The Fog and the Fury
Headline and opening sentence of a column in the Washington Times:
“Job creation fog . . . and fury
Something must be done [to] restore jobs in U.S. manufacturing….”
So far, so good. But the columnist goes on to explain the recent loss of manufacturing jobs:
“Let’s be honest. Some of these manufacturing jobs will not be coming back because of structural changes in our economy. Manufacturers have been reducing payrolls, in middle management and on the production line, because they have found ways to produce more goods at far less cost, boosting profits for further expansion and fatter investor and worker pension dividends.”
Uh-huh.
Here is a different explanation (the “fury,” as opposed to “the fog”), from a March 10 column:
“Last week’s jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on?
They’re calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They’re just not being created here in the United States.
The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary….
For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost….
At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans.”
— Pat Buchanan, author of
A Republic, Not an Empire
Happy Ides, Caesar.