distrust the other, and in terms of getting beyond that, even liberals are not yet perfect, though we’re sure as hell better than conservatives. Labor unions, for example, have long played on xenophobia. It’s not exactly a secret.

And since I’m saying I know of very few people who are really and truly above xenophobia, I’m of course not excluding myself. I’m just saying this time around it’s not my turn.

It wouldn’t surprise me if China referred it to the WTO and the WTO ruled against the US. It’s happened before, because the WTO doesn’t give one single shit about humans, animals, or any ecosystem: it just cares about trade and money.

I have no doubt, Qetesh, but remember that we Americans only feel bound to honor international treaties when it suits us (/tongue so firmly in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice)…

As for what happens next, so much depends on whether China’s kleptocratic Princelings are more afraid of their own peons than they are committed to maximizing their global profits. They do indeed have America, or at least Wall Street, by the short hairs, but they also have a billion-plus citizens who can no longer be trusted to shut up and starve for the greater glory of the Motherland. We may, in fact, have achieved a mutual self-reinforcing addiction to the “free trade” soma.

Which doesn’t mean things can go on as they have been indefinitely, or even for much longer. If I had to bet, I’d put my chips on the transportation problem: as energy becomes harder to find & more expensive to use, the “economic utility” of shipping huge quantities of low-end products halfway ’round the globe drops precipitously. I might even drop a chip on some pandemic — not necessarily bird flu, but hoof & mouth or one of the new chemical-resistant plant diseases — causing the world’s two biggest and most xenophobic powers to slam down the drawbridges again. Either way, I think we’re looking at ten or twenty years that are going to make the last “Great Depression” look as parochial as the Second World War made the “Great War” seem.

What do the rest of you think: what will happen next?

Nothing governmentally but handwaving, maybe something after the election to do with domestic inspections that would not affect the prices of the goods involved.

Lawsuits might help regulate the companies. Look out for another tort-reform push.

res ipsa: Just a guess, but it might mean inflation for the U.S. (or not).
Economics: The Dismal Science.
The Real Problem?: Overpopulation. There just isn’t enough of anything to go around world-wide, especially if we’d like the rest of the world to live even as well as the worst off here in the United Snakes. I (modestly) volunteer to have all pass before me in judgement, as to who lives, who dies, & who lives but is sterilized.

MB, 2 and 3 would be us. We’re way more expensive to the planet than anyone else lb for lb if you want to think about it that way. Not that I see the connection between trade and overpopulation. Maybe after a bit more Powers I will.

I did, but I also saw that they were in relation to food imports, not food produced here, and that they weren’t with the agency I think the Clinton admin and Dems in general do the worst job on, which was the point I went on to make, and neither were they in relation to food supply issues generally. My point about the problems with our food supply being of our own making you haven’t touched, and that’s really what this all comes down to.

Sooo, since Clinton’s FDA (the deceny of which I sneered at in the post) didn’t do fuck-all wrt meat inspection, no Democrat can criticise China’s selling us poison? Oookay.

not about what we produce locally, which is what matters, and it’s what we produce locally where the Dems really have issues.

Yeah, I’ve never posted on the awfulness of factory farms. Look, so far as I know we don’t import any real amount of Chinese beef or pork or chicken; if we did, there’d be an even larger e. coli problem than what we have now because even though our standards and practices with packing such meats sucks, it’s still better than China’s which are non-existent. By all means, the meat industry here should be put through the regulatory wringer. Duh. But if you can’t see the difference between e. coli and even mad cow versus melamine and anti-freeze, then you’re bound to miss the point. It’s the difference between villainy and cartoonish super-villainy; or, the difference between some, woefully inadequate regulation and absolutely no regulation at all.

I’m not dropping it on leftwingers, though.

But you did. And are. It makes Uncle Tom Friedman smile.

I’m just saying that everyone has base xenophobic instincts that appeal to our nature to distrust the other, and in terms of getting beyond that, even liberals are not yet perfect, though we’re sure as hell better than conservatives. Labor unions, for example, have long played on xenophobia. It’s not exactly a secret.

And since I’m saying I know of very few people who are really and truly above xenophobia, I’m of course not excluding myself. I’m just saying this time around it’s not my turn.

That’s pretty crappy. You’re saying: If in a given argument there *can* be a xenophobic rationale, then any other rationale which, via totally different reasoning, arrives at the same conclusion, must therefore be xenophobic to some degree, too. Moreover, you’re delighted that since you *don’t* come to the same conclusion, you get to play the xenophobe card for once. A tad too eagerly.

Let’s play this game of moral logic with another subject and see how it holds up. Let’s say you were against the Iraq War. Now there is definitely a racist argument against that war: you want no part of an operation which is sold as helping bunch of goatherding ragheads, What? You were against the war, but not by that rationale? Well, how do you know for sure? C’mon, everybody’s a little racist.

Sucks, doesn’t it? And while more racists (LGF, Malkin, et al.) by far were *for* the war, that didn’t stop several neocons and Sensible Liberals from arguing exactly what I did in the paragraph above (usually in trying to tar the anti-war Left with the Buchananite brush). It was especially rotten because it used leftist language in the service of a purely reactionary ends. Just like the “anti-Free Trade=Racist” argument. But then Sensible Liberals resemble one another, tend to converge on certain points, tend to employ the same reasoning and tactics in all their battles. It’s no accident that, well, Tom Friedman has Tom Friedman’s positions.

sniflheim: Well, it’s all about consumption & production. Fewer humanoids, workers become more valuable, & are treated better. And more nations could be self-sustaining, rather then having to buy from other nations. And I begin passing judgement right here @ home.
(I just like gross oversimplification. I’m one of the original reductionists. Gordian knot & all that.)

Further to what HTML said…

Labor unions, for example, have long played on xenophobia. It’s not exactly a secret.

This is true, but it’s also true that unions – and other people too – try to keep their jobs because there is value to them in keeping their jobs, not simply because they’re bigots.

Is Dodd’s position a moral one, or an economic one? Should we embargo goods from China to “force” (or persuade) them to raise their production standards for our sake?

Let’s say it’s a “consumer” demand. We “want” (sorry for all these scare quotes) to buy Chinese goods, but they’re coming in dangerous, so we have to put our foot down. I don’t see how he’s wrong in that. Wal-Mart may be discommoded by the demand, but that’s at the corporate level. Dodd is right in that ordinary consumers are entitled to not die, or have their pets die, when they buy something in good faith. Why should our FDA act as theirs, too? Because they don’t care? They should be forced to care. Isn’t that the other half of globalization? You want to play in the big leagues, you have to play by big league rules.

A friend of mine designs specialized medical devices like drug pumps and meters. He and his boss went to China looking for bright, with-it designers to do deals with–and didn’t find any. Fucking CHINA. He said, “You give them specs, and they’ll meet them to a T. But you look for creative or independent thinking and you can’t find it.” Interesting. Whether this is a result of Communism or “Chinese” culture, etc., I have no idea.

They want our market, fine; they must treat their workers, the environment, and consumers by our rules…

This is entirely doable. Of course, the corporations that currently profit from the offshore sweat shops, cheap labour and lax standards will suffer some profit loss if things change. The poor things; they might have to pare down the number of yachts, expensive cars, mansions and trips to Monte Carlo; and trophy wives might have to do without one couture dress each season.

Is anyone not sick of either major party here? I mean seriously, I’m starting “The Tea Party”. I want to get back to the basic principles and against all of this monstrously large government we have in place.

Otherwise, I plan to put on “whiteface” and do a minstrel show. Eh, could be fun.

Why have I become addicted to commenting here? And reading the posts here? What is wrong with me? I think I like “Sadly, No!”…..and the commenters here…..other than the antiPamela Geller stuff, of course….but this post and comments are a relief to me. That “cerebral fix” Peter Murphy was on about.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. You don’t like what’s going on with China/US trade and worker’s rights?

Help the Chinese build labor unions.

Well, it’s all about consumption & production.

Yup. As I’ve blathered on a few of these threads, the American model, especially on the demand side, is the worst on earth.

What’s worse than that, though? What’s really the epitome of ethnocentric stupidity? Well, that would be forcibly coercing our model onto other nations, especially other nations that have huge populations where the scales are ginormous. Most Indians and Chinese are dirt poor, and will remain so, even if they discover the glory of toiling in sweatshops. But there will be tiny middle and upper classes that develop — except, in nations of billions, these classes aren’t really tiny at all. It is entirely the object of transnational capital to make these classes of people conspicuous consumers, along the American model. Well, when they meet the goal, the planet dies. Simple as that.

In the 1890s, coal was the equivalent to our oil. China was thought to have the richest coal fields on earth; thus, the developed nations’ imperial interest in China, John Hay’s “Open Door Policy” (translated from the diplomatese to mean, “everyone gets a slice”), the militarization and colonization of the Pacific. But always abetting that interest was the perceived potential of the Chinese consumer market… for manufactured goods! Hahahaha. Now of course the developed nations manufacture little, but the Chinese market is still the great prize. The economic imperialists just got smarter — they took notice of the Chinese labor pool and thought, hmm, if we inculcate in them our consumer culture (not difficult, alas) we can have them make shit, for our market, that they’ll eventually want to buy too someday (let them dream); meanwhile, we’ll split the profit with the Chinese government and everybody wins (except the workers and consumers and environments of all countries involved.)

It’s a perfect mess. These countries have old and subtle cultures being smashed to bits in a few generations by marauding corporatist uberculture. These countries’ peoples, while poor in our cultural understanding of the word (economists claim their definition of poor is objective and not culturally loaded since it can be quantified; it is not), often scored highest on the primitive “are you happy with your lives?” tests of the time. But now that they’re subtly taught to think like Americans, they’re just as grouchy and hateful and competitive as we are; they don’t just have our habits of consumption now, they also have adopted our moods and modes of thought. This is what anti-globalists are talking about when they complain of “monoculture”… But hey, I’m sure retarded trolls like grampaw will show up eventually to say that the poor slave in the sweatshop breathing fumes and having their fingers chopped off has infinitely higher quality of life than the subsistence farmer — who was, by the way, a far more responsible steward of the earth and a healthy force against the loss of biodiversity.

If we had wanted to be good First Worlders, we would have put all our efforts into global healthcare and environmental stewardship and reproductive care first. Then, if Third World nations actually democratically chose to pursue our model of consumption (the Chinese of course cannot choose anything for themselves — to the delight of the neoliberals who purport to care so much for them), they wouldn’t repeat the mistakes we made, and the planet might have a chance. Before any of Anne Laurie’s intelligent predictions come true, I say environmental holocaust comes first.

Help the Chinese build labor unions.

Which is so easy for an American to do when it is in both governments’ and transnational capital’s interest to not allow this.

The whole Chinese system functions as it does precisely because any potential Samuel Gompers over there will be promptly shot in the head for his efforts.

That comment is messy. Tiring. Sorry.

Oooh, it’s Pim’s Ghost! Oooh lala!! Pim, our Atlas posts are teh funniest EVAR. Gah I was totally gonna blog on Pam’s saying that everyone had muslims “in [their] sphinctors” today but forgot all about it til now. Maybe tomorrow…

Yeah, what Bubba said. A phobia is an irrational fear. Being worried that someone else will take my job away from me is actually a pretty rational concern.

SGML: the poor slave in the sweatshop beathing fumes and having their fingers chopped off has infinitely higher quality of life than the subsistence farmer

I know I was railing on about shitting sweatshop conditions, but farming in the 3rd world really really does suck. It generally seems to be a combination of boredom and periodic starvation. Very very sucky starvation. In a sweatshop at least you can be somewhat sure you’ll be able to eat tomorrow, albeit with less fingers than today.

Does anyone else think it’s funny that we seem to be reaching the conclusion that China needs labor unions? This would be, you know, Communist China, that was founded by, like, Communists? Isn’t the entire fucking government basically one giant labor union? And now they’re all like “4 legs good, 2 legs better”? Man those fuckers didn’t learn anything from the Cultural Revolution.

With all due respect to the opinons expressed here Dodd’s proposal is so completely unworkable as to be laughable. The fact that his defenders are so hysterical speaks to that. People from the US, I won’t say Americans in deference to the rest of the hemisphere’s population, love making grandiose pronouncements about things they have a minimal knowledge of. We can see from the results of the actions taken by the Bush administration what kind of insane shit happens when people who think that way actually have power to effect the world.

40 comments in and Mr. Wonderful is the first to mention anything remotely relating to actual “Chinese” in an insulting thirdhand anecdote. Have any of you highly opinionated folks ever talked to a Chinese person? I mean one from China? The regular people here have a very different and much more nuanced understanding of the problems inherent in industrializing an agrarian nation than you do. They are the ones who suffer the consequences and reap the benefits, and there are very substantial benefits to the majority of the Chinese population. You folks remind me of the Westerners who come to Shanghai and Beijing who lament that the ‘quaint’ and ‘historical’ crowded lane housing is being replaced by modern high rise owner occupied apartments. When I talk to my Chinese friends they point out that while picturesque most people would rather have indoor plumbing, gas stoves and central heating, than live in some laowai (foreign devil) oriental fantasy movie set.

Talk about the ‘princelings’ of China is rather hilarious coming from a country where the income disparity between the rich and the middle class continues to increase at a geometric rate. Like most US citizens you guys need to get out more… and I don’t mean the Carribean or Cancun. Stop getting your China news from the WSJ and the NYT. Those papers are owned and invested in China bashing. If you really want working conditions to change in China the only power you have in the US is to force the US corporations who exploit the Chinese labor force to do it by boycotting their products… but that ain’t gonna happen. That requires more than name calling and bile spewing haterism.

Lets talk about prisons. Here’s something from Wikipedia, for what its worth;
“Compared with other countries, the United States has among the highest incarceration rates in the world. More people are behind bars in the United States than any other country, according to available official figures. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.2 million were incarcerated. China ranks second with a reported 1.5 million followed by Russia with 870,000. However, China’s true prison population has been speculated to be considerable higher by activists such as Harry Wu. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.” Of course then there’s Gitmo, etc.

As for Taiwan! all I can say is; Puerto Rico!

None of the above facts about the US excuse the oversights and evils that happen in China everyday and the Chinese people will be the ones who have to deal with that, but all your squalling and posturing has absolutely no chance of changing anything. I have great hopes for what is happening in China. I find the average person here to be much more aware of the complexities of dealing with the problems of an industrialized consumerist society than the average person back home (and I’m from oh so progressive San Francisco). Call me an idiot, a dupe or a communist tool, I’m actually in China and loving it.

With all due respect to the opinions expressed here Dodd’s proposal is so completely unworkable as to be laughable. The fact that his defenders are so hysterical speaks to that. People from the US, I won’t say Americans in deference to the rest of the hemisphere’s population, love making grandiose pronouncements about things they have a minimal knowledge of. We can see from the results of the actions taken by the Bush administration what kind of insane shit happens when people who think that way actually have power to effect the world.

40 comments in and Mr. Wonderful is the first to mention anything remotely relating to actual “Chinese” in an insulting thirdhand anecdote. Have any of you highly opinionated folks ever talked to a Chinese person? I mean one from China? The regular people here have a very different and much more nuanced understanding of the problems inherent in industrializing an agrarian nation than you do. They are the ones who suffer the consequences and reap the benefits, and there are very substantial benefits to the majority of the Chinese population. You folks remind me of the Westerners who come to Shanghai and Beijing who lament that the ‘quaint’ and ‘historical’ crowded lane housing is being replaced by modern high rise owner occupied apartments. When I talk to my Chinese friends they point out that while picturesque most people would rather have indoor plumbing, gas stoves and central heating, than live in some laowai (foreign devil) oriental fantasy movie set.

Talk about the ‘princelings’ of China is rather hilarious coming from a country where the income disparity between the rich and the middle class continues to increase at a geometric rate. Like most US citizens you guys need to get out more… and I don’t mean the Carribean or Cancun. Stop getting your China news from the WSJ and the NYT. Those papers are owned and invested in China bashing. If you really want working conditions to change in China the only power you have in the US is to force the US corporations who exploit the Chinese labor force to do it by boycotting their products… but that ain’t gonna happen. That requires more than name calling and bile spewing haterism.

Lets talk about prisons. Here’s something from Wikipedia, for what its worth;
“Compared with other countries, the United States has among the highest incarceration rates in the world. More people are behind bars in the United States than any other country, according to available official figures. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.2 million were incarcerated. China ranks second with a reported 1.5 million followed by Russia with 870,000. However, China’s true prison population has been speculated to be considerable higher by activists such as Harry Wu. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.” Of course then there’s Gitmo, etc.

As for Taiwan! all I can say is; Puerto Rico!

None of the above facts about the US excuse the oversights and evils that happen in China everyday and the Chinese people will be the ones who have to deal with that, but all your squalling and posturing has absolutely no chance of changing anything. I have great hopes for what is happening in China. I find the average person here to be much more aware of the complexities of dealing with the problems of an industrialized consumerist society than the average person back home (and I’m from oh so progressive San Francisco). Call me an idiot, a dupe or a communist tool, I’m actually in China and loving it.

Sure it sucks, and it was as you describe in China (if mostly because Mao forced farmers into pig-iron manufacturing instead of, you know, farming). But on the whole, in the Third World, and especially in Latin America, it was a better fate than what awaits them now.

Off topic-
My Ann Althouse facebook profile got a message.
“This is my first venture into facebook out of combination of boredom and curiosity…and who pops up in my age group but you. Goooness, Ann, you cannot possibly have been born in 1937. I would have guessed maybe 1957. Best wishes.”
*childish giggling*

Ooooops! How’d that happen? The points HTML raises in his latest post about biodiversity, personal happiness and the juggernaut of corporate consumerism are very valid. At the risk of sounding like the Reaganites vis. SA during the 80s, we need to engage as much as possible with the Chinese populace to work for our mutual salvation. There are many people here who hold worldviews very similar to yours, but they are discouraged and perplexed by the monolithic reaction of the US to China’s emergence as an economic power. We all need all the help and networking we can get to pop this pimple. Here’s a weird anecdote that illustrates the complex layers of the cultural interaction required. I was talking to a Chinese friend, highly educated and accomplished who shares your view of the erosion of a venerable cultural heritage, who in a political discussion offhandedly remarked maybe things would be better in China if they had the same access to firearms that we did in the US. Just that day I had been thinking how nice it was that when I heard popping sounds in China it was just fireworks celebrating a wedding or store opening not gunshots. 10 years ago my roommate and I heard the pop pop pop of a .22 pistol outside our apartment in SF. A tourist had been shot to death. Its a strange, dark, beautiful world we live in.

There’s something familiar in Lez’s post, like one of those dispatches sent by too credulous American correspondents in the Soviet Union, circa 1930.

You know, if American companies had found a way to make more money off the Russian people than they made from demonizing them, there’d still be a Soviet Union. The point being, there’s nothing apparently wrong with a totalitarian society so long as it’s corporate-friendly.

Oh, but HTML, economic freedom first, then political freedom! Sure, sure. That excuse has been good for almost thirty years now.

Just so I’m not misunderstood, I have nothing against the Chinese people anymore than I would have had against the Soviets back then. The Cold War was stupid, wasteful, enabled and strengthened the worst political actors on both sides; it was a cynical construction that nearly killed us all. Neither, then, do I want a new Cold War with China. But I don’t think we should be so actively helping a government like that, especially considering the cost to ourselves and the Chinese people. I think that by making the Chicom govt wealthier we are actually empowering them more, ensuring there will be no unions, no environmental policy, no consumer protection, and certainly no political freedom. Collusion with them isn’t working; it’s having the same effect as the Cold War, in that it strengthens what is politically rotten on both sides. There has to be another way.

Actually, it was the nascent environmental movement in China that caused all this. They realized they had all this poisonous crap on their hands and they could bury it in their backyards or sell it and ship it to America.

This post starts off with a photo of Taiwan (see the use of fantizi in the signage, the scooters, the tile-covered building to the right?) in an article about the PRC, which is sadly the highlight of the whole deal, since it pretty much goes downhill from there in terms of both accuracy and relevance. Way to go!

I’d go through the motions of correcting the piles and piles of ignorant assumptions that have been heaped up here by everyone (since I have, you know, lived in China and study the Chinese economy full-time, unlike almost every ass-talker here), but the proposals on the table are so ludicrously implausible that there’s no need for education, since all your assumptions will go exactly nowhere in the real world where adults do things. Better to save my efforts for policy debates that stand a fart’s chance of actually changing something.

Or: what Lez Ismore said. Fuck Dodd.

Also, before you do what you just did with Les and try to paint me as some kind of pro-PRC apologist, don’t even bother. I also lived in Taiwan for a goodly length of time, and have plenty of ill things to say about the PRC on nearly every point, from currency policy to the environment to human rights. The difference here is, I actually inform myself of the issues before I go spouting off random nonsense and likening people to mass-famine apologists from the 30s out of a need to fall back on ad hominem bullshit. You might want to try it sometime, it’s quite refreshing.

As much as I appreciate Senator Dodd ’s sentiment, in practice it suffers from a couple of slight problems, namely that it is completely impossible to implement, and that even if it weren’t it misapprehends the nature of the problem.

Firstly, keeping the problem goods out of the country by blocking “Chinese” products is like King Canute ordering back the tide. Fantasies of standing athwart a chasm-spanning bridge and shouting “You shall not pass!” to a Balrog made out of tainted dogfood and improperly secured magnets are just that, fantasies. Sure, with some effort you could stop all shipping containers labeled “Too: America, From: China”. But what about a device from country A containing a component from country B that includes a part assembled in country C but imported from China? What about more-or-less fungible food ingredients? The pedigrees of consumer products are murky enough as it is–imagine their opacity were there to be such an obvious financial benefit in their obfuscation.

And secondly, even if we did manage to keep all such object spawned in that dread land from tainting our pristine shores, where exactly do you expect the replacements are going to be made — France? The problem is structural–producing worthless plastic shit at a cost that allows you to sell it for a profit requires that it be made in a place where a product safety inspection is making sure that the shipment of My Little Ponies is not on fire when it leaves the loading dock, and where a good work environment is one where you supervisor is required to inform you as to why you are about to be beaten with a hose. The razor thin profit margins on which these manufacturers rely to make a living all but guarantee that the corners cut in the process will themselves have all their angular edges expertly trimmed. They cannot afford not to.

In the end, you can’t solve the problems caused by the widespread buying of worthless plastic shit by negotiating about the manner in which said worthless plastic shit is obtained. You solve them by buying less worthless plastic shit. That’s really the only viable way.

Lets talk about prisons. Here’s something from Wikipedia, for what its worth;
“Compared with other countries, the United States has among the highest incarceration rates in the world. More people are behind bars in the United States than any other country, according to available official figures. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.2 million were incarcerated. China ranks second with a reported 1.5 million followed by Russia with 870,000. However, China’s true prison population has been speculated to be considerable higher by activists such as Harry Wu. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.” Of course then there’s Gitmo, etc.

To be fair though, part of the reason why China isn’t number one is that they have a tendency to shoot you in the back of the fucking head on your way out of the courtroom. That kinda cuts down on incarceration rates.

Yeah too bad they’re not a supremely enlightened country like the US where a guy who jokes about frying a woman in the electric chair gets elected president, decider-in-chief, butt fucker of the Constitution, while everybody sits around beating off to Victoria’s Secret ads. If water-boarding and months of sensory deprivation and sleep denial aren’t enough the US just ships folks off to beautiful places like Bulgaria and Syria where they slap 220 volt alligator clips on their cojones and torture ’em until they drop dead. Now that’s some kind of outsourcing! Sophist, you are an aptly self-named fucktard. I’ll bet you were king of the debate team in high school, your last educational venue no doubt. Get a clue you fucking witless tool. Is that couched in a more culturally appropriate style for your bile bath you fat assed armchair xenophobes?

And HTML if I had an axe to grind I might agree with your characterization of my post but I’m just over here talking to real people. I guess in your sharply delineated world that would be a handicap to clear thinking. The smartest thing you said was your last statement. Got any real, applicable ideas about exactly what that way might just be? All you Chicken Little’s waiting for the sky to fall can call me an idiot optimist but I think humans have solved problems this hard in the past so let’s get it on brothers and sisters.

Hmm. I don’t recall claiming that the US was the apotheosis of saintly perfection to which all must aspire or be found wanting, but then again, responding to what people actually say is probably one of those lame debate team tactics you so rightly scorn.

HTML: I appreciate what you’re saying, but your argument’s a bit clouded. I think you should identify what you’re trying to achieve and then work out the best way to achieve it. I’m not sure, from reading your article, whether you want to improve the quality of Chinese imports or the lot of Chinese workers (both laudable). If the former, why bother with labor restrictions as well as quality rules? If the latter, surely you realise that cutting off trade with China would cause immense damage to the Chinese (and US) economies, hurting the poor first?

I think that by making the Chicom govt wealthier we are actually empowering them more, ensuring there will be no unions, no environmental policy, no consumer protection, and certainly no political freedom. Collusion with them isn’t working; it’s having the same effect as the Cold War, in that it strengthens what is politically rotten on both sides.

I agree with some of what you said there, but I think you’re making a mistake when you think that the Chinese government is really all-powerful and in control. They’ve got juice, don’t get me wrong, but from what I can see, they’re hanging on to some situations by their goddam fingernails.

Same here in Russia. Yeah, they do big&scary shit now and again (this last week they charged a commenter in a LiveJournal blog with an equivalent of sedition and are prepping to throw his hiney into gulag for a couple of years — all for saying that corrupt cops should be set on fire in the public square now&again), but they’re basically just smacking around the tall daisies in the hopes of intimidating enough people so they can keep their grips on the worn levers of power. Making the wealthy more powerful sucks, no doubt about it – and as we see on a daily basis in the U.S., it ain’t just confined to 2nd and 3rd world countries.

Far be it from me to tout “Invisible Hand” claptrap here, but I’m guessing that parents shopping for Christmas presents for the kiddies are going to be taking a look at the raised plastic stamping on the bottom of the Tickle Me Gitmo dolls to see if it says “Made in China.” Nothing seems to succeed in the idea marketplace like hysteria, and the sure-to-come stories of some kid drooling on him/herself after sucking all the paint off Barbie’s Malibu Corvette will have an impact on the national consciousness. Thus, Bob the Mythical Corporate Middle Manager and Regional Sales & Inventory Director will probably shy away from stocking the shelves with quite so much cheapass, possible toxic crapola in the near term. Not because he thinks such toys shouldn’t be sold, but because he needs said shelf space for something that will sell.

Bad case scenario: the suspect cheap-ass products from China gradually reappear on the shelves after the hysteria has faded.

Good case scenario: this is like the “Audis will accelerate and kill you” stories that aired in the late 70s, that still persist in the national collective opinion.

In the end, you can’t solve the problems caused by the widespread buying of worthless plastic shit by negotiating about the manner in which said worthless plastic shit is obtained. You solve them by buying less worthless plastic shit. That’s really the only viable way.

And the American addiction for worthless Chinese shit would be harder to kick than its one for products made from a combination of high-fructose corn syrup, GM soy and hydrogenated vegetable oil.

(And as Rick Perlstein has noted, the stuff that isn’t brought in from China ain’t that great either. Those lakes of pig shit aren’t in Guangdong: they’re in the Carolinas.)

The issue is structural: the structures are those of mass, concentrated, geographically isolated production, just-in-time delivery and an economy that would cough its guts out at $10/gal gasoline. And I don’t doubt that the Chinese are pretty aware of that, so individual contractors and subcontractors cut corners — just like every fucking industrialising country has always done — to rake in the cash and get up to speed before any oil squeeze happens.

The politics of this are tricky. What are the odds on Lou Dobbs, the Father Coughlin of the teevee, putting those dirty filthy Mexicans on the back burner and ramping up the anti Communistchina (as he calls it) rhetoric? Ideally, one would like to see a degree of political intervention before the Dobbsian nativist fringe start sabotaging container ports and burning Wal-Mart trucks.

What is the result of China releasing that $1.33TT in reserves into its money supply?

Two words: American peso.

Far be it from me to tout “Invisible Hand” claptrap here, but I’m guessing that parents shopping for Christmas presents for the kiddies are going to be taking a look at the raised plastic stamping on the bottom of the Tickle Me Gitmo dolls to see if it says “Made in China.”

Admittedly, the “sorry, son, that must-have toy WILL KILL YOU!1!” line won’t go down so well if other kids get Tickle Me Gitmo and fail to die.

An anecdote: I remember being in the CNN Center in Atlanta back in the late nineties, when they still had the stupid talkshow afternoon segment, and the subject matter was ‘should we be trading with China’, and the members-of-the-public audience variously waffled political for an hour on the topic. I had to restrain myself from shouting over the broadcast for them to check the labels on their shoes and handbags.

why bother with labor restrictions as well as quality rules?

These aren’t, in fact, contradictory demands. Labor conditions can be improved along with quality control and environmental standards as well. All it costs is a modest percentage of *short term* profit. *Who* it costs are the people Lesley describes above, a.k.a. the transnational wealthy criminal class (now including the Chicom govt!), which is why *their* priests and publicists in the economics field insist that economic “laws” prohibit the implementation of saner policies.

Or, what Anne Laurie and Mr. Wonderful said.

Sophist you can help increase your recall by laying off the bong. Maybe I’m simple but it seemed pretty darn obvious to me that your post was a direct response to mine about the US having the largest prison population in the world. See the giveaway was that you quoted my quote in your post…

Guys?

Point I’d like to make here is that China, at the present, is the ideal that the Libertarians have been selling us for years. A free-wheeling free market totally unencumbered by messy inconvenient government regulations. And what have we gotten from it? Quality? Value? Nope, we got lead-filled toys and poisonous toothpaste.

The fact that a bunch of sociopaths in Bentonville have made a mint off of selling this crap to the American public on the grounds that it’s “SO CHEAP!” just is the icing on the turd.

And HTML? Be nice to Pim’s. She’s being decent at the moment; fairly cool, in fact. I’ll even leave off my requisite comment in honor of the occasion.

Les, dear, the point Sophist was referring to was “I don’t recall claiming that the US was the apotheosis of saintly perfection to which all must aspire or be found wanting”. You brought that strawman into the fray. Sophist then pointed out the prison comparison really doesn’t help your point.

Between the strawmen and the ad hominems, you really aren’t helping yourself argument-wise.

We all know environmental standards are just taxes.

Hey, just so you guys know, with all the ad hominem, invective and misrepresentation of arguments that’s going on around here, it is virtually impossible for anybody who isn’t already fully invested in this issue to figure out what the hell you guys’ actual arguments are. All I’ve been able to figure out is that people are very passionate about Chinese trade, to the point where their first reaction to anybody who (I guess) disagrees with them on an aspect of the issue is to attack personally and dismiss their comments out of hand.

I know (and love) that S,N! is a snarkfest, but that snark is best reserved for slathering on the wingnuts and their bizarro worldview. In this case, it appears that HTML has raised an issue he feels is serious and should be discussed seriously… but nobody — including HTML, frankly — seems capable of doing so. It really leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Maybe if you laid out the problem, as you see it, and the solutions you think would be appropriate, and discussed those, instead of accusing each other of being Tom Friedman clones or bong-toting wastoids or, worst of all “sensible liberals,”* we’d be able to reach a little more clarity here.

*By the way, I think this phrase is being used much the way early communists originally used the term “politically incorrect” — to identify, label and cast out the ideologically impure. It’s a great way to enforce groupthink.

But “bong-toting wastoid” is my whole schtick!

Really, though, my fuse is short on these issues because someone inevitably characterizes my position as racist or xenophobic. It happens so much that I anticipate it and mock it pre-emptively, as in this post.

Also, it may help to know that I write these posts with Brad DeLong in mind. Few people in the blogosphere can infuriate like he can, because most people who are as wrong as he is on trade are stupid and evil wingnuts, but obviously he’s not. He really does morally know better, but the economic dogmatist in him overcomes his otherwise perfectly decent judgement on only this subject and the effect is execrable stuff like what is in the link in the last paragraph of the post. Really, it’s not just a smear of gigantic proportions in that post, but it’s a fundamental logical error of undistributed middle.

So, that’s my mindset. Then, strategically, there’s the explanation I gave mikey.

Also, it really bothers me when I counterattack (from the Left) people who’ve made careers out of attacking my beliefs *from the right*, and then people who ought to be a bit more sympathetic to my position come in and argue that first, I’m an asshole and purist for counterattacking, and second, that I’m the one being rightwing! Gah. Yet these same people do nothing but cheer when Atrios and Greenwald attack O’Hallon and Friedman, or when Kos tears Harold Ford a new one on MTP. Guess what? I’m doing the same thing as they are: warring on a belligerent, de facto wingnut position *that happens to be* clothed in Leftist threads.

“What is the result of China releasing that $1.33TT in reserves into its money supply?”

Rampant inflation and a collapse of consumer purchasing power. When you want to go buy a cup of coffee and a paper, you’ll be carting your cash around in a wheel barrow.

The gov’t does not care about protecting society from harmful goods. As long as they get their tax money, it does not matter. Big business runs the world (especially the US). After all, corporations and gov’t are merely quid-pro-quo whorehouses sold to the highest bidder. When the gov’t needs illegal wire-taps, Verizon and Sprint allow them secret rooms to listen in on calls. When Haliburton (and KBR) need more revenue, the gov’t hands out no-bid contracts. When the gov’t dislikes literature, Amazon and Wikipedia ban the book “America Deceived”. We The People had our gov’t (and our children’s health) sold out from beneath us.
Final link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-38523-0

Did you noticed on the smiley at the left? Is to give more confidence to the customers.

Who in his perfect mind spend money in this supermarket?

🙂

T.F

people who ought to be a bit more sympathetic to my position come in and argue that first, I’m an asshole and purist for counterattacking

Well, part of the problem, as I see it, is that you counterattack pre-emptively, which makes it hard to really think of it as a counterattack. It seem more like you’re just poisoning the well in advance by negatively characterizing your presumptive debating opponents.

I found this thread generating a lot more heat than light, which makes it incredibly difficult to figure out what everyone is really saying they see as the problem and the solution.

Regarding the February DeLong post you linked to, it’s a little hard to track exactly what you’re saying about it. Maybe if you break it down and address the “fundamental logical error” instead of dismissing it as “execrable” and “a smear of gigantic proportions,” it would be easier for those of us (i.e., me) who do not focus on this issue the way you do to figure out your position.

Consider this a request for “HTML China Trade Policy 101.”

Little Pig wins a stuffed pony for using ad hominem and strawman in the same comment, the blog signifier of a mail order philosophy degree. When USasians self righteously criticize the Chinese, not just the government, for their penal policies it seems to the point to remind them that their own country’s keeping the largest percentage of its population in prison of any nation on earth. (I’m sure some of you are Googling the CIA fact book right now to blow me out of the water with the Equatorial Republic of Africa or Turkmenistan). Much to his chagrin I’m sure, HTML Mencken (best blog alias evr) has pushed this discussion toward the actual crux of the matter. The crushing inhuman realities of globalisation as it used to open markets for mega-business meanies, no friend of “the people” no matter what country they happen to lucky enough to be born in. I believe the point that HTML is trying to make is that extremism in the service of attacks on the world corporatist conspiracy is no sin, whereas those of us who have gone native in China have a soft spot in our hearts for the splendid, hard working little buggers. Over here we’ve just had the 80th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army on August first and on the TeeVee its been non-stop movies of the comrades and comradettes blowing away the Japs and the Koumintang.

“Look, the American consumer has never given a damn that their t-shirts and sneakers are being made by 12-year-old kids living in near-slavery. We like it that way. Every time a kid loses a finger in an industrial sheet metal press, the WalMart happy face rolls back prices a little bit more.”

Nothing gets me hotter than watching children who are missing fingers work like slaves…it’s better than screwing puppies and eating them.

Not subtle enough?

My feeling is it would be hypocritical of us, after spending years bashing the Japanese for not letting our beef into their markets because we don’t produce it to their standards, and after waxing indignant at the French for not letting our GM (genetically modified) produce into theirs because of health concerns, to suddenly cut off trade with China because they don’t meet our quality control standards. Where do we get off insisting other markets allow our products in but oh no they can’t bring their products into our market. Do you see my point?

Something like the WTO is the right idea but as usual it’s been executed poorly. The WTO should establish a consensus quality standard that all member states have to meet; states who meet the standard should not face import restrictions on their products, and those who don’t should be subject to tariffs and refusals to trade which would then be backed by the WTO. The United States should not lose in the WTO for protesting shoddy and/or dangerous Chinese goods, no matter what the effect on Wal-Mart’s bottom line may be. The fact that we can predict losing such a protest at the WTO says that the WTO needs reform, not that we need to adopt Kucinich’s plan to return to bilateral trade agreements, tariffs and embargoes. That is the system of the bad old days and we need to move in more cooperative, multinational directions.

That’s what this liberal thinks.

The WTO should establish a consensus quality standard that all member states have to meet; states who meet the standard should not face import restrictions on their products, and those who don’t should be subject to tariffs and refusals to trade which would then be backed by the WTO.

Another race to the floor instead of the ceiling – and it will be a floor for those nations with high standards – is precisely the wrong thing to endorse.

Where do we get off insisting other markets allow our products in but oh no they can’t bring their products into our market. Do you see my point?

I’m not quite sure, but I think you’re volunteering to brush your teeth with this toothpaste I have here. I believe the brand name translates to something like “Chiang Kai-Shek Takes His Vengeance”.

If we had wanted to be good First Worlders, we would have put all our efforts into global healthcare and environmental stewardship and reproductive care first. Then, if Third World nations actually democratically chose to pursue our model of consumption (the Chinese of course cannot choose anything for themselves — to the delight of the neoliberals who purport to care so much for them), they wouldn’t repeat the mistakes we made, and the planet might have a chance. Before any of Anne Laurie’s intelligent predictions come true, I say environmental holocaust comes first.

Cheer up, HTML; what’s done is done, but I don’t believe the economic/environmental mistakes of the last 100 years are necessarily fatal. It’s going to be very, very painful — whichever side “wins” this particular argument — but Gaia is a tough mother and the human race is, for better or worse, one of her more successful offspring.

The real question is whether we’re willing (or capable) of scaling back to, say, 1950s living standards… or whether we’re going to claw desperately for every last kilowatt of Glorious Excess until the point where we’re all tipped back into the 1750s.

I took a class in population ecology back in 1973, and there was a long equation that was supposed to predict when a rapidly-reproducing mammalian species in a closed environment was due for a die-off. (Because, as I’m sure everyone here at SN! knows, when you have white rats in a lab cage, or voles in a meadow, or rabbits in a woodland, they tend to breed right up to the limits of their food supply and just a little further… but the “population” normally crashes before the habitat is exhausted past the point of recovery. Ninety percent of the rats/voles/bunnies die, usually from an emergent pandemic, with a side order of murder/suicide/reproductive failure. This is a Good Thing, as long as you’re not one of the bunnies in the unfortunate 90%.) Of course, being college students & therefore smartasses, some of my mathematically literate classmates worked through the equation using global population versus land mass, and found that the human race was due for a die-off sometime around the end of the 1970s. And we managed to cheat that particular deadline (AIDS is a textbook example of the sort of swiftly-emergent plague predicted in the numbers), although the thought experiment gave me one more reason not to breed.

Barring nuclear winter, I think we’ll get kicked back a few hundred years and a few billion people before we can completely trash the neighborhood. The question is whether our Human Exceptionalism (our mighty brains, our clever fingers) will enable us to change the angle of the drop as we scale down. Willingly or not, those of us at the top of the global economic pyramid (practically everyone in the First World, plus the inhabitants of the global nation of Richistan) are going to “lose” such perks as spending three hours a day commuting in an SUV or buying tons of cheap badly-made disposable crap or flying to Disneyworld or Cancun or Saint-Tropez every year. The question is how we replace the SUVs and the commutes and the disposable crap with alternatives that will make (most) people more-or-less as happy as riding in circles towing our tons of stuff.

When USasians self righteously criticize the Chinese, not just the government, for their penal policies it seems to the point to remind them that their own country’s keeping the largest percentage of its population in prison of any nation on earth.

Again, please provide a photo of me on my high horse, or shut right the hell up. Do I think the US penal system is a travesty? Yes, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the Chinese penal system is a absolute fucking travesty.

I take it Mr. Poppinfresh stands to lose a lot of money if China is forced to produce “Quality” instead of “quantity”?

As a card-carrying neooiberal, I thank you–I think…

Re:

“Also, it may help to know that I write these posts with Brad DeLong in mind. Few people in the blogosphere can infuriate like he can, because most people who are as wrong as he is on trade are stupid and evil wingnuts, but obviously he’s not. He really does morally know better, but the economic dogmatist in him overcomes his otherwise perfectly decent judgement on only this subject and the effect is execrable stuff like what is in the link in the last paragraph of the post. Really, it’s not just a smear of gigantic proportions in that post, but it’s a fundamental logical error of undistributed middle.

“So, that’s my mindset. Then, strategically, there’s the explanation I gave mikey.

“Also, it really bothers me when I counterattack (from the Left) people who’ve made careers out of attacking my beliefs *from the right*, and then people who ought to be a bit more sympathetic to my position come in and argue that first, I’m an asshole and purist for counterattacking, and second, that I’m the one being rightwing! Gah. Yet these same people do nothing but cheer when Atrios and Greenwald attack O’Hallon and Friedman, or when Kos tears Harold Ford a new one on MTP. Guess what? I’m doing the same thing as they are: warring on a belligerent, de facto wingnut position *that happens to be* clothed in Leftist threads.”

Final link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):

Matey, you’ve been pushing this line since God was a boy: please give it a rest. It’s been at least a year since the first time I saw this, and nothing’s been banned yet, so methinks you’re talking through your arse, yes?

Kthnxbai.

non-stop movies of the comrades and comradettes blowing away the Japs and the Koumintang.

I believe that should be “Kuomintang”. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Anne Laurie: 1750s? I’d say maybe fourteenth century, or maybe BC. Once things start to crash, we’ll have a whole lot of people who couldn’t feed themselves from a fully-stocked fridge, much less grow their own food. Land used for agriculture is increasingly fragile, while the best agricultural land is paved over. All those cities and shit? Built on what was the best land, while agriculture got pushed to the margins. And Australia, where I hang my hat, is in fairly desperate straits: the land was already marginal, being old and depleted, and we’ve pushed it well past the point of natural productivity.

So we’ll have a lot of folks who know the ins and outs of a duck’s bum with respect to Microshaft Word, but wouldn’t know a radish from a dog turd in the natural world. Can’t see them surviving, and I’m not sure I can see civilisation surviving once the infrastructure goes.

It’s a very fragile construct we’ve got here, kiddies. Let’s do something about it while we still can.

folks who know the ins and outs of a duck’s bum

Ewww

Sophist, you’re living up to your name, i.e. “a person who reasons adroitly and speciously rather than soundly,” though I’m dubious about the former. That comment was not directed at you. Get down off your high horse and stop it with the self referential obsessivity dude. And Qetesh I’m sure you’re right, my pinyin is hen bu hao. The important thing is they always get their evil raping and murdering asses kicked whatever you want to call them.

Anne Laurie: 1750s? I’d say maybe fourteenth century, or maybe BC. Once things start to crash, we’ll have a whole lot of people who couldn’t feed themselves from a fully-stocked fridge, much less grow their own food. Land used for agriculture is increasingly fragile, while the best agricultural land is paved over… We’ll have a lot of folks who know the ins and outs of a duck’s bum with respect to Microshaft Word, but wouldn’t know a radish from a dog turd in the natural world. Can’t see them surviving, and I’m not sure I can see civilisation surviving once the infrastructure goes.

Depends on your definition of “civilisation”, of course. The Die-Off, if/when it comes, is going to be a terrible thing to live through even for the survivors. But once approximately 90% of the current human population has died of famine, disease, exposure, or murder, those of you who make it to the other side will have many years’ worth of preserved food, manufactured goods, and libraries on paper to tide you over while the urban asphalt breaks down, since it will break down, and those rotting piles of corpses will provide an enormous bonus of fertilizer…

I can’t speak knowledgeably about conditions in Australia, but look at the Katrina tragedy in New Orleans from the other side of the wingnuts’ idiocy: Even though the people trapped in the ravaged city were by and large the most “marginal” members of the community — the chronically poor, homeless, elderly, very young, ill, addled, badly-educated — most of them did not immediately start preying on each other. Most of the confirmed looting was actually scavenging, people taking supplies to keep themselves and the people around them alive. Despite the wingnuts’ paranoid drooling, the dark-skinned “hordes” trapped in the Superbowl mostly behaved with at least as much honor and dignity as a bunch of upper-middle-class white people queuing up for the chance to buy an iPhone. In fact, the people who seemed to have behaved worst were the fortunate ones just outside the devastated areas: the sheriffs who turned refugees back at the exits to “protect” their clean white gated suburbs, the Blackwater mercenaries strutting around the high-ground, high-rent districts, the racist idiots who were more interested in rescuing tanks of fertilized embryos than dying patients in flooded nursing homes.

People do what they have to do to survive, and we’re genetically encoded for cooperation at least as much as we are for competition. Heck, I can’t cook myself, but I can grow vegetables, I’ve done basic nursing, sew well enough to keep bodies covered & drafts blocked, know enough about animals to keep the livestock alive & the vermin outside the compound, and have faith in my ability to find & follow written directions to cover all the survival-related skills I haven’t mastered. And I’m relatively old, and haven’t any offspring to protect, at that. As long as even a single-digit fraction of the “educated” population survives, the human race won’t lose the basic skill sets ranging from literacy to simple machinery like windmills, hydro-powered generators, perhaps bicycles. I may not survive, and possibly you may not (or may choose not to), but I believe that HTML and Mikey and Jillian and Candy — to pick some names at random — will still be around after the Worst. I just fervently hope it won’t come to that “Worst”, and devoutly hope that we’re smart enough to get off the Glorious Excess Express in time.

Sophist, you’re living up to your name, i.e. “a person who reasons adroitly and speciously rather than soundly,” though I’m dubious about the former.

So I’m living up to my name, save for the fact that I’m really not? Pfft, and I’m the one being instructed to put down the bong.

That comment was not directed at you. Get down off your high horse and stop it with the self referential obsessivity dude.

So you accuse me of thinking that China ought to be a “supremely enlightened country like the US”, but because you didn’t single me out by name you claim that the set of “USasians [who] self righteously criticize the Chinese” wasn’t intended to include me? Maybe I should just hand you my username right now, because you’ve got that “speciously rather than soundly” bit nailed.

Whoa whoa whoa. Suspending all goods from China? If we did that our country would collapse for lack of stuff, not to mention yes, Chinese supermarkets would be forced to close, and so on. If we completely stopped importing from China, we’d realize how much of our daily necessities actually come from there, and it would be a devastating blow to, say, Chinese-Americans who consume Chinese products that have no American-made counterparts. And I say, completely out of self-interest, that I don’t want all Chinese products to disappear, since I consume them myself. The solution needs to make them safe, not make them disappear. Again, I’m saying this because *I* like Chinese products.

There’s no question that our situation with China is on the messed up side, but I can’t possibly support Dodd’s position (and I like him generally) and the effects it will have on all corners of society and especially on Chinese-Americans and people like me who require dimsum for sustenance. On the other hand, if it’ll move the Overton window, go Dodd. (: Or if he’s saying it ironically, as a rhetorical maneuver, to make people realize the complexity of the situation. But while I would encourage every American product born in China to be certified in the US (not every single one, clearly, but representative samples), I certainly don’t want to give up my food.

Hey Sophist. Dude, do you live alone? If you’re this paranoid in a blog thread I wonder how well you do relating to real people. This comment is about you, the others were not, believe it or don’t… If I put your name at the beginning of a post it is about you. Nice job making this discussion all about your hurt feelings though.