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With 40 to 50 container ships off the southern California coast waiting to be unloaded, this would be a great time for the major national media to start talking about what we import.
They could go to US dollars that we ship overseas, primarily to our number one rival, the People’s Republic of China.
But the national media prefers to talk about the bottleneck in the supply chain and the inability of Americans to get their Christmas presents.
The best way to unclog our supply chain would be to start paying the wages of the unions of truck drivers and warehouse workers. I am talking about the truckers who move the goods from the ships to the warehouses.
These drivers, along with warehouse workers, work for low wages. This is why there are very few drivers and workers available to move the items. Once the merchandise is sorted in the warehouses, union trains and truck drivers are ready to transport the merchandise across the country. The railways are a tremendous arsenal of great union jobs. They are the main provider of jobs for the middle classes in this country of “Pilgrim’s Pride”.
Now back to the topic of this column: commerce and all the items we import from around the world, items that for economic and safety reasons should be made, produced, and assembled right here in the United States.
Why is this allowed to happen? Because it saves Americans a few dollars on product costs and brings greater profits to businesses.
Some of the countries from which we import more than to which we export, until September of this year, are: China $ 255.4 billion; Mexico $ 78.3 billion, Vietnam $ 65.5 billion; Germany $ 51.8 billion; Japan $ 47.5 billion; Canada $ 34.2 billion; and Malaysia about $ 20.1 billion.
We shipped approximately $ 780 billion to our top 15 trading partners in the first eight months of this year. That projects at over $ 1,000 billion for the year. There are a lot of other countries with which we have trade deficits of maybe $ 400 billion to $ 500 billion.
Imagine the high paying jobs this cost our country.
Some items that we import are electronic equipment, machines, boilers, nuclear reactors (yes, nuclear reactors), toys, games, furniture, clothes, iron, steel … the list goes on.
Let us remember what we did in World War II and after. With our patriotic spirit, initiative, hard work, dedication, intellectual property, design, industrial might and unprecedented manufacturing, we have become not only an unparalleled military force, but also the democratic arsenal of Franklin Roosevelt. .
We not only provided our forces, but also all of our allies, with the tanks, ships, planes, cannons and other military weapons that enabled us to defeat the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany. Then we rebuilt Japan and all the countries in Europe that wanted our help.
It was the greatest display of economic and military power the world has ever seen. And everything has been used for the good of mankind
Intellectual property theft
Some argue that the biggest beneficiary of our naive trade policy, to put it mildly, is Communist China. In addition to stupidly importing all these items from China, we allow them to steal a lot of our intellectual property.
What is not returned by American companies seeking to manufacture in China, the Chinese are simply stealing – by approaching employees with access to American intellectual property, then threatening or bribing them. They then launch Chinese companies in their domestic market and export those same items to the world, chasing and bankrupting the competition by selling at slash prices.
The intellectual properties collected by China are converted into military capabilities. Thus, our trade relations with China make the United States very vulnerable economically and militarily.
Leaders in Washington must make it clear that this trade with China and other countries must end now. Our survival depends on it.
William Lipinksi was a Democratic member of Congress for the 3rd District of Illinois from 1993 to 2004.
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