the real reason obama went to china (Congress, cost, dollars)

[floridasandy]

Do you know the real reason that Obama is in China?

Obama is carrying on the work of George W. Bush and Henry Paulson; he's trying to pry open Chinese markets to US financial services. That's right, the lavish executive junket doesn't have anything to do with human rights, climate change, or dollar/yuan rebalancing. That's all just public relations mumbo-jumbo. 100% bunkum.

True, China's dollar-peg creates an unfair advantage for China's manufactured goods, but so what? The Congress could change that in a minute by applying trade sanctions. But they won't. Because Congress is owned by Wall Street, and Wall Street thrives on the current system. Here's how it works: China sells the US cheap lead-based widgets, and then recycles the dollars into US Treasurys and "complex and utterly worthless" financial products. This provides the gargantuan investment banks with an endless flow of cheap capital to goose stocks and fatten the bottom line. Of course, the process does have it's shortcomings, like the fact that it crushes the domestic work-force, but that's how it was designed to work anyway. What economists call "unsustainable imbalances" are praised at the big brokerage houses as "windfall profits". The total destruction of the US labor movement is just an added perk for these well-heeled, flag-waving, uber-patriots.


http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/25016

[floridasandy]

let me add this as well:
Stephen Roach: "They're a big deal. Over 60 percent of export growth over the past twelve years has come from growth by Chinese subsidiaries of Western multinationals, but again the problem I have is that too many in the United States, especially the Congress but also Washington, focus on the bilateral trade imbalance between the United States and China. That's just a fundamental economic mistake that's being made." Avoiding a U.S.-China Trade Showdown - Council on Foreign Relations


Hmmm. So, a large portion of China's industrial capacity is actually "China-based multinational corporations". Now that's interesting! So US workers are actually competing with US industries that are using sweatshop labor to enrich themselves while savaging the American middle class. Great. I wonder how many of these "industry leaders" affix the stars-n-stripes to their lapel each morning before they trundle off to work?

This just proves that the outsourcing of jobs, the off-shoring of businesses, and the "free trade" laws are mainly the work of cutthroat American corporatists not the "rascally Chinese" as the media would like everyone to believe. China is not destroying America; blue-blooded, brandy-guzzling, Harvard-educated Americans are. It's just good-old-fashioned class warfare....and our class is losing.

For those who want to know what Obama's trip is really all about; ignore Obama altogether and read Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's article in the Wall Street Journal, "The Road Ahead for Asia's Economies." It tells the whole story. Geithner candidly admits that US markets will remain stagnant for years to come and that other emerging nations (ie China) will have to develop their own domestic markets.

this ties into the fekete article on the destruction of the manufacturing sector by the financial sector in this country. if we really want this country to go in the right direction, we have to get back to the manufacturing sector and job creation.

[GregW]

The financialization of our economy began with Ronnie Raygun and has not slowed down one bit. The only major change is that the international financiers have bought up formerly American banks and finance houses and are now working only for the benefit of their executives and a few stockholders to the immense cost to the most Americans and the rest of the world.

I have no idea how to make financiers and finance the tool of the investor and not the master.